I continued going back through the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 5 (1943), covering three more stories. As I did I realized that of the twelve featured in this book, five of them were either by the married writing team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore or by one of them individually...this may have been their "peak" year, at least as far as their short fiction was concerned. Now, here is my reaction to this week's stories...
Q.U.R. by Anthony Boucher
The first...and very revealing...thing about this story is its title, once you know what it stands for: Quinby's Userform Robots. It's some time off in the future and robots are everywhere serving humanity...in android form. The only problem is that they're failing and breaking down on a mass scale. What's going on? A brilliant inventor, Russ Quinby, realizes that it's in their design: robots should be specifically tailored to their assigned tasks and not all made to resemble humans...hence the coinage "userform". But robots are made by a legally-entrenched monopoly, so how do the narrator and Quinby, with their new spinoff company Q.U.R., get around this and introduce their specialty robots? That's for you, the reader, to discover...this story stuck with me because although for years science fiction writers typically saw robots as being android in appearance, Boucher foresaw their actual development as highly specialized thinking machines, which we see all around us today...
CLASH BY NIGHT by Lawrence O'Donnell
This is another tale by Kuttner and Moore written under a pseudonym...it's widely thought that Kuttner wrote this one alone, hence my 2016 review with him listed as the author: read it through this link: [Clash by Night]. There's not much I can add, except to note that when it comes to predicting the future, sci-fi writers can either be completely off the mark or mysteriously on target. Kuttner saw Venus as full of life...albeit very hostile life...with its planetwide oceans and jungles. Well, that's obviously not true as we now know. But he turned around and, two years before the atomic bomb was successfully (and very secretly) developed, chillingly predicted the ramifications of a world-wide nuclear holocaust...
EXILE by Edmund Hamilton
Exile, one of the shorter stories in the anthology, is an exercise in solipsism, which entertains the notion that the universe is a creation by oneself...always fun to encounter these tales. Along with that is the suggestion that, since all of our memories are presently embedded within our brains, then perhaps there is no such thing as the past...I may "remember" going to high school in 1973 but the memories I access are here in 2019. Exile is a good story about four science fiction writers who regularly meet and chat about their lives and chosen profession...
More science fiction stories from 1943 (if it really existed) next week...
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