Here are my reviews of three more stories from the anthology The 1973 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and featuring his selections from the previous year. 1972 for me in retrospect was a foundational year in which, despite some pretty severe personal depression during the spring and fall seasons when I went from age fifteen to sixteen and progressed from the tenth to eleventh grade in high school, I formed what I now regard as pretty much my outlook on the world and how I would want to live my life in it. I think the marked slowing of my body metabolism in this period helped in this growth while at the same time contributing to my doldrums...in the preceding years I was an overly nervous sort, much like the Tweek character in South Park But back to science fiction from that year: the first and third tales I discuss below would more properly be termed novellas than short stories...
THE GOLD AT THE STARBOW'S END by Frederik Pohl
In one of the most cynical ploys I've ever read in science fiction, a future president with his chief scientist send an astronaut crew on a deep space mission to what seems a habitable planet around Alpha Centauri...only unbeknownst to the crew, the planet doesn't really exist! This whole mission, intended to be suicidal in nature without the astronauts' knowledge, is to get them in an isolated state and come up with great new ideas and scientific principles...which they transmit back to Earth while they speed closer and closer to the speed of light to their doomed destination. The scheme naturally backfires on the perpetrators...this story structure of authority figures abusing their subordinates with their arrogance and presumptions carries over to the next two tales as well...
TO WALK A CITY'S STREET by Clifford D. Simak
A nondescript man who has lived his entire life in poverty in around others in the poorer side of town appears to have a strange gift: his simple presence around others heals them of whatever ailments they have been suffering. Enter another group of arrogant authority figures who corral him into signing away his freedom on a contract and whisk him around from location to location as they study his effect on the people he encounters. And yes, this strategy severely backfires...
RORQUAL MARU by T.J. Bass
It is far off in the distant future, so much ahead that humanity and other life forms have been genetically manipulated to the point that a stunted human variety, the Nebish, with four toes on each foot is the predominant form...yet these short-lived humanoids are essentially controlled by a network of advanced robots called "mecks". The Rorqual Maru in the title refers to a giant whale that has been altered to the point where it is a large ship, accommodating people...I wonder whether the writers of Star Trek: the Next Generation used this concept for their wonderful Tin Man episode. As the story develops the Rorqual Maru, having been in a deep sleep state due to the depletion of plankton and nutrients in the ocean, is revitalized when a meteor strike lets loose many nutrients. This sets off a conflict between the oceanic humanoid race, the Benthic, and the Nebish, leading to the "mecks" concocting a plan to genetically create a warrior humanoid to combat the Benthic: good luck with that. I thought the story's basic ideas were innovative but that the plot was a little bit convoluted...
Next week I conclude my look back at 1972 science fiction short stories...
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