Here are my reviews of three more science fiction short stories from 1961, as they appeared in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 23 (1961). They were all pretty thought-provoking, although I wasn't too keen on the first one below. But I still think even that one is pretty good reading...I'd welcome your reaction should you decide to tackle it...
DEATH AND THE SENATOR by Arthur C. Clarke
I remember reading this story fifteen years ago while with my son Will, waiting at the Orlando International Airport for the return of Melissa and my daughter Rebecca from her school trip to Washington, DC...after a second run-through I still disagree with the author's conclusions. A powerful politician has neglected his family over the years in favor of ambition, but now discovers he has a terminal heart condition. But relief is offered from a source he had campaigned as a senator to cut from funding: an orbiting zero-gravity station shown to be therapeutic and run by the Soviets. The ending, to which I strongly objected, implied that one's patterns of behavior are so strong in their lives that it would be preferable to just go ahead and die, since it would be fruitless to actually try to change...
THE QUAKER CANNON by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth
In a war implicitly between the West and the Russians (called "yutes") taking place way off into the future, in the 1980s that is, an American officer, who had been earlier captured, subjected to torture and interrogation...and subsequently talked, is given another chance as the personal aide to the general responsible for the upcoming major attack against the enemy. He is informed of a major ruse in their strategy: like Patton's phony army in World War II, another fake force is being assembled to make the yutes mobilize against them instead of the true invasion group. How this story ends is pretty brilliant...
THE MOON MOTH by Jack Vance
Vance posits the argument that when a society becomes self-sufficient and comfortable, then it will retreat into an intricate system of rituals and rules, stratifying everyone's role within it while being sharply opposed to anything innovative or different. As a consular representative of the "federation" to such a world, the protagonist finds himself caught up in a web of "musts" and taboos, having to wear a mask...not any mask, but the exact, appropriate one...while speaking to others in a completely roundabout manner to the accompaniment of any of a number of specifically-applicable native musical instruments. He is suddenly given an assignment to catch a dangerous assassin who had just landed there...and tries to plow through the entrenched, extremely individualistic social system to stop his foe. A very satisfactory ending with all the story's pieces falling together nicely. By the way, I'm starting to notice our own masks of today's coronavirus world becoming more stylized to reflect their wearers' sense of identity: watch out...
Next week I conclude my look back at the year 1961 in short science fiction...
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