Weekly Short Stories...1945 Science Fiction, Part 2

I continued looking back at 1945 and that year's best short science fiction which was selected for the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 7 (1945). These stories I have been reviewing almost all first appeared in monthly pulp publications like Astounding Science Fiction,  by far the most prominent sci-fi magazine of the time.  Here are the next four tales...with familiar authors as well..

FIRST CONTACT by Murray Leinster
First Contact is a story I first read before the others, many years ago.  It postulates what would happen if human explorers in deep space suddenly encountered a completely alien ship for the first time.  Leinster suggests that self-preservation...not only for the ship's crew but also for the home planet...would be the primary, overriding concern and that each ship would be duty-bound to destroy the other before it could signal or return back to its own world.  In the Crab Nebula, this scenario takes place as ships from Earth and the "other world" find themselves at an impasse, both completely understanding their predicament but unable to trust the other party enough to take steps to solve it.  Is there a reasonable resolution?  Guess you'll have to read it to find out...

THE VANISHING VENUSIANS by Leigh Brackett
I can't help thinking that Brackett had a strong allegory in mind by writing this tale of human pioneers from Earth struggling to find a place on oceanic, swampy Venus on which to establish their future homeland.  But the native life has different ideas and the humans find themselves in a life-or-death struggle...with consequences reminding me of what often happens to the indigenous inhabitants of a region when pioneers (or "aliens") pass through (or "invade") their land...

INTO THY HANDS  by Lester del Rey
Foreseeing the imminent destruction of humanity through mass robot-engineered planetwide warfare, a scientist invents three special robots, each with a special gifting, and entombs them in order that at a later date they will arise and help bring back civilization from the ashes.  Into Thy Hands is the story of these three as they emerge and struggle to discover their identities and purpose.  The ending is a complete surprise, totally brilliant...

CAMOUFLAGE by Henry Kuttner
Henry Kuttner's wife Catherine Moore the previous year wrote a short story (which I recently reviewed) titled No Woman Born in which a famous entertainer, after suffering through a tragic fire, has her brain placed in a robot's body.  Something similar to this happens in Camouflage as Quentin is the cyborg in question.  A plotting group of criminals hijacks a spaceship carrying an atomic plant to Jupiter's moon Callisto, but Quentin has been planted somewhere on it and controls the ship.  The race is on to find the metallic cylinder containing the cyborg's brain before he can kill them all and foil their plot.  Camouflage gave me the insight that when we're in vehicles like cars (or spaceships) we ourselves are much like cyborgs as our vehicles function as technological extensions to our own senses and appendages...and while we're in them we are just as much dependent on them for our survival as was Quentin in his cylinder...

Next week I'll conclude this look way back to 1945 in the intriguing universe of short science fiction...