Today I move onward with my science fiction short story reviews from 1971, starting with the first four tales appearing in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, which spotlights the editor's selections from the preceding year. Let's see...the first part of '71 had me finishing up my dismal ninth grade in high school with the fall showing some hope in my tenth, at least academically speaking. Around late spring all of South Florida stank with the smoke drifting eastward from the burning Everglades as we were in the middle of a horrible weeks-long drought. Nationally, Nixon was still plugging away as president, Apollo missions continued to land on the moon and return, and the Vietnam War was supposedly being "Vietnamized"...yet Americans, many drafted over there against their will, were still being sent into combat to draw enemy fire and die. I read The Old Man in the Sea by Hemingway, The Pearl by Steinbeck, and Macbeth by Shakespeare, all in English class with Macbeth performed by all the students in a string of nauseating plays with the same repeating scenes. But back to those sci-fi stories...
THE FOURTH PROFESSION by Larry Niven
Frazer, a California bartender in the not-so-distant future has as a surprise customer one of the alien hooded Monks, as they call them, a trader group that landed on the moon a couple of years earlier and were thought to only be on Earth around New York. To pay for his many drinks, the Monk offers him a number a pills, each of which imparts a special knowledge or ability. The alien's visit prompts a visit by an official government intelligence agent, raising Frazer's fears that since he consumed the pills and now possesses special skills and awareness he might become a prisoner of the state. And the Monk has a more dire proposal: in exchange for more knowledge pills humanity is to design and build a "laser launcher" that will allow his ship to leave the moon and accelerate back to the stars...otherwise, they'll sadly have to explode our sun in order to provide the necessary energy. It's a quandary for Frazer...I liked how he figured it all out at the end...
GLEEPSITE by Joanna Russ
In a nightmare dystopian future for Earth with an extremely poisonous, overheated atmosphere and male humans for some reason nearly driven to extinction, a bat-like woman visits an high-rise office where two sisters employed on the night cleaning shift are working. She offers to sell them "daydreams", vividly amplified by a device around her neck...in the process drastically altering the appearance of the office. She is drawn to the locked panels leading to the lethal outside...and it is here that I completely lost the author's train of narrative, difficult enough for the bulk of this very short story due to her deliberately cryptic writing style. In researching other readers' reactions to this story, they either didn't get it at all or thought it was a masterpiece...maybe if I wake up at three in the morning with a flash of sudden insight I'll join the latter group, but for now I'm just dumbfounded...
THE BEAR WITH THE KNOT ON HIS TAIL by Stephen Tall
This tale centers around what seems to be an interstellar distress call. Humanity has developed an extremely fast way to circumvent the speed of light and can now pretty much travel anywhere. The "bear" in the story is the constellation Ursa Major, and the "knot" is the star system Micor...on the stars is about to nova and the intelligent beings on one of its worlds are transmitting the intermittent, highly musical signals. A psychic pinpoints the source and the rescue crew sets out. This is more one of those old-style, feel-good stories about people being basically good, with no apparent limits to human ingenuity and desire to explore and help: kind of like Star Trek, actually...
THE SHARKS OF PENTREATH by Michael G. Coney
Sometimes when a story's protagonist is something of a jerk, reading it can be an irritating experience. Often though, there is an important point to be made: such is the case here as in a severely overcrowded Earth of the future, humanity has to rotate between Fulltime...like our ordinary existence...and Shelflife...stored away with the mind in a dream state. The richer people can, while in Shelflife, have their minds projected into robots that can travel just about anywhere. A little coastal resort has its shops and inns, and the owner of one of them spends his Fulltime with his wife there obsessing with squeezing out money from tourists as he'd like to have enough saved to travel the world himself. An experience with a couple visiting the place while in the robots, with their bodies in Shelflife, changes his perspective, though, and explains the point of him being the story's "hero": sometimes a life lesson needs to be taught...
Next week I continue with more reviews of science fiction short stories from 1971...
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