Here are my review of the next four tales appearing in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 23 (1961). One's a mystery, one's a satire, one's a "short-short", and one's a love story of sorts: nice mix...
HIDING PLACE by Poul Anderson
In interstellar space, a spaceship owned and staffed by an eccentric wealthy entrepreneur is racing to avoid being nabbed by brutal space pirates. They hone in on an alien ship and occupy it, only to find that all the life forms...including the intelligent beings who run that ship...are in cages as it seems to be a zoo of sorts. The human occupiers desperately need those beings' cooperation to be able to run this ship and escape the pursuing pirates, but how can they distinguish them from the other life forms they are hiding among? It's a mystery worthy of a Sherlock Holmes tale, and Anderson adds color to the story with the characters' salty language and behavior...nothing like mixing metaphors...
WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE? by Isaac Asimov
The story behind this humor piece is that back in '61 Playboy ran an article deriding modern science fiction as being a lot of campy, lurid tales unworthy of readership. Asimov turned the tables on the popular men's magazine with a story involving aliens abducting to their spaceship an unrelated couple standing in the New York subway, trying to coax them into mating...only the aliens are really clueless as to what actually constitutes mating among animals from Earth. Surprisingly, I thought the story was funny, too...
A PRIZE FOR EDIE by J.F. Bone
This was a very short story about someone named "C. Edie" being awarded the Noble Prize after being credited as the responsible party for discovering the cure for cancer. But who is C. Edie...the answer made me groan with dismay, but then I realized that this story came out before all those subsequent others from shows like Twilight Zone, Star Trek and The Prisoner with episodes treating the same subject. Nowadays you read A Prize for Edie and say to yourself "So what?"...
THE SHIP WHO SANG by Anne McCaffrey
This provocative story is a forum on how to treat the severely disabled from birth and offers a science fiction solution: from infancy have them adapted to pilot and run spaceships...from the inside, with their neural networks tied into the ships' systems. Helva was one such child, now grown...deformed beyond any ability to function independently and now only with memories of her altered, destined role. She selects her partner for their ship: a young man who shares her love of music...and the adventures ensue. The dilemma here is that humans like Helva are altered and adapted long before they are of an age to consent or dissent, but waiting that long in her life would be impossible. In today's world of robotics and advanced prosthetics, I wonder whether anyone could have written this story. McCaffrey would expand it into a full novel with the same title, published in 1969...
Next week I continue with this anthology of selected science fiction short stories from 1961...
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