I continued this week looking at anthologies celebrating quality science fiction short stories from the past, beginning the year 1944 using the book Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 6 (1944). Today I'll be examining the first five stories appearing in it...
FAR CENTAURUS by A.E. van Vogt
The first human space mission to the Alpha Centauri star system, our nearest star besides the sun, takes hundreds of years with the astronauts, nearly all the time in suspended animation, alternating waking every few decades of flight in order to document the mission's progress and to make necessary adjustments and maintenance repairs. After discovering that one of them had died while asleep, the protagonist begins to suspect that another of his crew is beginning to go insane. As his waking shifts progress and they approach Alpha Centauri, the drama increases until... This is one of those stories that imply that we'll eventually figure out a practical way to overcome the speed of light as an obstacle to space travel...good luck with that, while fifty years after the first moon landing we're just flying around in low Earth orbit (something that I'm hoping will change pretty soon)...
DEADLINE by Cleve Cartmill
Remember that this is 1944, the year before the very secretive Manhattan Project developed and perfected a working atomic bomb, soon to be exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Cartmill produced this story in rather graphic detail of how nuclear fission needed to be controlled in order to produce a viable explosion...his story prompted a visit to his editor by "authorities" concerned with a possible security breach. But the story then delves into speculation that the very explosion of such a device would cause chain reactions that would eventually envelop and destroy the entire planet...whew, I'm at least glad that didn't happen in real life...yet...
THE VEIL OF ASTELLAR by Leigh Brackett
Many years ago I saw a movie, titled Little Big Man, in which an orphaned white settler boy in the late 1800s, adopted by a Cheyenne tribe after his family was ambush by other Indians, grows up with a dual sense of identity...and eventually feels himself to be a traitor to both his Indian and white selves as he tries to negotiate his way through an irreconcilable conflict between the two warring sides. The Veil of Astellar is like that as a space explorer finds himself abducted by a predatory alien race and adopted into its culture...and now he has to ensnare his fellow humans for their purposes. A lot of soul searching here and a compelling tale...
SANITY by Fritz Leiber
Although it's been established that there is a strong case for a physical component to mental illness, many years ago...and to some nowadays as well...it was believed that being "insane" was a relative term denoting the inability of someone to adapt to whatever norms the current society imposed. In Sanity, this notion is used as ambitious bureaucrat, having clawed his way to what he thinks is the most powerful position in the world, enacts one directive after another mandating how people must live and classifying those who don't abide by them as being insane. How the others react to this is how the author slyly twisted the meaning of "insanity" to where, all things considered, I thought that he was more concerned with "nonconformity" than with mental illness. I did love the elevator scene at the end, though...that dude was thoroughly freaked out!
INVARIANT by John R. Pierce
Only five pages long, this was by far the shortest story in the book. Pierce made a great observation about biological regeneration and how other organisms...like salamanders...can completely grow back limbs and other body parts identical to the ones they lost. What if there existed a way to alter our own biology that would impart that capacity to ourselves? Sounds great, but in these very few pages the author dispelled that dream by revealing what should be an obvious...but very serious...side effect...
Next week I'll cover more great short science fiction from 1944, including three amazing stories written by the great Clifford Simak...
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