Here are my reactions to the next five stories appearing in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction for the year 1964, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr...
FOR EVERY ACTION by C.C. MacApp
This is a brief Cold War era story set a couple decades into the future (c. 1987) about Soviet-American competition and distrust, even at the far reaches of our solar system as a Soviet ship encounters a lone American in orbit around Pluto, maintaining his position above that world by shooting stylized arrows while keeping in time by singing a ridiculous tune. His explanation is that his American ship had been hit by strange, aggressive ball bearing pellets that seemed to be sentient and which disabled the ship...and would the Soviets please cautiously come down and rescue them all? The Soviet spacemen think the American is crazy and are suspicious of his story, but their response is only indirectly revealed at the story's humorous conclusion. I thought the angle about the ball bearings to be intriguing, but it was basically a propaganda piece deriding the Soviets' tendency for censorship...
VAMPIRES, INC. by Joseph Nesvadba
A delegate from eastern Europe is attending a conference held in rural England. He suddenly finds himself in possession of a racing-level automobile, and ends up discovering that it runs on his own blood as he presses the gas pedal. This to me read not as much as a science fiction story but rather as one that horror writer Stephen King might have penned. Still, it's in this anthology and I thought it was pretty cleverly written. The English translation I read was probably originally written in the author's native Czech...
THE STAR PARTY by Robert Lory
This brief tale reminded me of a certain Twilight Zone episode...if I tell you which one it'll give the ending away. On decadent Madison Avenue a young career man with his attractive wife attend one of the many annoying parties that ad execs tend to have...he would have avoided it but for one special attendee, a turbaned Asian man who turns out to profess a gift for discerning people's true natures through his own special interpretation of astrology. After introducing his wife to the man, he comes up with some stark statements to the effect that she wasn't who she professed to be. Upon reading this you might think the story is headed in one direction, but instead it shifts sharply in another...like that Twilight Zone episode I was referring to...
THE WEATHER IN THE UNDERWORLD by Colin Free
Off in the distant future the entire planet has undergone a deep freeze under advancing ice only seven years earlier, with only a select few able to descend deep under the frozen surface and survive. Those who were able to make it down below have to regularly plug into memory-erasing-and-identity-creating machines to prevent them from undergoing the extreme trauma and guilt from remembering their aboveground experiences. One man rebels and seeks truth and redemption...but as the ending shows this can be even more traumatic than what led up to it all...
OH, TO BE A BLOBEL! by Philip K. Dick
This is a farcical, humorous tale about humanity's war and rapprochement with the blobels, people-size one-celled, amoeba-like intelligent alien life that has settled among the outer planets in our solar system. George Munster is one of a few heroic human spies who was operated on to assume blobel form in the war...now that it's over he's an outcast, not able to control when he's human and when he slips into being a big blob. He marries a counterpart female blobel who, like himself, assumed the other specie's form during the war...and then they start having kids. It's all utterly absurd, but I'd like to see how this story would be depicted on the screen...
Next week I conclude my look at short science fiction from 1964 as they appeared in Wollheim and Carr's anthology. After that I'll jump back ahead the following week to where I had left off: the year 1968...
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