Weekly Short Stories: 1947 Science Fiction, Part 1

This week I moved forward one year in my reviews of past science fiction short stories to 1947...far bygone, to be sure, but still close enough that many alive then are still around now (including Stephen King, born in that year).  The book I drew upon is Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 9 (1947)...this series spans the years 1939-63 in short sci-fi.  Here are my reactions to the first four stories in this "year's best" anthology...

LITTLE LOST ROBOT by Isaac Asimov
To fully grasp this story you need to understand a little about Isaac Asimov's created fictional universe, especially with regard to robots.  In the not-so-distant future, robots, positronically-powered, are all android in nature and have achieved a great level of sophistication.  There has been popular backlash against them, and partially as a response all robots are programmed to adhere to the Three Laws of Robotics...the first and foremost being that a robot can never cause harm to a human, either by direct action or through neglect.  In a remote hyperatomic-driven space base, robotics psychologist Susan Calvin is brought in the solve a mystery, that of a missing robot that had part of its First Law amended to allow it to work in high-radiation zones with humans.  The missing robot has concealed itself among 52 other normal, unaltered robots.  Dr. Calvin's task is to figure a way to discover which one of the 53 is the hidden robot...all will need to be destroyed should she fail in her mission.  This is as much a detective mystery story as it is science fiction, and Asimov proudly admitted as much...

TOMORROW'S CHILDREN by Poul Anderson
A bleak tale of the worldwide apocalypse on many levels following a planetary nuclear war two years earlier.  Hugh Drummond, the protagonist, is an American military officer sent on a mission to discover the extent of the postwar damage, and he returns to the de facto President in Taylor, Oregon...the new national capital "city"...to deliver the somber news.  It isn't just the immediate death and destruction caused by the explosions or the massive social upheavals...the radiation has permeated everything on Earth, forever changing the future of humanity in the most fundamental ways.  This story came out while the United States had monopoly control over the nuclear bomb, two years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  But just two years later the Soviet Union would explode their first atomic weapon and Anderson's foreboding tale would take on a greater sense of meaning and urgency...

CHILD'S PLAY by William Tenn
One of the grosser short science fiction stories I've read and reminiscent of some earlier works by Lewis Padgett, Child's Play has no connection with the horror movie series starring the evil little doll Chucky.  Instead, an ordinary, insecure lawyer in a firm gets a mystery gift delivered to his door in the form of a large box.  Inside are instructions and ingredients for a child's educational toy: Build-a-Body.  He learns, through reading the instructional booklet, all there is about constructing other life forms, including humans.  Discovering that he can make twins of people, he decides to "copy" the gorgeous secretary who just threw him over for a colleague.  But there's a tall, menacing-looking man trying to find him...our lawyer hero knows his "present" came from the future and this dude is out to retrieve it: he'd better hurry with his plans.  I figured out the ending for this story too early...but the premise was interesting although quite a bit disturbing...

TIME AND TIME AGAIN by H. Beam Piper
A dying military officer on the battlefield in World War III...year 1975...gets a special injection that sends him back to his 13-year-old body and New Hampshire home in 1945, but complete with all his memories from the intervening years.  Knowing what's to come, he has to come clean with his father about his situation...his intent is to alter history over the next few years so that the war never materializes.  Time and Time Again is clearly about time travel, but toward the end goes more into a speculative conversation about the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the "now" as it passes through the chronology of years.  Interesting ideas, although the story didn't adequately explain itself, in my opinion...

More from 1947 in the world of excellent science fiction short stories next week...