Weekly Short Stories: 1943 Science Fiction, Part 4

I concluded my rereading of the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 5 (1943) with the final three entries from that book. Here's my reaction to them...

THE PROUD ROBOT by Lewis Padgett
The married writing team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore collaborated on many writing projects under the pseudonym "Lewis Padgett"...they are responsible for this story and the book's finale.  The Proud Robot is set in a future when the advent of television has coopted the film industry with two television programming companies vying, with their patents, for control over the industry.  The head of one of them has hired an eccentric inventor to save his company...but the inventor, who can only think clearly when he is intoxicated, remembers nothing of their initial meeting, although he apparently invented a robot whose function he doesn't know but which spends all its time in front of mirrors admiring its own appearance.  How does the inventor save his client's company and determine why he invented such a vain robot?  Read it yourself if you want...it's definitely not one of my favorites from Padgett...

SYMBIOTICA by Eric Frank Russell
Back in 1941 Eric Frank Russell wrote and published a story titled Jay Score, which I reviewed in a previous entry.  He's expanded it into a sequel as Jay Score and his spaceship's crew land on a remote planet in another star system.  They immediately encounter a strange, aggressive alliance among the native life forms...including trees and bushes...against the human visitors which they regard as hostile invaders.  Russell's narrative language, as told by one of the crewmen, is kind of campy but his vision of such a complex system of completely alien life forms and their survival strategies is impressive.  Of the three stories I'm looking at today, this is the one I think would transfer the best to film or television...

THE IRON STANDARD by Lewis Padgett
Kuttner and Moore, as they did with The Proud Robot, once again examine the notion of patents used as an economic weapon in The Iron Standard...albeit in a completely different setting. A space expedition from Earth to Venus...intended to establish relations between the two intelligent races of each planet...finds itself stranded due to needed repairs and must depend on the goodwill of the native Venusians to survive.  But they have an "iron standard" and stubbornly refuse to provide any food or assistance without payment in that metal, which the visitors are sorely lacking in.  To get money, they are told to get jobs.  But jobs, as well as virtually all conceivable patents, are controlled planetwide by the guild and one must be a member to become employed.  But to do that requires paying a steep membership fee to the guild...and of course they haven't any money!  This fruitless cycle reminds me a bit of what destitute people nowadays often have to go through in order to reestablish themselves on a higher level in our society.  The Earthmen, threatened with starvation, do come up with a winning strategy to break the stranglehold that the stagnant and passively hostile Venusian society has imposed on them...a good story with some application to today's world as well as quite a bit of implied satire...

So that's it with science fiction short stories from 1943.  Next week I'll begin with Asimov's anthology relating to 1944...