Weekly Short Stories: 1942 Science Fiction, Pt. 1

I continued my look back at old science fiction short stories by reading the first four in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 4 (1942). This volume contained some amazing...and mostly lengthy...tales, some of which speak to us in our world today.  Here are the first four...

THE STAR MOUSE by Fredric Brown
Old science fiction stories are often full of eccentric, reclusive scientist/inventors with their quirky little projects.  A common theme back then was one who designs the first rocket to outer space...Fredric Brown used it in this story as a kindly old scientist first catches Mitkey, a little mouse formerly living undetected in his home, and then sends him up on a rocket.  While in space an unknown small asteroid, inhabited by very small, intelligent beings, intercepts Mitkey's flight and they infuse the little mammal with human-level intelligence and alter his vocal apparatus to allow him to speak...which he does in the scientist's thick German accent.  When he returns to Earth and asks someone for directions to his old home in New Jersey...well, you can see the farcical direction this is heading...

THE WINGS OF NIGHT by Lester del Rey
Two space workers soft-crash-land their ship on the moon after one of its parts malfunctions.  As they approach a very smooth area to land, the ground suddenly opens up and they go deep under the surface to the distant bottom...where an ancient intelligent being, the last of his kind, lives and has a desperate need for his race's survival.  Can the two parties communicate to help each other out of their predicaments? And what about one of the men, who tends to display bigotry toward beings different from himself?

COOPERATE--OR ELSE! by A.E. van Vogt
It is the future and humans have explored and settled far off into the galaxy, including a place called Carson's Planet. On it live the ezwal, apparently unintelligent animals that provide them food.  On a spaceship a captive ezwal, revealing its species' truly intelligent nature, has taken over the ship and killed all but one of its people...a Professor Jamieson, who escapes on down to a jungle, sea, and monster-infested nightmare of a planet with the ezwal in hot pursuit.  The ezwals want to expel humans from their planet, but to do so involves no one knowing of their intelligence...so Jamieson has to die.  But the professor realizes that in order for either to survive on this extremely hostile world, they must cooperate with one another.  This story was written at the precise moment in history during World War II in which the Democratic allied nations added another ally: the totalitarian Soviet Union, which was suffering a brutal invasion from Hitler's Nazi regime...

FOUNDATION by Isaac Asimov
I've already read and thoroughly enjoyed the five core books of Asimov's Foundation series, in which humanity, so far off in the distant future that they've forgotten their planet of origin, lives under the rule of a galactic empire. A"psychohistorian", Hari Selden, envisions that empire's eminent breakup and subsequent eons of brutal, chaotic infighting before civilization can be restored.  His strategy to drastically shorten this dark period involves setting up two scientific outposts on the opposite ends of the galaxy...but the very scientists he dispatches are ignorant of his true intentions.  Before the novels starting coming out in the 1950s Asimov had already laid out the groundwork in the 1940s with a series of short stories...this was the first.  Great ending!