Here is another article with me reviewing old science fiction short stories...again from the year 1963...as they appeared in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 25 (1963). I thought each tale I'm discussing below was important in its own right and they're definitely worth the expenditure of reading time...and a little money if you choose to buy the anthology as I did. They all left an impression on me, especially the last one...
This is a short story with a "you reap what you sow" theme I've often seen in many Twilight Zone episodes, which incidentally was in its third and fourth seasons in 1963. In this tale we're off in the future a few years and society has turned into an ugly consumer cesspool of vicarious thrills...the latest craze enables "viewers" to temporarily feel the ongoing pain of real injury victims, with media companies even stooping to the level of paying hospital patients to undergo surgery without anesthesia and transmitting their agony to the hungry masses. I keep thinking of that brilliant 2006 Tool song Vicarious...seems we're well on our way to this disgusting scenario...
TURN OFF THE SKY by Ray Nelson
On our Earth in the distant future they have a one world government as well as a permissive nanny state that provides for people's needs from birth to death...Abelard Rosenberg is an anarchist who walks around in public nearly naked, passing out his political pamphlets to anyone who'll take them. He encounters a young woman, Reva, who takes him across the Atlantic on one of the 1000 mph subterranean trains crisscrossing the oceans to England, where there is actually a live music hall featuring artists performing songs with primitive major and minor scales...the music of their own time has expanded to incorporate hundreds of notes in very complex scale patterns. The story focuses on their relationship and philosophy on life and society...it's very cerebral and worth a read or two...or three...
THEY DON'T MAKE LIFE LIKE THEY USED TO by Alfred Bester
One of my all-time favorite science fiction short stories, a young woman living in a model sailboat house in the middle of New York's Central Park believes she is the last person left alive following a nuclear holocaust...but one day Linda encounters Mayo, a young man who is passing through the empty streets on his way further south. In the midst of this incredibly gloomy and broken environment the two get along and converse in a light, humorous manner, much like how Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart's characters interacted in their movie African Queen as they faced grave danger. In time both Linda and Mayo reveal their personal stories of happenstance survival when the bombing hit...after some misunderstandings are resolved they grow to like each other and bond more deeply, hinting that maybe humanity still has a small chance of continuing on. But there is an undercurrent of something going on around them in the city...including a blue jay's imitation of something metallic and a white, hard gelatinous substance covering a nearby building. The ending is nothing short of terrifying...Stephen King couldn't have done better than Bester with this one. By the way, the story's setting is around the year 1980, which gives a clue as to the apocalyptic nature of many people's thinking back in '63...
Next week I finish my look back at science fiction short stories from the year 1963...
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