Here are my reviews of three more stories deemed by editors Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg to be among the best from 1964, as they appeared in their anthology Robert Silverberg Presents The Great SF Stories (1964). Of them I was the most impressed with the relatively short first story below, demonstrating that filling a lot of pages with writing doesn't necessarily mean that the story's better...although in the end the writer probably got paid more. I thought that Silverberg and Greenberg put too many novellas into this book, but technically its title doesn't really say "short stories only"...
THE LAST LONELY MAN by John Brunner
It's off in the future and a "great" discovery has been made: Contact, whereby people can arrange with others...usually close family and friends...to have their mental patterns imprinted upon themselves so that upon someone's death, their minds and identity will immediate flee their own deceased bodies and then inhabit the bodies of whom they have made "Contact" agreements. In the narrative, a man with a lousy personality and no friends and family...hence no Contacts...desperately seeks out the protagonist for one connection to save him after he dies. The whole thing seems like a very scary concept to me...and then I look at how people nowadays appraise themselves and others based on their relative popularity on social media...
SOLDIER, ASK NOT by Gordon R. Dickson
Sometimes an author can get so involved with his or her own fictional "universe", with its various societies, rules and history, that an individual story can suffer without the context of the other stories propping it up. Such is the case, I fear, with this novella that examines how, as humanity explores and settles the cosmos, it might be advisable for the different groups to separate and develop specialization ...and then later work to reintegrate themselves back together. A news reporter is on a distant world where an armed conflict is going on between such groups. Instead of seeing the bigger picture that others see...including the warring sides themselves...he lets his emotions and desire for revenge cloud his judgment. I vaguely felt here that Dickson's idea of manipulating the march of history as a kind of philosophy was a bit derivative of Isaac Asimov's science of psychohistory that was a crucial element of his Foundation series of novels...
A MAN OF THE RENAISSANCE by Wyman Guin
On yet another waterlogged planet with a human population (see The Kragen from a couple of weeks ago), the title character...truly a "man of the renaissance" with his Da Vinci-like talents for art, architecture, invention and understanding of science and history...struggles within the intrigues of a low-tech system of royal principalities as he seeks through a revolt to tie three small islands together to form a more viable political and economic entity. Although the author goes into the protagonist's mind as he works on various scientific and technical problems facing him and explains the nature of the islands in terms of volcanic activity, the genre to me was much more like the fantasy fiction of Robert Jordan or Brandon Sanderson than science fiction. Since I'm currently rereading George R.R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire I could almost imagine this tale, with its very similar sociopolitical structure, on the other side of the planet from Martin's Westeros, a side covered with sea and floating islands. This novella should have been in a "year's best" fantasy fiction anthology instead...
Next week I discuss more science fiction short stories from the year 1964...
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