I conclude my look back at the year 1954 in short science fiction with discussions of the final five entries in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 16 (1954). I like this series in large part because the two editors, Martin H. Greenberg and Isaac Asimov, contribute brief introductions to each of the stories, often referencing other works of the author in question. Each book also gives a synapsis of that year in history...not only the headlines news but also what was happening in entertainment and the arts, including of course science fiction literature...
THE FATHER-THING by Philip K. Dick
In what on the surface seems to be a typical suburban American family setting, the mom tells her son to call his dad in to dinner...but the boy, having just seen two identical "dads" in the garage, doesn't want to go. What eventually happens in this horror-turned-science fiction story reminded me a famous 1956 sci-fi movie and made me wonder whether they derived their movie idea from this Philip K. Dick tale. Upon further investigation I discovered that the movie was derived...but from a story earlier than Dick's...so maybe it was Dick who picked up on someone else's idea. Regardless, this is a pretty scary story...
THE DEEP RANGE by Arthur C. Clarke
Clarke, who lived for many years in Ceylon/Sri Lanka, was an accomplished skin diver with a great love for the sea and its life. This optimistic story is set in a future time when the ocean depths are the source of farming and ranching that easily feed the world's population, forever putting an end to famine. But within one of the herds of whales, it seems a predator has slipped through the barrier and the protagonist, along with his two dolphin colleagues, go down to investigate...
BALAAM by Anthony Boucher
I'm really not a fan of overtly religious analogies and speculation within the science fiction genre...the ending to the Matrix series left me a bit cold. Boucher has already gone down this road with his The Quest for St. Aquin and once again I'm being subjected to yawn-inspiring theological arguments in sci-fi disguise. Balaam seeks to recreate the parameters of that Old Testament story as a Jewish rabbi on Mars is ordered by his military commander to curse that planet's alien invaders...
MAN OF PARTS by H. L. Gold
In an interstellar war of the distant future, a spaceship pilot who had just bombed a crucial site of the enemy's crashes on a nearby world populated by rock-and-metal-based intelligent creatures completely unaware of the conflict going on in the stars above them. One of their surgeons rescues most of the pilot's brain and his two arms by putting them into the largely metallic body of a miner, a completely different, non-humanoid life-form. The resuscitated pilot finds himself in a deep conflict trying to reconcile his original human nature with his new life and its parameters...along with his new society's values, priorities, and assumptions. Very interesting, and I found the ending to be funny in a kind of macabre way...
ANSWER by Fredric Brown
Brown was famous for writing extremely short stories with knockout endings...here's another one, less than a full page in length. In the future, all the computers spanning the cosmos have been connected and now humanity can use them to solve what heretofore had been considered to be unsolvable problems. Upon closing the switch that establishes the connection uniting the computing systems of 96 billion planets, Dwar Reyn poses the first (and possibly final) question...now get ready for the punchline...
Next week I'll start reviewing selected science fiction short stories from the year 1955...
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