Today I'm continuing my review of 1970 science fiction short stories as they appearing in the book World's Best Science Fiction 1971, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and focusing on what they saw as the elite tales from the previous year. For me 1970 was a seriously challenging year, to put it diplomatically. No, let me put it bluntly: it was categorically the worst year of my life...partially due to the circumstances I was living through (13-14 years old with a specifically hostile academic and social environment) and partially due to my reaction to those circumstances. If you're confronted with difficulties and personal storms, there's nothing worse than the sinking feeling that you are helpless in dealing with them...and that's how I generally felt back then, being expected by many to confront adversity with my hands tied behind my back. But in the tapestry that is my cumulative life with all its experiences and lessons, that troublesome year was instructive and invaluable...in retrospect I feel myself blessed and enriched by having lived through it: after all, everybody's got a "worst year ever" and if '70 was my worst then I must have done pretty well. And now my reviews of three more sci-fi stories from 1970...
WATERCLAP by Isaac Asimov
On Earth of the not-too-distant future (from 1970's perspective) the moon has been settled and people born and raised there...on our overcrowded planet the ocean's deeps are also being explored and settled. Space and the sea bottom are competing for government funding amid a dulled and apathetic population, turned inward on itself...hey, kind of like the way it is nowadays! Sensing that his lunar settlements are being threatened by the promotion of oceanic development, a Lunar man goes deep in a bathyscaphe to visit one of those ocean floor installations, ostensibly as a safety expert but really to sabotage the operations there. This story gives a pretty reasonable picture of what such an undersea settlement might look like and how it would operate. When we finally get to the point where they are built and house populations, I wonder if the scientists and engineers will draw upon Asimov's old tale from over fifty years ago...
CONTINUED ON NEXT ROCK by R.A. Lafferty
The reader needs to take care approaching this story, which is more a cryptic puzzle than an actual flowing narrative. Six people working on a archaeological dig site progressively uncover newer relics on the chimney rock formation...opposite of what should be as lower finds are supposed to be further in the past. They keep digging up inscriptions that use graphically gross and violent language in the context of "love". And the workers themselves are problematic, each one also a puzzle, especially the psychic young woman Magdalen and the mysteriously appearing man Anteros. But the professional archaeologists themselves display peculiar behavior as the dig site seems to be working profound changes on them. I have a problem with stories like this that seem to be deliberately written to confuse me...other readers for some reason think they're the pinnacle of art, though...
THE THING IN THE STONE by Clifford Simak
Following a devastating car accident three years earlier in which a man lost his wife and daughter...and suffered a brain injury...he has been living in isolation on his Wisconsin farm, caring for his livestock and having to deal with a very contemptuous (and contemptible) neighbor to keep him. He has discovered...probably due to that injury...that from time to time he not only can picture the surrounding countryside as it existed eons earlier, but can also listen to the stars. But more than any of this, from a cave embedded within a cliff on his property he can hear the thoughts of a strange intelligent being trapped in the stone hundreds of feet below. Aside from how this all is resolved at the end, my main take from this story by my favorite science fiction writer is the juxtaposition of two clashing philosophies: the contemplative, contented and guileless protagonist and his materialistic, jealous and scheming neighbor. It reminded me of a novel I think I first read back in 1970: James Hilton's Lost Horizon, which presented a similar philosophical contrast between two key characters...
Next week: more from the year 1970 in short science fiction...
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