I've started rereading science fiction short stories from way back in 1952 as they appeared in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 14 (1952). The U.S. was still fighting the Chinese and North Koreans, Harry Truman was in his final year as president, and Dwight "I Like Ike" Eisenhower would run and be elected. My dear, wonderful sister Anita was born in 1952, which more than anything else makes it an important year to me. Here are my reactions to the first five stories appearing in the book...
THE PEDESTRIAN by Ray Bradbury
In November 2017 I wrote a review of this very significant four-page short story...here's a link to it: [Pedestrian]. In that article I wrote about vehicles stopping or driving by very slowly when I would be out running...it still happens, the last time just this past Saturday and with illegally tinted windows masking the driver. It appears that some people have nothing better to do than to drive around slowly, scrutinize pedestrians and act creepily toward them. Sadly, I think there are plenty of people around us who are so screwed up in the head that they believe...as was the case in the story...that no one has any legitimate business being on the streets without a vehicle...
THE MOON IS GREEN by Fritz Leiber
In Leiber's story a young woman is stuck...apparently for years...in her stuffy, ugly, and restrictive bomb-shelter of a home with her verbally-abusive, domineering husband as she imagines that the world outside isn't really loaded with deathly radiation following a full worldwide nuclear exchange. She sneaks a peak through the fortified window and sees that the moon is green...beautiful, she thinks, without considering why it appears that way. This story goes on to illustrate how people, faced with unpleasant circumstances, can talk themselves into a narrative (while selectively accepting supporting input from others) that denies the legitimate reasons for their undesirable situation...
LOST MEMORY by Peter Phillips
A very well-written story, presented from the perspective of a robot news reporter on a completely machine-"inhabited" planet, set many years in the future. A man-piloted spaceship soft-crashes on this world and the robots, completely unaware of their ancient origins as human creations, regard the ship itself as the life form, completely ignoring the significance of the carbon-based "insulation" inside...
WHAT HAVE I DONE? by Mark Clifton
A consulting psychologist for employers who has interviewed thousands encounters a young man who seems to emanate no discernible personality. Later he reveals that he is of an alien race seeking to infiltrate and ultimately conquer Earth by adopting human form and gradually easing us out of existence. The psychologist is horrified at the thought...but given the choice between this technologically extremely advanced race simply annihilating humanity in a flash and giving us some time to work with, he agrees to teach the invaders...now numbering around 30...how to act and appear more human, especially with regard to their emotional demeanor. Our hero then thinks up a strategy that in the end depends upon the sad fact that people tend to despise and persecute the best and most idealistic among them...
FAST FALLS THE EVENTIDE by Eric Frank Russell
It is eons into the future, our sun is dying out, and Earth is on its final legs with oxygen seeping away and life dwindling to a few. But humanity has staked its future on a workable survival strategy as it has become the educator of the cosmos, sending out on ships teachers to all sorts of alien worlds. Melisande, the story's protagonist, has chosen a remote world that has never encountered humans. What will be her fate? Russell paints a optimistic picture of humankind outlasting its own planet, not by conquering and transforming other worlds, but rather fitting within the framework of the universe as it already exists. What a prescient story, clearly ahead of its time...and there's a twist to the ending...
Next week: more notable sci-fi short stories from 1952...
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