Below are my reactions to four more short stories originally published in the year 1966 as they appeared in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1967 with Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr as editors. Usually each week when I do this blog feature I can find at least one of the stories I'm examining to be likeable...unfortunately I couldn't this time around, and to make the matter worse the first three were excessively long. Oh well, you can't win 'em all...
BIRCHER by A.A. Walde
Off sometime in the future when murder is very rare, a regional homicide chief investigator is stumped by an unidentifiable body...clearly the victim of a violent murder...that has been dumped within his district. Since due to the highly advanced forensics and technology it is virtually impossible in his time to find a corpse without any trail of identifiable features, he finds himself in a situation that threatens his own job should he fail to discover the murderer, much less who the victim was. It's a traditional whodunnit murder mystery in science fiction garb...nothing wrong with that, but as a reader I felt cheated by the extraneous "facts" the author provided at the end to explain it all...information that I would have no way of knowing since it was safely tucked away within Walde's fertile imagination...
BEHOLD THE MAN by Michael Moorcock
This story took the overdone sci-fi gimmick of time travel and used it to make a statement about religion. A young amateur psychologist with bigtime neurotic and existential hang-ups finds himself presented with the opportunity to travel back in time by using a crackpot inventor's time machine...he goes back to the Sea of Galilee area around 28 A.D., where he plans to find Jesus and discern some ultimate truths. The story goes back and forth between his experiences in the Holy Land and the events and discussions with others that led to his forsaking of the present. If you're into the psychological theories of Carl Jung, you might get more from this story than I did. I did appreciate that the author demonstrated how certain events can be twisted out of shape and exaggerated over time within popular culture to create myth...the time machine angle was absurd, though, and could only be used one time since any subsequent "trips" would have changed the outcome (although the recent Star Trek movie series seems to have figured a way around that)...
BUMBERBOOM by Avram Davidson
This story, written in a language the author projects far into the future on Earth (and is thus harder to understand), deals with a common theme in science fiction: the regression of humanity from an advanced technological state to a backwards, divided world with more genetically differentiated humanoid groups staking out their own territories and reverting to older social forms and norms. The chief instigator in this change was something called the "Great Gene Shift" and left unexplained. The story's protagonist, Mallian, High Man to the Hereditor of Land Qanaras, is a traveling adventurer who seeks his own power and fortune by manipulating those he encounters. He runs across a huge ancient mobile weapon...perhaps it was a tank...called "Bumberboom" and decides to go about arming it and using it to achieve his ends. The story resembles Don Quixote in its flow and characters, and Mallian even gets a Sancho Panza-like sidekick toward the end. It's farcical and hard to decipher...if you can get through the muddled language it's kind of funny and sad at the same time...
DAY MILLION by Fredrik Pohl
This was a very short, snide little piece appearing at the time in the men's magazine Rogue, so its subject was heavily sexual and concerned the relationship between two humans of the future 10,000 years from now (1966, that is). Pohl does throw in some intriguing ideas about the redesigning of people...on both genetic and cybernetic levels...to achieve longer and more active lives and specialized abilities to adapt to certain environments. But the general aim of Day Million was to titillate the reader, which apparently worked well enough for anthology editors Wollheim and Carr to select it: I wouldn't have...
Next week I continue looking back at short science fiction from the year 1966...
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