As I kept reading through the "year's best" anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 20 (1958), the quality of the entries continued to impress me. The last four, which I will discuss below, are especially good...my favorite is the one by MacLean. Here are my reactions to them...
THE BURNING OF THE BRAIN by Cordwainer Smith
In Cordwainer Smith's future universe of interconnected stories focusing on exploring and settling the cosmos, telepathy plays a big role as humanity struggles to conquer the deadly hazards encountered while in deep space travel. One such ship is on a voyage and gets lost...while the ship's navigation charts are wiped out by accident, leaving only the patterns within the captain's own brain as a possible source for finding their location and avoiding a horrible death in the remotes of space. But at what cost to telepathically retrieve the buried information?
THE YELLOW PILL by Rog Phillips
A psychiatrist has on his daily office schedule a special visit an by apparently delusional young man in police custody who has just shot and killed six people. But to Gerald Bocek, Dr. Cedric Elton is no psychiatrist, but rather Gar Castle, his shipmate in the middle of a space voyage. Elton wonders how to shake Bocek from his delusion, knowing that a certain yellow pill will do the job. This brief tale twists in one direction that the reader might have anticipated...but not its ending, which I thought was brilliant...
UNHUMAN SACRIFICE by Katherine MacLean
The idea of imposing one's own culturally-biased religious beliefs on others in unknown, alien settings is the theme of this story about a mission on an unexplored planet with such a preacher determined to convert the population without any knowledge of their society or even biology. The ending is a shocker and ultimately justifies what everyone in the visiting party, not just the preacher, regards as an inhumane practice upon the natives with its own...
THE IMMORTALS by James E. Gunn
The idea of achieved immortality being a privilege only available to the wealthy elite isn't a new idea in science fiction, but this story really gets under the surface of it all, exposing the ugliness of an economy dominated by organ harvesting and medical cannibalization of the weak and disadvantaged with the general society disintegrating all around. One of the most glaring and disturbing dystopian stories I've ever read, and I've gone through a few. The ending gives an unexpectedly new perspective on the title...
Next week I begin my look back at old science fiction short stories from the year 1959...
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