Weekly Short Stories: 1960 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are four more science fiction short stories from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 22 (1960).  This paperback anthology series, compiled during the 1980s and early 90s up to Asimov's sad death from kidney failure in 1992, covered the years 1939-63 in the genre.  For 1964 through 1990, I've also collected the ongoing "year's best" science fiction short story series edited by Donald Wollheim...so you see I've got a long way to go just to get to thirty years ago...

MINE OWN WAYS by Richard McKenna
This is a story of allegory, as are many science fiction tales, about how one's own cultural centeredness can cause judgmental conclusions about another society and its norms and laws.  Set on another planet, Earth travelers are repelled by the killing they see within an indigenous humanoid society there...their eyes are opened when the "priest" in charge of the barbaric rituals reveals his true identity and the underlying cause of the "tests" the young initiates are required to perform...with violent death as the penalty for failure.  An interesting theory contained within about the origins of our own humanity...

MAKE MINE...HOMOGENIZED by Rick Raphael
A deliberately funny and satirical take on the arms race, nuclear testing, and genetic manipulation as a hokey ranch woman living near one of those western testing sites discovers one day that one of her cows' milk is high-powered fuel of a kind no one has remotely developed...and that her rooster produces golden eggs with equally strong detonator powder inside.  Of course, the secret gets out and the author has fun describing the reactions not only of the defense bigwigs, press, and politicians, but also of the Soviet Union with its propensity for ridiculous propaganda.  A long story, but enjoyable with a very silly, campy pun stuck at the very end (in our age it would be called a "dad" joke)...

THE LADY WHO SAILED THE SOUL by Cordwainer Smith
Cordwainer Smith was the pen name of Paul Linebarger, a college professor who as his alter ego created a special, unique future history of space exploration...my favorite story of his is The Game of Cat and Dragon from 1954. The Lady Who Sailed The Soul is a sci-fi love story about Cordwainer's imagined space pioneering vision of star-travelers on spaceships powered by vast light-sensitive sails, the passengers in suspended animation and the pilots medically modified to stay always awake with their sense of time passage drastically slowed. On such a voyage to "New Earth" light years distant the pilot perceives that one month has passed but physically ages forty years.  A woman and man, the former about to pilot her first mission and the latter, physically old but mentally still young, have a romantic affair but then part company...and then she embarks on her own piloting assignment on a ship called The Soul.  I liked the story, but preferred others by this author...

I REMEMBER BABYLON by Arthur C. Clarke
Clarke is best know for his 2001: A Space Odyssey movie that he co-created with Stanley Kubrick in 1967 and later wrote a four-part book series about.  In 1945 he predicted the rise of communications satellites stationed in stationary spots around the Earth...twelve years before Sputnik, the first satellite, was ever launched! I Remember Babylon is a semi-fictional essay in which Clarke encounters a man working for America's adversaries...and their new satellites will broadcast unrestricted pornography and violence into American homes 24/7 (to supposedly weaken the population) interspersed with propaganda while our government will be able to do nothing about it.  In 1991, when the anthology's editors picked this "story" for inclusion, they were glad that Clarke's vision didn't come about. Unfortunately, they were clueless about the soon-to-be advent of the Internet, which produced the exact same effect as warned in this story...

Next week I conclude my look back at the year 1960 in short science fiction...