If 1968 was a tough year for me growing up, 1969 was even tougher...I was going through all the trauma and turmoil of early adolescence, twelve going on thirteen, and both my peers and the authority figures around me let me down pretty badly...I'll just let that go for now. In science fiction, though, the short stories were good, and today I'm reviewing the first three from the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1970, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, and covering the previous year's output. Actually, that third story below is a novella, which accounts for the fact that I'm only reviewing three. Here they are...
A MAN SPEKITH by Richard Wilson
A moderately successful disc jockey gets hired by a company with space connections and finds himself alone in orbit on a spacecraft with an advanced computer for company when the Earth simply rips itself apart one day, killing everybody...except our hero. He continues along, putting out an audio journal describing his ongoing feelings and memories of his former life and doomed planet. Meanwhile the computer has its own narrative going on as it describes some facets of the circumstances unavailable to the isolated DJ, who is unaware of its existence. The story's resolution is one of the best I've read in a while...
AFTER THE MYTHS WENT HOME by Robert Silverberg
Around the year 12,240 the highly technologically advanced humans on Earth have discovered ways to call up famous figures from the past, but eventually they get tired of listening to Churchill and Einstein and they devise a way to call up all the old gods. If the god in question has his or her roots in a real person, then they will cast a certain aura about them...surprisingly all of them do, but the jaded people of our future, full of their own self-sufficiency and luxury, grow bored of them as well and send them all back after only about fifty years. Not wise, considering what happens next...
DEATH BY ECSTASY by Larry Niven
In this novella Niven saw ahead to the time when organ transplants would be commonplace, extending people's lives and paradoxically causing life to be valued less since people's healthy bodies had become economic commodities...organized crime gets in on the act and people are kidnapped in order for their organs to be harvested. An investigator, formerly a miner in the Asteroid Belt, finds that one of his old buddies has died on Earth of an apparent suicide due to current addiction. Knowing that his old friend would never do such a thing, he undercovers a major scam. Current addiction is something the author brings up in his 1979 novel The Ringworld Engineers, and he imbues the protagonist and his helper with specific psychic abilities, crucial to the story's outcome. I enjoyed Niven's story here more than his longer works...
Next week I continue my look at short science fiction from 1969...
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