Today I begin discussing science fiction short stories I read from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 21 (1959). They're all good, but I'm partial to the second and fourth ones below as they possess a special depth beyond the stories themselves...
MAKE A PRISON by Lawrence Block
This rather short tale is a case in point regarding the concept of "thinking outside the box" when attacking problems. A prisoner, apparently from another world, had murdered several of the planet's inhabitants. In line with their principles forbidding capital punishment, they have erected a very high tower, at the very top of which their prisoner will be sent via pneumatic tube to live the rest of his years, cared for with food and water but totally isolated from the rest of the world. A real "duh" moment at the end...
THE WIND PEOPLE by Marion Zimmer Bradley
An exploratory ship with a coed crew is on a stopover for several months to find fuel on an idyllically green planet, apparently uninhabited by sentient life. One of the women finds herself pregnant and gives birth to a boy...she remains behind on this world with her infant baby since the ship's takeoff would have killed him. The two of them survive for years there...but the mother is in a complete state of denial about the translucent people around them, whispering like the wind. This is a tragic tale about a number of things, possibly chief among them the tendency for people to deny that which is unknown and over which they have little or no control: a lesson for the times we live in...
NO, NO, NOT ROGOV! by Cordwainer Smith
1959 was a peak year in the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Bloc countries...this story goes back to the Stalin years as a Russian scientist and his wife have hit upon the ultimate weapon to defeat the capitalists by getting into their minds and manipulating them. Rogov insists on having a crucial mind-control experiment performed on himself...which predictably goes haywire with some major unforeseen consequences...
WHAT ROUGH BEAST by Damon Knight
My favorite story of the bunch, it is about an unassuming man who has a gift...or maybe it's a curse...to reach into alternative universes and replace something in ours with something from one of the others. In this way he works miracles around him, but must keep it all secret. Unfortunately one day he gets careless, people discover his gifting, and it all starts snowballing downhill. A searing commentary about base human nature and how people quickly adapt to unexpected blessings and make their continuation into entitlements instead of feeling and showing gratitude and contentment for what they had been given...
Next week I will continue my look back at the year 1959 in science fiction short stories...
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