Weekly Short Stories: 1964 Science Fiction, Part 1

After finishing the 25-volume yearly "year's best" series covering science fiction short stories from 1939 through 1963, I'm now reviewing the anthology Robert Silverberg Presents the Great SF Stories (1964), in which the editor, a noted science fiction writer himself, along with Martin H. Greenberg from the previous series, selected in the year 2001 what they deemed to be the best stories from '64.  For the years 1965 through 1989, which I plan to review in the future, I'll be using a different anthology series.  For me in 1964 I was seven going on eight and living with my family in West Hollywood, Florida, starting the year off in the second grade at Boulevard Heights Elementary School and finishing it there in the third.  I remember being big on star-gazing, following the Beatles and rock n' roll on the radio, new TV series like The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Bewitched, My Favorite Martian...and that great sci-fi series The Outer Limits.  We were a "cat" family at the time with such beasts as Tiger, Panther, and Smoky...the first was with us into 1966, the second was so disruptive that we had to return him to the humane society, and giant, semi-feral Smoky one day just up and left us, as sometimes is the case with cats. Oh, and I was definitely getting into reading back then, too.  Here are my reactions to the first three tales in the book...

OUTWARD BOUND by Norman Spinrad

Humanity has developed interstellar travel but cannot transcend the speed of light...hence many years, even centuries, pass by as travel and settlement of the nearest star system progress slowly.  The Earth authorities have come to realize, though, that this situation works in their favor as the new settlements are forced into dependency relationships with the home planet.  An interstellar trader takes on his ship a fugitive theoretical scientist who may have discovered a means to exceed the speed of light and the race is on to capture him before he can forever change the destiny of manned space exploration.  The main message is that scientific innovation often finds itself as an act of rebellion, intentional or not...

THE KRAGEN by Jack Vance

More a novella than a short story, Vance expanded The Kragen later on into a novel titled Blue Planet...I found this shorter version long enough, although I liked it.  The setting is a planet completely covered with water and rich with life...including large predatory beasts called kragens.  A penal ship loaded with convicts is traveling through space...the inmates take over the ship and they end up castaways here.  They develop a strict caste system and learn to make a sort of devil's pact arrangement with the largest kragen, whom they call King Kragen.  It's now 300 years and several generations since they landed and one of the people, protagonist Sklar Hast, has had enough of appeasing the wildlife and begins a revolt against the established authority.  As with the preceding story in this anthology, The Kragen makes the point that science and discovery can be revolutionary acts, seen as dangerous to the authorities at the time but ultimately transformative and paradigm-shifting in an empowering way for the general good...

THE MASTER KEY by Poul Anderson

The clever interstellar space merchant Nicholas van Rijn, a recurring character in Poul Anderson stories, hears an account of the leaders of a party that landed on an unexplored planet to establish trade relations with the intelligent humanoids living there. The focus is the incident whereby the natives, after having gotten along well for some time with the traders, suddenly turn on them and violently attack them.  Why this happened is the big mystery, with the expedition's two leaders offering their own theories at the end.  But discerning van Rijn has figured it all out and it comes down to the essential difference between the wild and the domesticated...or in the case of humans, the civilized...and how they go about dealing with obeying authority.  I enjoyed the story and felt I learned a little on the side about human nature...

Next week: more science fiction short stories reviewed from 1964...