During this problematic year of 1968, during which the following five stories I'm reviewing below from the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1969 were first published, I developed the hobby of DXing, in which I pulled in distant stations on my cheap Juliette-model table radio. Listening for hours to frequencies full of static and competing stations were a regular part of my 11-12 year old nights...probably didn't help me the next day at school as I often underslept (and missed homework assignments): oh well, the foolishness of youth. Now, from my convenient vantage point in 2021 I see the quality of fiction going on in this period and I wish in hindsight that reading would instead have taken a stronger hold on me back then...
THIS GRAND CARCASS by R.A. Lafferty
I've seen this kind of premise for a story before: at the beginning a weary individual unloads what looks like a tremendous bargain to somebody they he may possibly bear a grudge against. Then as the narrative progresses it becomes clear that the item in question is more of a curse than a blessing. In This Grand Carcass it's a special machine that thoroughly manages its owner's finances and other machines, and it performs this task so admirably that it looks like he is soon the richest and most powerful man in the solar system. Only one problem: the owner is getting sick and very weak: what's causing that? The ending points to another type of story...
A VISIT TO CLEVELAND GENERAL by Sydney Van Scyoc
Possibly the most cynical story I've ever read about chaos, corruption and cover-up in the hospital system, a reporter in the future...continually reminded to take his "memory" pills after recovering from a traumatic, near-fatal accident, fills in for the title hospital's regular beat reporter, himself recovering from a health setback. If you've ever seen the movie Coma, then you pretty much have a sense as to where this story is going. It's an exposé on how an institution, with the means to effectively cover up its mistakes and excesses, can turn on the very society and people it is meant to serve. Scary...
THE SELCHEY KIDS by Laurence Yep
Sometime apocalypse scenarios aren't planetwide...sometimes they only hit a locality, as in this tale of the future when western California one day suddenly slides into the Pacific Ocean, taking the family of the protagonist, a young man associated with a marine research organization. After a period of grief he returns to the area and goes back to work for the marine scientist from his past...along with a pretty telepathic girl and two dolphins: to their boss Professor Selchey they are all the "Selchey Kids". One day he gets a special assignment: go with his crew to the now-submerged Institute where in a watertight vault lies his late father's papers on important research: what he discovers opens his eyes much more than he would have liked about his own origins...
THE DANCE OF THE CHANGER AND THE THREE by Terry Carr
This story discusses the possibility of intelligent life whose forms are so physically and chemically different from our own that their very values concerning life and communications with others becomes suspect. Sentient, essentially immortal colorful energy wave forms thrive on a far distant planet much too hostile for human habitation. But a certain resource is discovered for mining there, and Earth sends a party to establish a mine and relations with this resident life. The story's title refers to that alien society's tradition going back eons where a "dance" between a "suicidal" entity and its three "friends" takes on a significance incomprehensible to human minds. And then the values of this society become tragically known to the mining colony...
SWORD GAME by H.H. Hollis
If you like mathematics, particularly the subject of topology, this brief tale is for you. A burned out math professor is about to resign in frustration, and then notices a bohemian young female student with whom he starts up a relationship. They start their own traveling magic sword show, based on a tesseract, a cube with a cube on each face, that plays around with time. It's a circular story that paradoxically ends at the end of the universe due to the intervention of another topological device, a mobius strip. Pretty intriguing, but I'm glad the callous professor gets his comeuppance even if he does outlive everybody...and I mean everybody...
Next week I conclude my look back at the year 1968 in short science fiction...
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