In opening this review of the stories appearing in the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 17 (1955), only three tales appear below...that's because the middle one is actually a novella and pretty long for inclusion in such a book. Each story has its own particular message to impart and in its own way eerily predicts things that have come true over the years. Here are my reactions to them...
THE TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD...Frederick Pohl
Every morning Gary Burckhardt wakes up is June 15th and he is coming out of a nightmare of a terrible explosion. Shaking off his unsettling dream, he sets about his morning business and goes to work at the chemical plant. But Gary is starting to suspect something amiss with his life and circumstances...on the surface everything's the same but not exactly...and he can't escape that deja vu feeling. Finally another man, also suspicious, approaches him and the search is on to discover what the heck is actually going on. Pohl delivered a story here about how little control we really have over our own lives and privacy...oddly prescient so many years before the Internet and its intrusion into our own personal information and preferences...
THE DARFSTELLER...Walter M. Miller, Jr.
At some time in the near future (from 1955's perspective), professional stage acting has been completely supplanted by sophisticated robot actors who almost exactly resemble former real stage stars...who had sold the rights to use their names and copy their images. Ryan Thornier was one of the former acting stars but refused to sell out to make way for the robots...he's now a janitor at one of the roboticized theaters, and his boss wants to take away even this job and replace it with an automated service. In an upcoming play, the star male robot...who was to play a role that Thornier knew by heart...is malfunctioning. And the disgruntled actor decides to take matters into his own hands and deliver his final performance. On one level this 64-year old story resonates with the trend of replacing the work force with technology...even in acting, look at how computers have augmented the stars of film (Lord of the Rings, Polar Express, Star Wars). It was, in my opinion, what was said at the end of the story that endeared it to many...but you have to read the story first...
THE CAVE OF NIGHT...James E. Gunn
Written six years before the first human...the USSR's Yuri Gagarin...was launched into space and orbited Earth...The Cave of Night already anticipated the apathy and skepticism that would come to typify much of public and political opinion about the space program. Remember, just a few months after the first manned landing on the moon, TV networks stopped evening live coverage of the Apollo 13 mission...that is, until a mission-and-life-threatening crisis happened on the ship. And then it was all headline news with the world standing united with the three astronauts, who were potentially stranded in space. What does this have to do with this story? Just read it and dig that ending...
Next week: more from 1955 in the genre of short science fiction...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment