Weekly Short Stories: 1948 Science Fiction, Part 3

I concluded my look back to 1948 at the year's best short science fiction with the final four tales from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 10 (1948).  A dismal outlook on humanity's future and aberrant children are their themes...pretty standard sci-fi fare.  They're not my favorites, but each has its own message.  Here are my reactions...

IN HIDING by Wilmar H. Shiras
Timothy Paul is a thirteen-year-old boy who seems the prototype "average kid"...B-grades in school, doesn't isolate himself socially...but his teacher is concerned about Tim's growing absentmindedness and senses something's wrong, contacting Peter Welles, a psychiatrist.  Most of the story is about how Dr. Welles coaxes Tim to open up about his own life, and it soon becomes clear that he is at super-genius level and has been deliberately concealing that fact in order to avoid trouble with others in society...especially his own grandmother, who is now his guardian after his parents died years earlier from radiation sickness.  And here is where I see a major problem in society: someone begins to stand out with their intelligence and talent and others resent their superiority and set out to "put them in their place". I wonder how many of us as children employed Tim's strategy of concealment...and how many are still doing it, as adults...

KNOCK by Fredric Brown
Knock is a quirky short, little tale about a vastly different alien race that wiped out all animal life on Earth as a preparation for their own settlement, but before they doused the planet with poison spray they took samples of different species for their "zoo"...including two humans.  Walter Phelan finds himself being one of them and has been isolated for two days since the attack, other than his contacts with the strange conquering creatures, who treat him well in his confinement and whom Walter always calls "George".  The horror of such a disaster befalling our planet is only magnified when Walter discovers that since the aliens themselves don't reproduce sexually, many of their "samples" will die off since they don't have both males and females to perpetuate the species.  And he wonders about the other human left alive...

A CHILD IS CRYING by John D. MacDonald
Another story about a super-genius kid, the setting reveals what happens when he...unlike Timothy's concealment in the story In Hiding...openly reveals his talents: the military buys him off from his parents.  The officers, in the midst of nuclear tensions and conflict, seek to extract as much information from him as possible.  This is problematic since little Billy can mentally suggest people to hurt themselves if they get too aggressive...sounds a bit like Stephen King's novel Firestarter, doesn't it?  But when they discover that Billy's incredible reasoning ability gives him the power to predict the future, his interrogators cannot hold themselves back as they desperately seek to discover their own fates...

LATE NIGHT FINAL by Eric Frank Russell
Another conquering race from the stars...this one so humanoid in nature that they can pass for ordinary people, lands on Earth on the outskirts of a small Wisconsin country town in the form of several warships.  Their militarist commander wants the glory of forcefully subjugating the population, which confounds him by being friendly and hospitable.  His own men gradually lose their sense of discipline and loyalty as they encounter the locals and interact with them.  The reader may initially get the impression that this is all a story about the present time, but that's not the case at all.  It felt a bit like a "reverse" Mars is Heaven by Ray Bradbury, which I reviewed last week...but the ending is vastly different and carries a statement about where humanity's best chances for long-term survival lie...

Next week I begin my examining of the best science fiction stories from 1949 as I continue reading this anthology series...