As I continue along with my look at the best in short science fiction, I have begun with the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 5 (1943) and the first three stories in the book. So without further ado...
THE CAVE by P. Schuyer Miller
The setting is Mars enough years in the future for humanity to have settled there while still battling the hostile environment...both its climate and the native inhabitants. A grek, the intelligent humanoid life form there, has sought refuge in a cave from one of the extremely fatal storms afflicting this planet. Once inside he finds several other native creatures huddling for safety there...including a zek, one of their carnivorous beasts. Yet within the cave predator and prey maintain a state of peace among themselves as long as the storm rages outside. Meanwhile, Harrigan, a young man caught in the storm, discovers the cave and goes within, only to find said Martians. His encounter with them will determine his fate in this story. The Cave is the first of two stories in this anthology dealing with the notion of a collective alliance within an ecosystem when faced by outside dangers. The grek wonders whether the human in the cave is a part of that ecosystem...or a part of the outside danger. He gets his answer by how Harrigan behaves at the end...
THE HALFLING by Leigh Brackett
I have never understood the appeal of freak shows, be they in circuses or in Ripley's Believe It Or Not shows and museums. The Halfling deals with a future circus showing "halflings", in this story meaning native intelligent life in humanoid form from other worlds in our solar system. This premise is obviously preposterous as Venusians, Martians, and the life forms from various moons of Jupiter are wandering around the set, all a part of the traveling show. There is a vicious cat-man from Callisto and a Martian dancer...but John "Jade" Greene, who runs the circus, hires a new dancer...a beautiful young woman...to headline the show. And then they find the old dancer murdered, traceable back to the cat-man. And so on goes the story. I didn't like this tale because one...like I said...I don't like freak shows, two, its premise was impossible and silly, and three, it didn't give me any insights about anything to carry off from it after it was over...
MIMSY WERE THE BOROGOVES by Lewis Padgett
As I indicated when I reviewed The Twonky recently, Lewis Padgett was a pen name for the husband and wife writing team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. They have three entries in this 1943 anthology, but Mimsy Were the Borogoves is by far the best of them...and in my opinion, one of the best short science fiction of all time: it's certainly my favorite. The title is from a poem by English author Lewis Carroll within his book Through the Looking Glass...Carroll actually makes a brief appearance in this tale toward the end. A little boy, playing hooky from school on the shores of a river, finds a strange box. After some difficulty he opens it and finds several strange toys, with which he begins to play...and his thinking begins to change, along with that of his two-year-old sister, also enamored with the little gadgets. But their parents can't see anything logical about these toys...everything seems random about them and nothing makes sense. Mimsy Were the Borogoves points out the fundamental difference between how children...especially young children...and adults think, and how our conditioning may fundamentally bias us regarding the true nature of reality. Unlike the previous story in the book, this one leaves a lot of things to consider...
Next week I'll delve further into what anthology editors Asimov and Greenberg deemed the best science fiction short stories of 1943...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment