Weekly Short Stories: 1949 Science Fiction, Part 1

I began my look at some of the best in short science fiction from seventy years ago, according to the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 11 (1949).  Today I'll be reacting to the first three tales in the book from the year in which NATO was formed, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic weapon, and Harry S. Truman was beginning his first and only elected term as U.S. President after he served almost all of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth term.  Here they are...

THE RED QUEEN'S RACE by Isaac Asimov
I just finished reading Asimov's 1955 novel The End of Eternity, which examines travel back in time and the paradoxes it can produce.  In The Red Queen's Race, a idealist scientist devises a method to send a modern chemistry text, translated to ancient Greek, back to that era in hopes of redirecting the flow of history away from the devastating wars experienced in the twentieth century...and to forestall the threat of nuclear warfare.  The ending reveals the results of his efforts...which kind of reminds me of what happened when Harry Potter and Hermione Granger tried their own version of time travel in J.K. Rowling's third book of her series, The Prisoner of Azkaban...

FLAW by John D. MacDonald
A short, short story with a major knockout revelation at the end, Flaw is about the first mission to send men to Mars and back.  Like our Apollo 10 flight around the moon, this one will circle the Red Planet and return to Earth.  A young woman, engaged to one of the astronauts on the mission, anxiously awaits his return...they've exchanged rings and he's wearing hers with a ruby and a flawed design.  That ostensibly insignificant fact turns into a major factor at story's end as we're informed of very somber news about our place in the universe...

PRIVATE EVE by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore)
If my memory serves me correctly, the People's Republic of China has set up a surveillance state in which hundreds of millions of cameras are currently spying on the population, setting up an essentially totalitarian society.  But even here in America it's difficult to go into public...at least in more urban areas...where the cameras around aren't recording your movements as well.  Private Eye is set in a future where the walls themselves record everything everybody does...but there are privacy laws and only those charged with serious crimes are subject to having their past actions reviewed and scrutinized.  The protagonist in the story wants to commit a murder but knows that in the future, once it's over, the authorities will be able to see his every past action leading up to it and hear everything he has said along the way. So given this almost omnipresent surveillance, how does he plan out and execute his crime?  Even more than a sci-fi crime tale, this is an examination of adult psychology...but that's not surprising since the authors, actually the married writing team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. "Catherine" Moore, were probably the greatest at probing into people's personalities and motivations in a science fiction context...

Next week: more short science fiction from 1949...