Today I finish looking back at the year 1945 and its best short science fiction, as appearing in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 7 (1945). Here are my reactions to those five stories...
THE POWER by Murray Leinster
In late-fifteenth-century Italy a man writes another about discovering a great power from a mysterious teacher/guru type. Through successive correspondences he reveals his conclusion that his benefactor is a kind of fallen soul with dark knowledge...but our hero is too tempted by the riches the Power brings him to reject him. The Power is about how a different, alien culture is inevitably filtered though one's own "home culture" narrative...which tends to distort the motives and reality of who the other party is and what they have to offer. The close-mindedness of those living five hundred years ago is obvious in this story, but how presumptuous would we be in our world today should something similar happen to us?
GIANT KILLER by A. Bertram Chandler
My least favorite story of this bunch, it is also the longest. Often in short science fiction the author will trick...or least try to trick...the reader by making an alien society or species the protagonists...I've seen this done in more than one Twilight Zone episode as well. The hero in Giant Killer is young Shrick, one of the People, as Chandler puts it, who not only has to fight the Giants in the wide open spaces but also survive the murderous wrath of his own, who have condemned him for being one of the Different. Intrigued? Then please read it...who knows, you may like it more than I did...
WHAT YOU NEED by Henry Kuttner
Speaking of the 1960s television series The Twilight Zone, there was one episode with the same title as this story...no wonder since it was an adaptation. The written version goes into greater detail about how the seller of curious ordinary items that mysteriously seem to come into use at crisis moments is able to match his products with his customers...I probably would have enjoyed Kuttner's original story more had I not already seen the Twilight Zone version, which turned out to be one of the great, classic episodes of that wonderful series...
DE PROFUNDIS by Murray Leinster
Another one of those "see things from the alien's viewpoint" stories, this one is set down deep in an alien world's ocean as an intelligent, telepathic...but very ferocious...serpent creature encounters an human underwater exploration vessel accidentally broken from its cable leading to the surface. Like the same author's story The Power, once again we're treated to a native culture filtering input about aliens and the unknown through their own pre-taught narrative, eventually arriving at preposterously wrong conclusions...
PI IN THE SKY by Fredric Brown
One night the brightest stars in the sky...468 of them to be exact...begin to move very quickly, appearing to defy the speed of light limitation in their motion. Their night sky destination seems to be in the general area between the constellations Ursa Major and Leo...what's going on? One of those wily old scientists common in sci-fi tales extrapolates the stars' motions and arrives at an impossible conclusion, leading to an old apartment building in Boston. An impossible story with a semi-plausible explanation, more than anything it is a satire about our market culture and one of the funniest...
Next week I begin to look at the year 1946 in the universe of short science fiction literature...
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