Recently, each Wednesday on this blog from September 30th through October 28th, I examined the "year's best" in short science fiction from the vantage point of editors Robert Silverberg and Martin Greenberg in their 2001 anthology Robert Silverberg Presents the Great SF Stories: 1964. However, there was already another "year's best" anthology series that had begun with coverage of short science fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and which I'll be using while covering the years through 1989. It came out in 1965 with its own selection of 64's top tales...all but three differed from Silverberg and Greenberg's picks 36 years later. The Silverberg book promised to continue its year-by-year series but the first anthology turned out to be the final one. So we're now left with two fine sci-fi short story anthologies for the year 1964: the following are my reactions to the first five stories included in the Wollheim anthology but missing from Silverberg's...
GREENPLACE by Tom Purdon
It's some time into the future and politics is as corrupt as ever...only with virtual immortality having been achieved, those in power tend to stay there endlessly. With mind control methods perfected to manipulate the population, a "survey" taker for an opposition candidate enters a hostile suberban neighborhood to size up the people's attitudes. Maybe from Silverberg's 2001 perspective this story didn't qualify for his anthology, but an editor from 2020 would surely see the application to today's crazy world of political spin in both social and broadcast media...
MEN OF GOOD WILL by Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis
This very brief tale extends the rivalry between Russia and the U.S. to the moon's surface, where the two opposing camps have their stations built within eyesight of one another. A visiting UN ambassador is marveling to the American base commander about how only on the moon is there peace between the two sides...and suddenly everyone has to duck as the bullets suddenly starting flying in. The explanation is brilliant and unexpected...
BILL FOR DELIVERY by Christopher Anvil
It's a rough business out in open space as an interstellar shipper has his hands full of difficult assignments from his overly demanding, hypercritical boss. This very funny story has the crew forced to transport 50 huge, cantankerous and dangerous birdlike creatures across vast space, with ridiculous instructions on handling them...
A NICHE IN TIME by William F. Temple
It is some time off into the future and backward time travel is feasible...not a good sign for a sci-fi story's premise, may I say. Everard is from that future, a Visitor whose job involves going back in time to pivotal moments in different famous figures' lives...like Van Gogh, Shakespeare, and Bizet...and influence them just enough to get them over their troubles on their respective roads to greatness. The contradictions implicit in this notion bring out the whole ludicrousness of the author's proposition...ultimately, Everard finds himself in need of a Visitor to assuage his own discouragement...what he chooses to do with it affirms my own stance against such tampering with time...
SEA WRACK by Edward Jesby
In the future a new amphibious subspecies of humanity has been developed...and, naturally, due to economic conflicts between those on land on those in the sea, a spirit of prejudice and animosity has arisen between the two groups. When one of the sea people finds himself washed ashore and a decadent rich young woman plays him off against her land-bound boyfriend, the conflict becomes angry and physical...and the surrounding people sound off against the "intruder". Another sci-fi tale about how humans could be physically altered to live underwater, as well as a sobering exposition of the inevitability of hostility whenever two groups with conflicting interests encounter one another...
Next week: more reviews of 1964 science fiction stories from Wollheim and Carr's anthology...
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