Today I finish my examination of science fiction short stories as they appeared in Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr's anthology for the year 1964, titled World's Best Science Fiction...minus the three tales I already discussed a few months ago when I reviewed Robert Silverberg's anthology for the same year. It's all been a worthwhile venture and I encourage you to see if you can't get yourself hold of some of these great old collections...Amazon's a good starting point...
THE UNREMEMBERED by Edward Mackin
This is one of two stories I'm looking at today that play around with the reader's sense of reality. It's off in the future and human life can be artificially extended through a drug only available on an extraterrestrial asteroid...and now the supply's dried up. Facing mortality, the 200-year old protagonist sees how his own being will leave the Life Carrier Wave and merge with the universe...one symptom is that he will be completely forgotten by others, even his own wife. Pretty heady stuff...
WHAT HAPPENED TO SERGEANT MASURO? by Harry Mulisch
The author of this macabre story is from the Netherlands, and it shows as a Dutch military expedition in their country's still-held territory of New Guinea drives deep into uncharted territory. One of the group's soldiers rapes a local girl and the consequence, only hinted at, seems to be a curse levied on a different soldier...Sgt. Masuro...with his own past to reconcile. This tale reminded me both of the Twilight Zone episode The Jungle and Stephen King's early novel Thinner, which he first published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman...
NOW IS FOREVER by Thomas M. Disch
This is a clever tale dealing with the social repercussions of a game-changing technological innovation, the Reprostat: a machine that makes exact copies of anything...ANYTHING. The implications of this are made clear at the story's ending, a major mind-blower. It's also a lesson in doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, as a career janitor at a bank finally finds payback with his arrogant, racist banker boss. For me the Reprostat is also analogous to today's game-changer of the Internet and that innovation's darker side...
THE COMPETITORS by Jack B. Lawson
In our future humanity has broken free of the Earth and is settling the cosmos. Only one problem: the robots we invented and developed have turned into competitors and are now independent, crowding us out as we explore means of outdoing them. In this middle of this comes a crisis: a completely different intelligent race, in cooperation with its own machines (as opposed to what humanity has been going through), has suddenly grown hostile to the human presence and has set out to destroy us. A man enlists the aid of a robot to defeat them...what ultimately happens turns the story's premise on its head: those are usually the best ones, aren't they...
Next week I'll jump back ahead to the year 1968 using Wollheim and Carr's anthology series to review more science fiction short stories...
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