Weekly Short Stories: 1967 Science Fiction, Part 4

And here we come to my final article reviewing science fiction short stories from 1967 as they appeared in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and examining their selections published the preceding year.  For me, 1967 has to be one of the more interesting years in my recollection of my own life as I experienced it...part of this is probably due to me being ten going on eleven, and part of it pertains to some of the weird stuff going down back then around me...

THUS WE FRUSTRATE CHARLEMAGNE by R.A. Lafferty

Here is another of those (groan) time travel tales where the protagonists keep going back in time to change their own present time.  These experimenters perform the deed, than notice that nothing has changed...but from the reader's perspective everything's different.  They keep repeating the experiment and the outcomes get stranger and more comical while the principals are unaware of any anomalies...I'm glad this story was short or I would have fallen asleep reading it. I read another, earlier story along the same lines and think that Lafferty may have inadvertently ripped it off...

HANDICAP by Larry Niven

This, the most intriguing story of today's four, is set on a remote planet called Down as a maker of specially-designed hand prosthetics for "handicapped" intelligent species (like dolphins) seeks out a special sessile (immobile) creature in the desert.  Called a Grog, it doesn't stir from its spot and on the surface seems unintelligent with withered, vestigial arms ...but our protagonist senses something out of kilter with it and connects it to an older aggressive life form, thought to be extinct and which enslaved vast sections of the galaxy.  The ending is a classic presentation of a dilemma, with the reasoning contained within even suspect...

FULL SUN by Brian W. Aldiss

Way off in the distant future...or is it...man and machine are working together to end the scourge of werewolves around them.  Out in the wilderness of central Europe, Balank tracks down a renegade werewolf with the aid of his computer/machine partner called a "trundler".  He encounters a local resident who questions the harm of this growing offshoot of humanity, and the two examine the news on their wrist-TVs...looks like the machines are engaged in pretty heavy time travel and the ones dominating the world right now are from the distant future.  Eventually Balank begins to put it all together, but it is left to that renegade werewolf to lay it all out for us.  The ultimate question is: who is the real enemy?

IT'S SMART TO HAVE AN ENGLISH ADDRESS by D.G. Compton

In this futuristic story, an elderly concert pianist visits his old associate, a composer...at the latter's English home, naturally.  The composer has availed himself of the latest medical breakthroughs for longevity and rejuvenation, as well as a new technique whereby he can have his own mental activity recorded and sold as "art".  The pianist, having already made his peace with his own aging, lessening capabilities and eventual death, strongly resists his friend's attempts to coax him into joining in fighting the ravages of time.  I had mixed feelings about this story, being 64 myself.  If possible, I'd like to "live long and prosper" as the Vulcans might say and wouldn't oppose medical advances to that intent, but sometimes this new digital technology of ours does seem to permit a degree of "cheating" when it comes to producing things presented as art, especially in the field of music...just saying...

Next week I am going to backtrack three years and begin discussing other science fiction short stories from 1964, using this time around the first anthology from the Wollheim and Carr series that I've been using recently...