Today I begin looking back at the year 1966 with sci-fi short short stories using the retrospective anthology World's Best Science Fiction: 1967, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr...the title year refers to its time of publication, not the stories contain therein. The first three stories I discuss below contain their own feasible innovations...implanted memories, time-capturing glass, genetically altered human forms to live on other planets...while the final one has a more philosophical (and humorous) bent to it. Here they are...
WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE by Philip K. Dick
The is the Philip K. Dick tale on which the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall was based...which just a few years ago was remade with a different cast (with much worse reviews). The themes are similar, with a man on Earth doing menial work in the not-so-distant future while dreaming of having an adventurous life on Mars after it has just begun to be explored and settled. There's a company that creates and implants intricate memories into its clients, and Douglas Quail goes there...with the discovery soon made that he's actually been to Mars. From here on the written story diverges quite a bit from the movie and, in my opinion, has a more interesting, twisted ending...but you'll have to read it for yourself to discover what it is...
LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS by Bob Shaw
In this story Bob Shaw introduces his innovation of "slow glass", through which light takes years to pass ...and therefore provides a window into the past, capturing ongoing images of wherever it faced the measured number of years before. An unhappily married, quarreling couple is driving through the countryside, where rows and rows of slow glass are up for sale. The man stops where the owner is sitting to see about buying some of the glass and happens to see a young woman and her child looking out the nearby home's window without seeming to take any notice of them. This tale has an amazing ending and puts life's petty squabbles and resentments into perspective...
THE KEYS TO DECEMBER by Roger Zelazny
In a relatively distant future when humanity has explored and settled deep into the cosmos, biological science has naturally leaped ahead and genetically-designed humanoid varieties, suited for more extreme conditions on specified worlds, are being born to "normal" parents. Jarry is such a "person", a Catform Coldworlder meant to live on a very cold planet with mining interests, but before he can be sent there its star turns supernova and he is stuck in cold hibernation until another home planet can be found. Finally another is discovered, but it must be environmentally modified over the course of some thousands of years while Jarry and the other Catforms living there spend most of their time in suspended animation, coming out briefly every 200 years or so to make sure the process is running well. Only one problem: the native life forms on this world are struggling to varying degrees to adapt to the much colder conditions and Jarry sees that one species is much more intelligent than the prospectors had thought. I wonder whether this might be one of the more realistic scenarios for future space exploration and settlement...
NINE HUNDRED GRANDMOTHERS by R.A. Lafferty
On the asteroid Proavitus dwell a population claiming never to die. A trading company, with its employees taking on menacing names like Manbreaker Crag and Blast Berg, lands to transact business there. One of its members, a young man named Ceran who has foresworn the toughguy nicknames of his fellow workers, decides to investigate the source of the native folk's immortality, leading on a quest deeper and deeper under the surface as he peels back generation after generation, talking to the sleepy ancestors. The ending of this very short story is funny...and hints that the secret to never-ending physical life may be a lot simpler...and less important...than one might think...
Next week I'll be continuing my review of short science fiction from 1966...
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