Here are my reactions to the final four stories in the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 23 (1961). The first story I thought was a great classic, but I wasn't so hot on the final three...I guess it's all a matter of personal taste...
A PLANET NAMED SHAYOL by Cordwainer Smith
Cordwainer Smith was to me the most imaginative sci fi writer when it came to envisioning future space travel and settlement, and his depiction of life on a remote prison planet in A Planet Named Shayol is so vividly bizarre that it steps over the line into the horror genre...but you'll have to read for yourself this remarkable tale of a convict sentenced to serve the remainder of his life there. The imagery is like one of those nightmares that you just want to wake up from...but can't. Cordwainer Smith was the pseudonym for Paul Linebarger (1913-66), a college English professor who preferred a quiet life behind his literary anonymity: his 1955 story The Game of Rat and Dragon is one of my all-time favorites...
RAINBIRD by R.A. Lafferty
Another (groan) time travel story that once again presents the concept of paradox and all the interesting effects that traveling backward in time can have on future events. In this story, it is 1779 and a young man, destined to be a moderately successful tinkerer and inventor of assorted small items, sets out and turns into the world's premier inventor, producing technology far ahead of its time. But when he is old, he decides that he could have taken wiser paths in his younger years that would have advanced his inventions much further...and thus steps into the "retrogressor" (time machine) he has also invented, to counsel his young self into the direction he so clearly sees now. And that's what I managed to get of this tale: no one is completely satisfied with their pasts and many of us, from the advantage of hindsight, see certain pivotal times in our lives that would have changed for the better had we acted differently. But I didn't need another time travel story to tell me what I already knew...
WALL OF CRYSTAL, EYE OF NIGHT by Algis Budrys
In the future, the communications industry is being dominated by advanced subliminal products that detect the viewers' predilections and then manufacture a "reality" that they can experience which meets their expectations. A tycoon finds himself in a desperate race against his main rival to find the ultimate subliminal technology...and goes to Mars where the Martians reputedly have developed one such machine. What's real and what's not get all fuzzy in this story, not one of my favorites...although the anthology's editors had all kinds of wonderful things to say about it. It did give me a creepy feeling, seeing the direction our Internet and social media of today are going with detecting our own interests and then producing content to reflect them...
REMEMBER THE ALAMO! by T.R Fehrenbach
A short alternate-reality story about that famous event, but with the principal players substantially altered. And wouldn't you know it: another dang-blasted time travel story! Still, the author has a lot of fun recasting the roles of William Travis, Jim Bowie, Davey Crockett and Santa Anna as a British "traveler" from the future gets a severe lesson in alternate history at the besieged Alamo...
Next week I start my look at the year 1962 in short science fiction...
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