Today I begin reviewing science fiction short stories from the year 1965 as they appear in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1966, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and presenting their selections from the previous year. For me, still living in the Boulevard Heights subdivision of West Hollywood, Florida...which that year would be annexed into the city of Hollywood...1965 marked my transition from the third grade at Boulevard Heights Elementary School (two easy blocks from my home) to the fourth at Nova Blanche Forman Elementary, five miles away and requiring daily bus trips...this brought a group of unforgettable kids into my life like Martin, Mike, Jim and Greg. In 1965 President Johnson would often interrupt regular TV prime time shows to give nationwide addresses, usually beginning with "My fellow Americans" in his thick Texan drawl while discussing various issues, among them his decision to escalate fighting in Vietnam, and I was totally into listening to the pop/rock music being played, via my trusty little transistor radio, on 560/WQAM "Tiger Radio". My favorite TV show by far this year was The Man from U.N.C.L.E....I had each episode's title memorized. Pet-wise, Tiger the cat reigned supreme at our home. But enough of the memories, here are my reactions to the book's first four tales...
SUNJAMMER by Arthur C. Clarke
Imagine a yachting regatta with majestic boats out on the open sea racing for bragging rights and the prize purse...now picture it in space and the boats are ships with wide, ultra-thin metallic sails to capture the radiation emitted from the sun (aka solar wind) to power them onward and you have the premise for this thoughtful story about one such event. Seven ships, each designed differently and from a different country, vie to be the first to pass the moon as they leave Earth's orbit. This story's a great lesson in science as Clarke teaches the reader a lot about what goes on inside the sun and how its radiation bursts can pose a threat to space travelers, as well as how physics would dictate the motions of such "sailing" ships in space...
CALLING DR. CLOCKWORK by Ron Goulart
This story is a brutal indictment of socialized medicine as society in the future is divided between private health and that provided for "free"...the Urban Free Hospitals are dilapidated, neglected and use run-down robots as physicians. Arnold Vesper, his own medical care supposedly assured with private insurance, is visiting an ailing friend of his father's in one of those "hospitals" and gets himself inextricably sucked into the system. It's all exaggerated satire that makes the author's point much too vividly, although I strongly believe that providing affordable health care to all is an integral part of what any civilized society should strive for...
BECALMED IN HELL by Larry Niven
Howard...this story's narrator...and Eric are the two crewman on a scientific mission with their spaceship deep into hot, poisonous Venus' atmosphere...the extremely dangerous conditions leave little room on their mission for technical problems, but of course one is detected...and the two have difficulty finding the source of the breakdown as time is running out on them. Not only was the unique working relationship between the two intriguing to me, but this might be the earliest science fiction I've read about Venus that described our "sister" planet in realistic terms instead of as the commonly-depicted fantasy world with treacherous oceans and steamy jungles teeming with lots of scary creatures...
APARTNESS by Vernor Vinge
In Vinge's post-apocalyptic depiction of future Earth following a nuclear holocaust that virtually wiped out life in the Northern Hemisphere, it is left to the remaining southern nations to pick up the pieces and go on. An Australian anthropologist is on an Argentine ship...Buenos Aires is now the great world power...as it explores a section off the Antarctic coastland in search of a lost floating island that the Argentine ruler's astrologers predict will bring great joy and wealth to the regime. Knowing that this is all nonsense, the anthropologist has his own agenda, revealed with the discovery of a heretofore unknown settlement of humans on Antarctica. What follows bears out the story's title and steers it into an ingeniously different direction: brilliant and ahead of its time...
Next week: more sci-fi short fiction from 1965 reviewed...
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