Weekly Short Stories: 1951 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here's week #2 in my look back at notable science fiction from the year 1951, reading through the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 13 (1951).  This excellent series, spanning the best in short sci-fi literature from 1939 through 1963, actually came out much later than the years they covered, with a new book published every few months starting in the late 1970s and ending with editor Isaac Asimov's death in 1992.  One of my favorite parts of each volume is the Introduction, which capsulizes not only the main historical developments of the year in focus, but also what was going on in other areas like entertainment, sports, and literature...for example, this volume mentioned the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, possibly my all-time favorite science fiction movie.  It also suggests some science fiction novels to read...maybe I need to go back and start reading them all.  Here's my reaction to the next five stories in the 1951 book...

ANGEL'S EGG by Edgar Pangborn
This story's "lesson" bothered me to no end, and it all comes down to the double meaning of the word "save".  An honorable man, partially disabled from service in World War I, owns and tends his farm and one day discovers one of his chickens sitting on a strange, translucent egg.  It hatches and from it arises a diminutive young woman...with wings.  She communicates with him telepathically and relates her origin from a distant world where the population transmits its memories and experiences down through each succeeding generation...by completely "saving" their memories through a painless process that ultimately empties the subject's mind and causes a peaceful death.  When she tells our protagonist that she had just "saved" his prized chicken as he looks down upon its dead body...well, maybe you can see where I am starting to have a problem with this story and where it's going.  Most of us think of "saving" in terms of rescue or salvation, but here it's more like saving a computer file.  Maybe Angel's Egg is a little ahead of its time in this respect, but I personally don't want to go down that road, thank you. The author seems on the "angel's" side: I strongly beg to differ with his opinion...

"BREEDS THERE A MAN--" by Isaac Asimov
In this tale Asimov speculatively (I don't think he actually believed it) entertains the notion that instead of looking at the great Golden Ages of our past in which humanity seemed to make giant leaps in knowledge, science, the arts, and philosophy in just a very short timespan being cut short by the onset of calamitous events time after time, to look at the idea that it was the Golden Ages themselves and quick advancements that caused the onset of the disasters.  Dr. Ralston, a gifted engineer with the knack for intuitively fixing highly technical problems, becomes suicidal and knows why: the atomic warfare project he is on is progressing too fast and the "powers that be" are fighting back by rendering those working on it mentally disabled.  I recommend this story for Asimov's theory...in a way it's true but on a much smaller scale: when I was a kid and displayed my intelligence in the presence of others, adults and children alike seemed to go out of their way to stymie me and put me down...

PICTURES DON'T LIE by Katherine MacLean
A radio decoder for the Army stumbles upon extraterrestrial television signals and not only makes first contact but develops a rapport with his alien spaceborne counterpart.  And now all of Earth is in a state of excitement and anticipation as the first spaceship from another world will soon land in a clearing.  Their TV shows make it clear that they are humanoid in form with a few minor differences, and they seem to be culturally similar to us.  And pictures don't lie...as the title suggests...do they?  Yet there just be something beyond the pictures that nobody ever got around to thinking about...

SUPERIORITY by Arthur C. Clarke
Two interstellar societies are at war with each other in a future time, and the "home" world...already gradually winning the conflict through higher numbers and attrition...thinks that it can institute innovative research to develop a new, overpowering military technology.  But research and development takes time and resources, diverting from the ongoing war effort and empowering the enemy, who begins to turn from defense to offense.  Where this all leads is a repudiation of the notion that superiority in advanced technology will always prevail in armed conflicts, as was evident in Vietnam and seems to be coming true right now in Afghanistan (it sure didn't work for the Soviet Union there back in the 1980s).  Of course, R&D from both sides during World War II produced superweapons that affected the war...the German V2 rockets and the American atomic bomb, so Clarke's notion isn't necessarily always applicable...

I'M SCARED by Jack Finney
Set in the present (1951, that is), a 66-year old retiree living in New York is fiddling around on his radio when suddenly, for a few moments, a broadcast from 25 years earlier interrupts his listening.  Thinking it to be a glitch of the broadcaster, he brushes it off until he begins to hear strange reports from other people who had experienced incidents with time displacement of objects, animals...and even people.  He collects well over a hundred of such reports and becomes frightened...not for himself in his old age but for the future of humanity as the collective anxiety of people in this age of nuclear threats and war has caused the very fabric of time itself to begin to tear. As the anthology's editors remarked, the 1950s is often seen nostalgically as the "good old days", but remember that in '51 the Korean War was going full throttle, the Russians had just exploded their own atom bomb, and the future was very much in doubt in the minds of many...this was to be, after all, the decade of the family bomb shelter...

Next week: more stories from 1951...