Today I conclude my look back at the year of 1966 in science fiction short stories with the final entries in the retrospective anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1967...edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr. While these stories were first appearing in various magazines I was nine years old...going on ten...living in Hollywood, Florida with my parents and sister and attending Nova Blanche Forman Elementary School in Davie, going from the fourth grade there into the fifth. In February we were blessed with a spunky little cockapoo puppy, which we named Michelle after the ongoing hit Beatles song...she would be with the family for fifteen wonderful years. Lyndon Johnson was riding high in the presidency and seemed hellbent on getting the country inextricably drawn into an endless war of attrition in Vietnam with the military draft going on strong, sending non-volunteers into enemy-held territory to draw out their fire: what a cynical strategy. I remember earlier that year a "patriotism" class at Nova in which the idea of how noble it is to die for one's country was promoted...the librarian's son was in 'Nam at the time and she put in her two cents worth for the war. All I could think, at age nine, was is this what's in store for me in my life? Well, here are my reactions to those four stories from the book...
THE WINGS OF A BAT by Paul Ash
Industrial mining meets time travel technology as such a firm finds itself doing just that, back in the Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs roamed and pterodons...winged dinosaurs...flew. The physician on duty finds himself the nanny of a baby version of such a creature...wing spans up to twenty feet when grown. It's a bit comical how the doc, who's telling the story, reluctantly puts up with the antics of this creature. Fiona, she's called, grows up and eventually gets her flying instincts and skills going and flies away, never expected to return to the camp. Yet you know that somehow in the end it's all going to come back as a terrible storm is brewing and our physician hero is caught in the middle of it all. Although it was (ugh) a time travel story, this one was set completely in the past so they didn't pull out all those annoying paradoxes that they do in other such tales. Also, I thought it was kind of sweet...
THE MAN FROM WHEN by Dannie Plachta
Speaking of annoying time travel stories, the only redeeming thing about this one is that it was very, very, short, taking up just a couple of pages. Out in the country somewhere a man contemplates the scenery while about to mix his favorite drink. Suddenly, just a few hundred yards away there's a big explosion...and a stranger emerges from the surrounding mist and approaches him: naturally he's from the future, performing a time travel experiment. What he tells the dude standing there reveals what we sometimes think about doomsday predictions of our future: if they're far off ahead of us then we tend to shrug them off...otherwise...
AMEN AND OUT by Brian Aldiss
In a future Earth when a select few, through special injections, have become immortal and computers and machinery pretty much run people's lives with each person carrying around with them a computer-run shrine to pray to, one indigent outcast has a bold plan to rock the boat as he tries to convince one of the immortals to be the first one ever to leave their place of confinement for centuries. This story delves into topics like how much people increasingly depend on their machines...and the reference to the shrines made me grin, thinking how much folks nowadays revere the smartphones they absolutely must have in their possession 24/7 and how much meaning they derive from them. Also, it's a bit philosophical about the implications of immortality and how such people might see things differently from us mortals. The story's final line is a classic...
FOR A BREATH I TARRY by Roger Zelazny
Many thousands of years into the future there is no more human life on Earth, but the machines they built continue "living" on and have created new machines that serve them. Originally there were two main machines, Solcom as a satellite orbiting Earth, and Divcom, deep underneath the surface, who are now vying for machine supremacy and trying to convert the planet's smaller machines to their respective sides. On the North Pole dwells the huge, cubical machine Frost who, besides his assigned duties on behalf of Solcom, has an interesting hobby: the study of Man through his relics, books, and movies. It is this quest to understand what humanity was all about and how they differed from machines that drives the flow of this interesting story. Frost's fascination with humanity leads him to a wager of sorts with the other machines, leading to a most intriguing ending...
Next week I begin my look at science fiction short stories from 1967...
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