Below are my reactions to the final three stories appearing in the retrospective anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1970, containing selections by editors Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr of what they deemed the best from 1969. That year saw me become something of a spectator sports fanatic as I followed local teams the Miami Floridians (the American Basketball Association) and the Miami Dolphins (American Football League), along with pretty much the entire 1969 Major League Baseball schedule. I followed most of the games on the radio...even with the Dolphins their home games were blacked out on TV. I got to know the '69 Chicago White Sox pretty well since the local station, WKAT, broadcast their games. That was a tough time in my life as I was an awkward, messed up young adolescent, and since then I've grown to appreciate how sports can help to get people away from dwelling on themselves: it was difficult, I'm sure, for a lot of folks last spring when the pandemic abruptly shut everything down. But I digress: here's my take on those last three stories...
SHIP OF SHADOWS by Fritz Leiber
This novella examines...from the viewpoint of one of its residents...a large spaceship that has been out there so long that its origins are lost to those dwelling within it. Spar, a seemingly elderly man who has lost much of his vision as well as his teeth, works at the ship's Bat Rack, its version of a bar, while a talking cat (Kim) has adopted him and dispenses its own very blunt criticisms. Talking animals, vampires, zombies, space travel, apocalypse...it's all here for you the reader to decipher (if you can) as much of the story's mystery is in figuring what the heck's going on here. But don't worry, it all explains itself in the end, which didn't make me feel much better about the general state of things...especially that dismal view of the ugly big orange round thing outside the ship's window. I thought Leiber did a great job here of describing how people might adapt over time to a zero-gravity environment...
NINE LIVES by Ursula K. LeGuin
Libra is a distant planet suitable for little else besides mining, especially for the much needed large amounts of uranium this seismically-active world has in abundance. Two advance engineers, Pugh and Martin, have been there on assignment for some time and have discovered the ore and laid the foundations for the development party to extract it...their isolation, though, has left them lonely and testy. But this incoming crew, which turns out to be a ten-person clone of a renowned, deceased engineer, makes matters worse as they are all into each other (on a number of levels) and demonstrate little desire for any meaningful interaction with the "old hands". But one day while the clones are all down there with the uranium a severe earthquake happens and the demographic equation drastically changes...
THE BIG FLASH by Norman Spinrad
Reading this story you might think "This could never happen", but since it is all about mass hypnosis with people voluntarily submitting themselves to mind control, sadly something similar is going on today with the manipulation of whole segments of our population by media, both of the mass and social varieties. Set ostensibly in the "present" time period around 1969, the U.S. government is considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons to decisively beat back the enemy in southeast Asia...but the president is aware that the general population strongly opposes such a strategy. Meanwhile, a new rock band,, aptly named The Four Horsemen, with an apocalyptic message and show, is storming the country and becoming wildly popular. After noting that their use of atom bomb explosion graphics in their concerts is swaying the public's opinion in favor of atomic warfare, the president decides to stage one of their concerts in a desert where he will set off a nuclear bomb, hoping to tip the tide of public opinion behind his proposed SE Asia policy. But the plot gets out of hand because of that mass hypnosis...you can manipulate a mob to a certain point beyond which you lose control over it, a lesson for our times as well...
Next week I begin looking at the year 1970 in short science fiction...
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