Weekly Short Stories: 1949 Science Fiction, Part 2

As I continued looking at what editors Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg chose to included in their anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 11 (1949), I realized that all of them came out years before I was born in 1956. Each of us has this "zero" point in the chronology of years, with the history predating our existence on Earth somehow seeming not quite as real as that through which we have personally lived. Science fiction stories aren't limited in time as to their content, but their writers are since they write them in the context of the current time setting, in this case seventy years ago in 1949.  I always have to keep this in mind when reading these stories as the language can sometimes get a little politically incorrect, especially with regard to women's roles in society.  Here are my reactions to four more stories in the book...

MANNA by Peter Phillips
A company has created and is marketing a new kind of superfood-in-a-can and has built one of its factories on the site of an old monastery...which is incidentally the dwelling place of the ghosts of two monks deceased centuries earlier.  In order to fulfill their obligations for ascendency, Brothers James and Gregory secretly "spirit" away can after can of Miracle Meal back to their original century when the local population is suffering badly from famine.  In the meantime, the home corporation is puzzled at the food's inexplicable disappearance and the story goes on from there.  I thought this story was kind of silly in that it attempted to merge the ideas of ghosts, spiritual ascendency, and subatomic physics into something that made a kind of sense...which it failed to do for me...

THE PRISONER IN THE SKULL by Lewis Padgett
This is what I would call a "loop" story, in which the ending leads back to the story's beginning.  John Fowler, a morally-compromised, shallow, and materialistic young man answers his doorbell one day thinking it is his almost-as-shallow girlfriend.  Instead, a gaunt, featureless man with a haunted demeanor and inability to formulate words enters.  Fowler at first tries to rid himself of the unwelcome and troubled intruder, but soon discovers that he is gifted with technology and is continually coming up with new inventions that Fowler tries to get patent rights for himself.  He keeps the man, whom he dubs "Norman", confined in a room as he exploits his abilities while refusing to help him in his quest for a cure.  This is a story where the protagonist is the villain...but justice will prevail nonetheless in the end. Or is there an end?

ALIEN EARTH by Edmund Hamilton
In my opinion by far the best of these four stories, Alien Earth takes place in the present (around 1949, that is) as a teak merchant explores a remote area of Indo-China before it later became the nation of Laos.  He and his guide encounter an indigenous man whose motions and even bodily functions are at one hundredth the rate of normal people.  He appears at first to be motionless but then is shown to be purposefully moving...at a tremendously slow speed.  Our protagonist discovers him to be just one in a cult of plant worshippers...the adherents consume a special drug that slows their processes and perceptions down to this level...a level at which they can perceive trees and other plant forms as active, sentient beings.  Indeed, what they experience is an alien earth and a fantastic concept.  But what are the trees are going to have to say about this tree-killer when they find him down at their level? Thank you, Edmund Hamilton, this tale is worth remembering...

HISTORY LESSON by Arthur C. Clarke
My sister Anita, older than me by four years, while still in high school one evening decided to read me a few short stories she encountered...tales like Ray Bradbury's The Small Assassin, Bram Stoker's The Iron Maiden, and this one by Arthur C. Clarke.  It is the final line that makes this brief story memorable for most, but upon rereading it many years later I was more interested in the first part, which relates the final extinction of a much-declined humanity eons into the future as the last remnants find themselves trapped between fast-moving, converging glaciers from the north and south.  This group, at the very end, sets up an area to safely store and protect from the glaciers items from their distant past, including an old, never-used-but functional asteroid beacon and something in a disc-shaped container.  Much later, Venusians travel to Earth and discover the beacon and objects.  Clarke wrote many of these kinds of very short stories with zingers at the end.  If there is a lesson to History Lesson, I think it's that it's way too easy to make erroneous assumptions about the past based upon fragmentary evidence...

Next week I'll cover some more science fiction short stories from 1949...