When the retrospective anthology I'm referring to here with my review of science fiction short stories from 1962 was first published in January 1992, co-editor Isaac Asimov was already seriously ill with kidney failure...he would die from it three months later. So only Martin Greenberg is present in this volume...along with the final one covering 1963...with his commentary alone preceding each entry...so sad. As for my own life in 1962, I was five going on six...which meant that I began the first grade in September of that year at Boulevard Heights Elementary School in West Hollywood, Florida. Only a month later they marched us into the inner hallway and had the class line up and kneel down against the wall, our hands tucked over our lowered heads: it was a civil defense drill during the scary Cuban Missile Crisis...but I was unaware of this at the time and just thought of it as a weird fire drill...
THE INSANE ONES by J.G. Ballard
It's a crazy future scenario here with psychiatry as a profession banned world-wide to accommodate a sweeping political movement to remove insanity as a possible criminal defense. One psychiatrist, recently released from his own three-year imprisonment for such an illegal practice, finds himself pressured to treat an obviously disturbed young man who is determined to commit a dangerously violent act. This story puts forth the suggestion that what is ultimately a sane or insane act is largely determined by the context in which it takes place...sometimes it's the surrounding society that has lost its sensibilities...
CHRISTMAS TREASON by James White
A network of psychically-connected, precocious little children across the world are concerned about whether Santa Claus will be able to deliver his toys this season...they project themselves out in a search for his headquarters, settling on what turns out to be a nuclear missile installation. High jinks abound as military guards keep encountering little kids in pajamas...a funny, seasonal tale with a hopeful ending...
SEVEN-DAY TERROR by R.A. Lafferty
Another tale about precocious children, as a little boy in a small town has built a "disappearer" out of spare parts he's found lying around and tries out his invention on the neighborhood...and its occupants...with disastrous results. His big sister knows what's going on and offers her solution to the problem. The final sentence thoroughly cracked me up in this short, short story...
KINGS WHO DIE by Poul Anderson
This is a story examining the possibilities of the human body becoming fused with high technology with a space war between the two Earthly superpowers providing the setting. Here are warriors with bombs surgically planted in their bodies while the other side has discovered that the human mind can be fused with computers to provide a very effective operating system. Anderson showed quite a bit of prescience here while at the same time writing a Cold War story with the antagonists extending their respective opposing ideologies far into the future...in his scenario the war on ground level is still "cold" while what was proxy warfare in 1962 among smaller nations on Earth has now been transformed into space battles. I wonder if that's where we're heading with our respective "space forces"...
THE MAN WHO MADE FRIENDS WITH ELECTRICITY by Fritz Leiber
A man deliberately moves to a home with a noisy, crackling high-tension electrical tower nearby. He claims to be able to hear the electricity speaking to him, and it can apparently understand his words as well. And, it seems, the network of electricity that now spans the globe has come to its own conclusions regarding the way things should be. A forerunner of the genre of science fiction that would give us movie series like Matrix and Terminator...
Next I continue my look back at science fiction short stories from the year 1962 as they appeared in Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 24 (1962)...
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