Weekly Short Stories: 1960 Science Fiction, Part 1

I begin my look back at the year 1960 in short science fiction with the first three stories from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 22 (1960).  During that year I was three going on four and spent almost the entire year living in an apartment with my mother, father and sister in Opa-Locka, a suburb northwest of Miami with a One Thousand Nights theme of oriental architecture and street names (we lived on Dunad Avenue).  Of course back then I wasn't aware it was "1960" or that Eisenhower was president...or what a president was for that matter.  But I do remember lots of things that went on that year, including the scary time when what I would later learn was Hurricane Donna swept through.  Anyway, here are those first three stories...

MARIANA by Fritz Leiber
A young woman living out on some far off planet one day begins to question the nature of her reality when she discovers in her own home a control box with labeled switches.  This very brief story reminds me of the scene in the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine when they are in the Sea of Green and encounter a sea monster that sucks in everything around...including, ultimately, itself...

THE DAY THE ICICLE WORKS CLOSED by Frederik Pohl
A planet whose economy depends totally on its one commodity, its unique natually multi-colored snow high in demand across the settled universe, falls into depression when an engineer elsewhere is reported to have copied the process, enabling anyone to produce it and consequently crashing the planet's economy.  Now the only way for the population to earn substantial money is the abhorrent practice of renting out their bodies to tourists who briefly inhabit them telepathically.  A lawyer uncovers something seedy going on when he defends some youths who had kidnapped the mayor's child for ransom.  This story has a similar theme to The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, which I am currently reading...

THE FELLOW WHO MARRIED THE MAXILL GIRL by Ward Moore
A rather wayward man is left the only surviving parent of six girls in a backwoods farm...one of them discovers in the nearby country a young man who cannot speak but only hum, has four fingers and toes instead of five, and possesses a remarkable ability to heal the sick and make plants grow and yield abundantly: he's obviously of another world.  Nan, one of the older girls, falls in love with him and eventually the two can converse and...well, you already know the story's title.  Once again here is a tale about someone whose extraordinary abilities, once know to certain parties, can place his freedom...and even life...in jeopardy...

Next week: more in science fiction short stories from 1960...