Here are my reactions to five more stories from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 14 (1952). They're all pretty good, although the first three pretty much wear out the concept of time travel. So without further ado, here they are...
THE BUSINESS, AS USUAL by Mack Reynolds
This very brief tale examines the paradoxes built into time travel...that is, travel to the past, not the future. Once time machines get invented, the author hypothesizes the existence of a jaded future humanity expecting time tourists from the past...and only too ready to fleece them for everything they've got...
A SOUND OF THUNDER by Ray Bradbury
Big game hunters can't wait to take advantage of a time travel company's offer of a prehistoric safari time trip, with nothing other than the terrifying Tyrannosaurus Rex as the targeted prize. But the company tells the hunters of the restrictions, meticulously constructed in order to avoid influencing anything that might come back through the Butterfly Effect to drastically alter the present. You know something's bound to go wrong here as soon as the hunters are told in no uncertain terms NOT to stray from the prescribed path...
HOBSON'S CHOICE by Alfred Bester
A future America...and most of the rest of the world, for that matter...devastated by nuclear conflict is still plugging on forward, and an investigator is sent to an area in Kansas hit hardest in the war with little left to speak of but which, for some reason, is reporting a healthy increase in population. Upon arriving he sees how bad it really is and the area is mostly deserted...except for groups of happy, healthy people who from time to time come out of buildings, get on a bus, and ride off. He investigates further and discovers the unsettling reason for their presence. The moral of this story...yet another about time travel...is that people tend to think more fondly of the "good old days" or a more promising future than they do of their present circumstances without taking into consideration the many blessings they are currently enjoying that don't exist in their envisioned past or future. A good, thought-provoking tale...
YESTERDAY HOUSE by Fritz Leiber
Back in January 1973 I first saw the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece Vertigo, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak. It involves a man's despair over the tragic death of his young love and his fanatical determination to recreate her...in minute detail...in another woman. Yesterday House is a similar tale as a young man working as an assistant on the New England coast to a research biologist discovers a remote island where live an isolated and beautiful young woman with her two eccentric and unpleasant aunts. As he falls in love with her, our hero discovers a strange connection between the girl and his boss, who has been doing research into the generation of life...you might already see where this is going. It's a great story idea...and the ending was not at all what I expected...
THE SNOWBALL EFFECT by Katherine MacLean
A college's department head during budgeting time demands that one of the sociology professors justify his own field in order stay employed there. The response is a project he had been working about the snowball effect in social movements...by analyzing snowballing movements in the past he has discovered how to set up an organization whose effect and power will continue to increase without restraint. Intrigued, the department head sets up with the professor an experiment: they go to a nearby small town's social sewing club and implement the plan, with unforeseen consequences...
Next week I'll review some more sci-fi short stories from 1952...
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