When I recently picked up my own copy of Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 15 (1953), it struck me that I've owned that particular book in the series longer than most of the others, having read several of its stories a number of times. Today I'm covering the first three of the selected science fiction short stories from 1953: all three are set off in the future on other planets, the first two of which happen to be Mars...
THE BIG HOLIDAY by Fritz Leiber
This story reads like something that Ray Bradbury would have written about the good ol' days growing up in a small midwestern town, but the people here are living on a future terraformed Mars...and seem to have gotten their priorities straight, celebrating the "Big Holiday" by laying down their work and engaging in good-natured community games, feasts and parties...along with the rest of the now-enlightened collective population of Earth and Mars. It's a story of hope, that somewhere along the line the things that should really matter to us will finally become the determining priorities for humanity's future instead of destructive warfare, fear, and hate...
CRUCIFIXUS ETIAM by William M. Miller, Jr.
A young man from Peru, enticed by the good pay for laboring on Mars, signs up for a five-year stint there. He is fully aware that eventually he will probably lose his ability to breathe on his own and become permanently dependent on oxygen directly supplied by a machine to his bloodstream, but he struggles in vain against what increasingly seems inevitable. And why are all of them working so hard anyway to dig up the strange substance from deep under the planet's surface? Another Mars tale with an ultimately optimistic ending...but in this case to get to heaven you must first go through hell...
FOUR IN ONE by Damon Knight
One of my all-time favorite sci-fi stories, Four In One takes place far into a future when the entire human-settled galaxy is locked in the throes of a civil war between two implacable factions. On a hasty project to claim an previously unexplored-but-strategic planet for one side in the conflict, a biologist and three others in his team accidently fall into a mass of strange protoplasm...which proceeds to digest their bodies, leaving only their brains, eyes, and nervous systems intact within the mottled mass. How protagonist George Meister assesses and adapts to his unique situation and how he deals with the others sharing his predicament form the flow of this fascinating and singular tale. And the ending definitely provides food for thought...
Next week: more reviews of good 1953 sci-fi short stories...
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