Weekly Short Stories: 1969 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reactions to four more short stories from the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1970, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and covering the previous year's selections.  As I mention below, 1969 was the year that man first landed on the moon...by the time of the Apollo 12 landing later that year the American public was already becoming jaded over it all: President Nixon would end up "nixing" the final planned Apollo missions after Apollo 17 in 1972, and of course we've never been back.  As for me, I continued my anxiety-ridden young teen life and actually enjoyed a brief period in early fall of '69 at the start of the eighth grade when I was a very diligent and productive student...an experience inspiring me to this day...

ONE SUNDAY IN NEPTUNE by Alexei Panshin

This reminds me of Robert Heinlein's stories about space exploration with an upbeat, "can-do" theme about humankind's progress and intrepidness.  Stationed on Neptune's moon Triton, a couple of spacemen get the idea to explore the "surface" of Neptune for signs of life: the real goal is to gain some permanent mention in the annals of space exploration.  They do, but for a reason they hadn't expected.  This story anticipated the boredom that the general public would feel about space ventures...and it came out the year that man first landed on the moon...

FOR THE SAKE OF GRACE by Suzette Haden Elgin

In a sci-fi universe with human civilizations sprouting up independently on different worlds in different star systems, one such society is critically examined for its overbearingly discriminatory rules against women and their roles in it.  I couldn't help coming out of the reading feeling that the author was targeting Middle Eastern traditions here, since the characters' names had an Arabic bent to them.  A father has to return to his home planet to chastise his wife for her public "misbehavior", but finds himself distraught when his own daughter enters the esteemed Poet examinations: failure in this for a woman results in solitary confinement for the rest of her life...

YOUR HAPLOID HEART by James Tiptree, Jr.

There are certain species of animals on Earth...jellyfish is an example...that alternate generations between reproducing asexually and sexually...this story examines a humanoid society on a distant planet that functions similarly.  The only problem is they're eager to be classified by the visiting human galactic federation scientists as also "human" but they don't seem to meet the criteria because of their reproduction methods.  One group, the Esthaans, are the generation reproducing by budding, producing little baby Flenni, who reproduce as we humans do...their "babies" are little Esthaans.  But the Esthaans have created an extreme taboo about the process, not recognize their Flenni counterparts as an essential part of their own species and instead seek to wipe them out.  The federation team of Pax and the narrator Ian have to figure it all out and save the day...

THERAPY 2000 by Keith Roberts

Travers, living in the nightmarish year of 2000 with its extreme congestion and noise, resorts to extreme measures to stuff his ears and give himself relief from the nonstop assault on his hearing.  Only during the wee hours of the morning do things ever quiet down, and it is during this time that he mentally drifts into an idyllic relationship with a woman, Deidre, who comforts him...usually in a beach setting totally alien to his crowded, high-decibel New York life.  "Noise, noise, noise"...reminds me of an old Twilight Zone episode, The Mind and the Matter, starring comedian Shelly Berman whose character Archibald Beechcraft lives and works under similar circumstances and is totally fed up with all the "people, people, people" around him...he finds a mental way to help himself as well.  For myself, I have always been sensitive to loud crowds, a few years ago taking to wearing disposable ear plugs in such settings...the problem has thankfully alleviated somewhat.  Here's another tale of the "future" that is receding into our past...

Next week I continue looking back at the year 1969 in short science fiction...