Weekly Short Stories: 1957 Science Fiction, Part 1

Out of the 25 volumes comprising the anthology series Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories that spanned quality science fiction short stories from 1939 through 1963, the volume #19 about the year 1957 is the one I've possessed the longest, having read it a number of times.

STRIKEBREAKER by Isaac Asimov
I reviewed this story back in '17...here's a link to that article: [link].  A small world building downward underground inside itself, with an extremely dense population, has developed a rigid social system where certain jobs and their performers are stigmatized and isolated.  One of the workers, the man operating the human waste recycling works, declares himself on strike until he and his family are allowed to integrate into society.  A visitor to the planet on a different mission confronts the crisis...which creates an ethical dilemma...

OMNILINGUAL by H. Beam Piper
More a novella than a short story, Omnilingual delves into the problem of decoding the language of a culture without any "Rosetta Stone" or common points of reference.  Such is the problem encountered by a scientific team investigating the ancient Martian ruins of an intelligent race extinct for millennia.  Eventually they hit upon the solution, which in light of what we would put on one of our early space probes in retrospect seems self-evident...

THE MILE-LONG SPACESHIP by Kate Wilhelm
Here's another tale I've discussed before, and here's a link to it in another 2017 article: [link].  It assumes the existence of telepathy as a man on Earth, following an auto accident in which he suffered brain trauma, keeps dreaming in his hospital bed of being in deep space...and inevitably finds himself on board an alien ship.  What he doesn't know is that this ship is real and has its own telepath...fearing other intelligent life in the cosmos, they try to influence his dreaming enough for him to reveal where Earth is.  This is an interesting story with one of the "sides" completely oblivious as to the danger they are in...

CALL ME JOE by Poul Anderson
An embittered man crippled by an earlier accident is stationed around Jupiter, engaged in a project to seed life there adapted to its intensely different environment of methane and extreme pressure and cold...his consciousness is transferred into the body of a manufactured creature who can withstand the harsh Jovian conditions.  The story toggles back in forth between this individual and "Joe"...I read a similar premise in Clifford Simak's 1944 short story Desertion, which he later incorporated as a chapter in his novel City...

YOU KNOW WILLIE  by Theodore Cogswell
One of the rare science fiction stories bluntly dealing with the problem of racial persecution in America...particularly in the South, Willie McCracken, a well-to-do white racist businessman in a small town, shoots to death a black man who he sees as a competitor...at the trial they produce a false alibi and the all-white jury promptly acquits him.  But the victim's Aunt Hattie, with her traditional spiritualism that includes curses, still has something to say in the matter. The ending reminded me of what happened to Hitler in Robert Heinlein's short story Successful Operation...

More about 1957 sci-fi short stories next week...