Weekly Short Stories: 1954 Science Fiction, Part 3

Here are my reactions to four more science fiction stories from the year 1954, as they appeared in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 16 (1954).  To be perfectly honest, I wasn't all that thrilled with the first three below...sometimes when you're reading anthologies and collections, though, you have to cross some deserts of dry literature in order to access fertile lands of imagination and insight...

LETTERS FROM LAURA by Mildred Clingerman
I think this brief story may have been considered back in 1954 to have been a little provocative, which then enabled it to gain some notoriety...you'll have to read it to know what I'm talking about.  Anyway, a young woman writes a series of letters...first to her mother and then to a friend...about her time travel experience: in her time in the future, they have time travel tour companies.  Her trip is to ancient Crete, where a certain monster is reputed to dwell...

TRANSFORMER by Chad Oliver
Another story that reads more like a Twilight Zone episode...I'm thinking mostly of that Five Characters in Search of an Exit episode...Transformer is told from the perspective of a toy figurine woman stuck in a bratty boy's model train setup.  She describes the abuse he inflicts on the other "inhabitants" there...actually, this sounds more like Toy Story, doesn't it?  The gimmick to this tale is laid out in the beginning, so I'm not giving anything away.  It just didn't work for me...

THE MUSIC MASTER OF BABYLON by Edgar Pangborn
It's toward the end of the 21st century and, after nuclear Armageddon and the resulting overwhelming depopulation of Earth and breakup of social structures, a man finds himself spending the final decades of his life in solitude on the northern edge of what used to be New York City...and has sole access to a great old museum there, one that features a grand room with a piano.  A player himself, he wants to properly play a piece that a latter-day composer had composed a century earlier when the world was beginning to come apart.  One day in the museum he discovers he isn't alone...this story is more a somber post-apocalyptic mood piece, something you're either going to like a lot or not at all...

THE END OF SUMMER by Algis Budrys
I have to admit I was struggling through most of this story about gained immortality and the need to continually reinstate memories until I got near the end...and then what a revelation that was!  After reading it I understand that absolute immortality carries with it some pretty serious flaws...but if biological research and medical applications continue to advance our life spans, along with a higher quality of life in those later years, I'm all for it...

Next week I'll finish my look back at short science fiction from 1954...