Here are my reviews of four more science fiction stories from 1971, as they appeared in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, with the editors' selections from the previous year. As a teenage kid that year, I was into music a lot and tended in the evenings to be a couch potato in front of the boob tube. All in the Family had its breakthrough debut season in '71 while shows like Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett gave CBS dominance...at least in my household. In the summer, Apollo 15 landed on the moon: one of the astronauts was James Irwin...another Irwin, Hale, that November would win his first professional golf tournament of many. I say this because people who ask my name often seem flummoxed when I say "Irwin", sometimes unable to spell it properly...but I bet no one with their last name ever stood on the moon (or won three U.S Opens). But you came here to read my reviews, so here they are...
A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE by Poul Anderson
Three despicable human interstellar criminals have hatched a scheme to hijack a peaceful species' primitive spacecraft (while kidnapping one of them to pilot it) in order to sell the technology to barbarian warlords...but the harmless-seeming Witweet has figured out something about the nearby outlying planet Paradox and lures his onboard captors into landing there to salvage abandoned human technology. But there's something about the prevalence of helium on that planet's breathable atmosphere that gives Witweet an avenue of escape. Anderson was a "hard" science fiction writer who liked to inject science principles into his stories...here is a prime example...
REAL-TIME WORLD by Christopher Priest
This is one of those stories that call into question one's true, real status, both in terms of work assignments and actual physical location. Way off in the future again...the year 2019 to be exact...a special observatory has been constructed on a distant planet whereby the human scientists can observe its life undetected...through the convenient expedient of being a tiny fraction of a second in the past. The man assigned to collect the reports and communicate back and forth to Earth is the narrator...and he knows that the mission has an entirely separate aspect to it: to study how the crew reacts as each one is separately provided skewed, personally relevant news sheets from Earth. I happen to watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy regularly when possible...and for some reason my "SmartNews" computer news feed always seems to have something about the latest episodes: pretty creepy, I'll say, and implying that they're sneakily getting some unsolicited feedback from me. Although way off with the space technology, the story seems spot on with its social analysis for our times...
ALL PIECES OF A RIVER SHORE by R.A. Lafferty
A very wealthy Native American has a hobby he practices to obsession: collecting artifacts from the past. One day he discovers that there is something called The Longest Picture in the World, a mysterious miles-long representation of a river shore...presumably the Mississippi...that over the years had been cut up and spread out through the years over several states and countries among a multitude of owners. Leo Nation sets out to collect them all and put them back together in proper order...rolling them all up and spinning them out, creating the visual sensation of a boat ride down the river. He's successful...that I'll say...but the ramifications of the final product are more than a little chilling...
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE... by Alan Dean Foster
In a future in which Earth has begun to engage in interstellar travel, the dominant alien race of the galaxy punishes our home planet by erecting an impenetrable barrier around it, prohibiting any more space travel, after a war following Earth's refusal to join their federation. Many generations later that group has been vanquished and a more benevolent and democratic galactic federation faces attack from a different, ruthless foe...and their representatives visit Earth to lift the longstanding barrier and to enlist their help. Expecting a regressed, backwards society they are astonished to discover something else. This is one of those "mess with us and you're asking for trouble" kind of stories...
Next week I continue my look at science fiction short stories from 1971...
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