Weekly Short Stories: 1951 Science Fiction, Part 1

I began my look back at some of the more highly regarded science fiction short stories in 1951 by rereading the paperback anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 13 (1951). The five stories I'm discussing below all have familiar names as authors, so without any further delay let's take a look at them...

NULL-P by William Tenn
William Tenn, whose real name was Philip Klass and was an professor of English at Penn State, was known to go a bit off on the satirical side in his stories, and this one is a case in point.  Following a disastrous world war that nearly destroyed the planet, everyone gets taken up with George Abnego, whose statistically average scores on just about any test done on him has revealed the return of the "normal" to the world...to its collective delight.  I can't help but think of Warren G. Harding's slogan of "Return to Normalcy" in his wildly successful isolationist presidential campaign of 1920 following World War I. A few folks, however, see only mediocrity instead of  "normalcy"...or normality as it is more properly called, and Tenn lays it on thick showing post-war society exalting the mediocre normal as he takes this trend to its logical conclusion...

THE SENTINEL by Arthur C. Clarke
This tale was the forerunner to Clarke's great work 2001: A Space Odyssey, on which he collaborated with Stanley Kubrik.  There are notable differences: in The Sentinel humanity doesn't get a piercing sound coming from the monument left on the moon (like in the later movie), which leads to a different reaction and a possibly foreboding ending...

THE FIRE BALLOONS by Ray Bradbury
Father Peregrine, on his first assignment to an already-settled Mars in the future (from both 1951 and now), is eager to save souls and squash sin.  But when he arrives he discovers intelligent, sentient disembodied native life in the form of spheres of light...or "fire balloons".  They are elusive, but present themselves in emergencies to rescue humans from accidents...Peregrine recognizes this and sets out with his skeptical colleague Father Stone to present the Gospel to them.  But what can he use to first attract them for an audience and then how can he illustrate his message?  An interesting speculative tale with something positive at the end...

THE MARCHING MORONS by Cyril Kornbluth
The premise of this story, which was very popular at the time of its first publication... is bogus: that intelligence is primarily hereditary and that certain demographic "groups" produced smarter offspring than certain others...you can probability guess which groups the author had in mind...sigh.  It is many centuries off into the future and the world has a human population primarily with an average IQ of 45...constantly cared for by a superintelligent minority which is based at the poles and whose members conceal their caretaker role to the "dummies".  They want to discover how to rid themselves of their "problem" and finally find their answer from the ideas of an average human who had been in a state of suspended animation for centuries.  This story has so many things wrong with it that this anthology's editors took care to dissociate themselves from it, finally deciding to begrudgingly include it because it had made the Science Fiction Hall of Fame...

THE WEAPON by Fredric Brown
A little more than two years ago I discussed this very short but very profound story...here's a link to that article: [The Weapon].  A scientist is developing a new doomsday weapon for his government.  A pleasant stranger visits him and his mentally arrested son, befriending them both while pleading with the scientist to halt his work for the sake of humanity.  Read it: the final line is unforgettable...

Next week I plan to continue discussing more science fiction short stories from 1951...