Weekly Short Stories: 1954 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reactions to four more entries from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 16 (1954).  By the way, after starting with the year 1939, I have it covered through 1990 with annual "year's best" anthologies of this genre of fiction...this blog feature is destined to be long-lasting...

THE HUNTING LODGE by Randall Garrett
In a somewhat dystopian future dominated by robots and surveillance, a small number of people rendered immortal and who are desperately clinging to that status and their accumulated power and wealth, face violent opposition within their own government.  One of the agencies sends out an assassin...under hypnosis and with an assumed identity...to get rid of one of the worst of them.  Does he survive his assignment and is he successful?  Read it and find out.  I have a problem with stories like this because it implies that there's something inherently wrong with long life...as if outlasting everybody else somehow means you're being unfair to the masses: what nonsense. I'm opposed to any literature that pushes the notion that old people have already had their "chance" and now need to step aside and make room for others...

THE LYSENKO MAZE by Donald A. Wollheim
Trofin Denisovich Lysenko was a Soviet-era biologist who postulated the notion that an organism can genetically pass its environmentally-acquired characteristics down to future generations.  Dictator Stalin made his theories official state science, but virtually all of the rest of the scientific community denounced Lysenko as a charlatan.  Wollheim's story centers around a scientist who believes Lysenko was right and who sets up an experiment...using mice and a large, complicated maze...to prove himself to his skeptical colleagues.  This story seems to end one way...until you read the last paragraph.  By the way, Donald A. Wollheim is the publisher of the Isaac Asimov Presents series and himself edited another, which I may be referencing at some future time...

FONDLY FAHRENHEIT by Alfred Bester
The idea that psychosis is a disease that someone can "catch" from another is essential to this story of a planet-hopping man and his android robot...the latter seems to go into an insane murderous rage whenever the temperature around it rises beyond a certain point.  But the owner seems to be experiencing trouble separating his own identity from that of his android.  The story can be very confusing as it is alternately presented in the first person from the android's viewpoint, then from that of the owner, and then in the third person...sometimes even changing the perspective within the same sentence...

THE COLD EQUATIONS by Tom Godwin
On a rescue mission in the interstellar frontier to an endangered small party on a remote planet, the pilot of his small, efficiently-designed spacecraft discovers a stowaway.  But the craft's weight requirements are rigid and pre-planned for no extra weight, otherwise the increased gravity on descent will cause it to expend its fuel early and cause it to crash.  The policy is clear-cut...the intruder must be jettisoned into space for the sake of the mission, but the compassionate pilot and his unwelcome guest must first come to grips with this unsolvable predicament. A real heartbreaking story...

Next week: more from 1954 in the world of short science fiction...