Today I finish my look at the year 1957 in science fiction short stories with the final five appearing in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 19 (1957). Of these, three have within them the theme of time travel, something that I've grown to find tedious reading about since the writer pretty much has a free hand to define it as he or she likes and it's way too easy to come up with "intriguing" paradoxes. Anyway, here are my reactions to these stories...
THE TUNESMITH by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
This, the longest story of today's selection, is a gloomy...but ultimately redemptive...look at our future and increasing corruption and the dumbing down of our popular culture. The music industry is monopolized by a collusive alliance between a dictatorial corporation, Visiscope, and the various musicians' trade unions and their restrictive rules for their members. A talented musician/composer who loves classical music, struggling against the powers-that-be, modestly supports himself and his wife by composing mindless commercial jingles, which have come to comprise popular music...but finds that the system is working against him as he tries to express himself creatively. I found this story, on one hand, to accurately foretell the decline in our musical culture, but on the other it really tore into organized labor, an institution that needs more support nowadays as collective bargaining seems under constant attack...
A LOINT OF PAW by Isaac Asimov
This mercifully brief story is an example of a spoonerism, that is a transposing of the initial consonant sounds in two words...you met what I gean, right? In this case a crook with a time machine forwards himself in time to just beyond the statute of limitations for his crime...the court then decides whether the legally-applicable passage of time defined by the statute refers to personally-experienced time, which was negligible, or "outside world" time...in which case the lawbreaker gets away free. The judge delivers the final line, a spoonerism that made me wonder why this story was selected for the anthology...unless maybe because its author was one of the editors...
GAME PRESERVE by Rog Phillips
This is a story where point of view changes the entire paradigm of what is going on. Among a society of forgetful, slow-witted giants living outside among the crumbling remains of a former advanced civilization lives a small boy called Elf...he is part of their society but believes that they don't understand him or why he remembers things they don't and has a general curiosity about his surroundings. Then the story pans over to a different vantage point and the scene suddenly turns into a dystopian horror story set many, generations into the future...it's all kind of heartbreaking...
SOLDIER by Harlan Ellison
A future soldier whose entire life was designed for fighting is in the midst of yet another World War...I think it's number seven...and the battleground is loaded with every type of horror imaginable (or beyond imagination). Suddenly a random confluence of energy strikes him and he finds himself zapped back into the present time (c. 1957) in the New York subway. Knowing only war, he reacts as only a soldier such as himself would be expected...the surprise is not only what happens next but also how the authorities decide to use him for the greatest good. To me this was the best of today's stories and Harlan Ellison was an extraordinary writer...more from him as the years move on...
THE LAST MAN LEFT IN THE BAR by Cyril Kornbluth
This story frustrated me to no end...a time traveler somehow picked up a far-off future religion's Seal in a time vortex and is now being pursued back into the present (again around 1957, naturally) where he finds himself sitting at a bar trying to figure out what to do. His pursuer Galardo finds him there and tells him he needs to return what he stole in order to avoid the Century of Flames...our hero is stubborn, though. What happens at the end makes no sense whatsoever...if it's any consolation to me, Isaac Asimov himself couldn't figure out what it meant either...so why did he and the anthology's other editor, Martin Greenberg, select it to be one of the year's best stories?
Next week I'll begin looking at science fiction short stories from 1958...
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