The next three science fiction short stories I read from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 5 (1943) are by familiar authors: Frederic Brown, C.L. (Catherine) Moore, and A.E. van Vogt. I have been a fan of Brown and Moore for decades while van Vogt had a penchant for writing extremely convoluted plots...some worked and some didn't. During 1943 all were writing at the peaks of their respective careers, and these three tales reflect this...
DAYMARE by Fredric Brown
Many years in the future humanity has explored and settled into our solar system, including Venus, Mars, and some of the gas giants' moons. On Jupiter's Castillo the settlements are divided into sectors: in Sector Three an unspeakable event has occurred: a murder, never having happened there before. But the victim, an eccentric inventor suspected of dallying in forbidden subversive and technical literature, appears to have died of a different cause by each person who sees his corpse...a major mystery! Frederic Brown weaves into this tale of conspiracy and deception a future society that is so frightened of war and unrest that it has gone to extraordinary measures to censor anything from the past that the authorities regard as dangerous...
DOORWAY INTO TIME by C.L. Moore
An alien, in self-imposed isolation, has constructed for himself his own museum of prizes he has stolen, often at great peril to himself, from other worlds...including some of their inhabitants. He considers himself a hunter and is addicted to the thrill of the chase and its accompanying danger, although he knows that he ultimately always has the upper hand. After walking his halls he becomes bored and ventures through his "doorway into time" to take for his collection a young woman from Earth...but the man accompanying her has different ideas. This story, to me, seemed to be a not-so-subtle slap at trophy hunters who, with all the odds on their side, go to wilderness areas and slaughter wild animals just because they can...and then stuff and mount their carcasses as if they actually accomplished something worthwhile...
THE STORM by A.E. van Vogt
In the distant future we're dealing with human expansion into the galaxy. Biological android robots...sounds like a contradiction, doesn't it...are hiding and in conflict with the rest of humanity, which considers them as subhuman. Now their home planet looks to be occupied by the enemy and they hatch a plan: draw the advance ship into a very concentrated, invisible and lethal cosmic ray storm to destroy it. The Storm is, to me, an allegory about prejudice in general...something I appreciate from a writer back in 1943...and its final resolution I really appreciate...
I'll conclude my look back at 1943 short science fiction next week...
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