Weekly Short Stories: 1950 Science Fiction, Part 1

This past week I began to examine some of the best in short science fiction from the year 1950, though the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 12 (1950).  Harry S. Truman was our president at the time, I wouldn't be born for another six years (my sister another two), and my parents...living in Albany, Georgia with my future dad working as a mailman and mom as a telephone operator...were just a year into their marriage.  Later on that year North Korea would invade South Korea and nearly conquered the peninsula before we countered them with a bold amphibious landing at Inchon.  In the world of science fiction short stories, numerous pulp magazines spread the talent and some mainstream magazines began to publish them as well.  Here are my reactions to the first four stories, all of which paint a gloomy picture of humanity's future and three of which are apocalyptic...

NOT WITH A BANG by Damon Knight

Rolf Smith is a man who had believed he was the lone worldwide survivor of a nuclear war, but discovers that there is another still alive...and a woman at that: he realizes that for the survival of the species they must become a couple.  But she still holds to her conservative religious beliefs about the sanctity of marriage...and there is no one left around to marry them!  Rolf knows he himself hasn't long to live since he has come down with a condition that sporadically paralyzes him, so he must quickly court this woman and cajole her into finding reason in their unique circumstance.  The ending makes the story's title to appear as a double-meaning...

SPECTATOR SPORT by John D. MacDonald

A time traveling professor finds himself in a dystopian, crumbling future society in which everyone is plugged into vicarious, alternative realities where they can live out their personal fantasies.  When he reveals that he is a time traveler from the past, the authorities assume he has overdosed on one of their programs and is scheduled for a "lob job" against his will.  Everyone in this society assumes that the ultimate way of living is to be completely immersed in a fantasy world...an eerie tale foreshadowing our current "reality" of video game mania and the rise of virtual reality... 

THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS by Ray Bradbury

There are no people in this very short story of an automatically-run house a little off into the future...the only building left standing in the area after a nuclear strike.  Bradbury goes into great detail, for example, describing how the breakfast is cooked, presented on the table...and after a while when no one is there to eat it...taken back up, scraped, and cleaned.  But even inanimate houses have their own life spans...

DEAR DEVIL by Eric Frank Russell

Human-size Martians, slithering and with tentacles, are nevertheless the "good guys" in this tale of neighborly goodwill and redemption.  On a exploratory fly-by of Earth off into the future...many years after nuclear war had decimated the planet...a Martian poet is let off to take in the surroundings and live there.  He encounters a broken humanity where the adults, riddled by plague and fearing their children's susceptibility, abandon them and leave them to forage in groups for themselves.  The Martian, little by little, befriends the little boys and girls and gains their trust...they affectionately call him "Devil".  Where does this all lead?  Well, unlike the first three stories I reviewed, this one presents an optimistic outlook on humanity's future although I hope we'll neither destroy ourselves in nuclear conflagrations nor need Martians to come save the day...

More about science fiction short stories from 1950 next week...