This week I start a new "year's best" science fiction anthology with short stories from that genre: Donald A. Wollheim Presents the 1974 Annual World's Best SF, presenting the editor's picks for the best from 1973. 1973 historically is well known as the year American soldiers came home from Vietnam as well as the breakout of the Watergate scandal that would bring down the Nixon administration the following year. Personally, I was transitioning from my junior to senior year in high school. In the winter/spring I tried out for my high school's track team with dubious immediate results, but that experience planted a seed within me for running that I revitalized 14 years ago...and I'm going strong. Later that year I had my only surgery (so far), for a hernia. Overall, though, I thought '73 rocked! Here are my reactions to the first three stories in the book...
A SUPPLIANT IN SPACE by Robert Sheckley
A tongue-in-cheek story about a defiant reject from an alien society, banished from them for his open disrespect of their rigid rules...Detringer is quite the character. He is able to land on a remote planet but without more fuel is stranded...enter a human exploratory expedition landing there. The fastidious-but-honorable captain and the suspicious and ambitious colonel are in a power struggle, and their developing relationships with Detringer form an interesting triangle as the three vie with one another to accomplish their own aims...great ending, and it was very funny...
PARTHEN by R.A. Lafferty
On Earth men everywhere are happily losing their fortunes and livelihoods while marveling at the new wonderful, beautiful women around them. At the same time a cryptic message has been received, only revealing that an alien race has infiltrated humanity and has decided that half the population is obsolete...with the other half to be their slaves. As a reader I thought the story was leading in one direction but quickly realized what was going on...
DOOMSHIP by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson
This collaborative novella effort by the two noted sci-fi authors examines the idea of
"tachyon transmission" using faster-than-light tachyon particles (a fictional creation) as the driving force. From them an exact copy of someone can be transmitted almost instantaneously over vast reaches of space from one tachyon transmitter to a corresponding tachyon receiver...kind of like Star Trek's transporter but with the original person still intact. This sets the stage for a deep space probe to an unknown approaching phenomenon outside the galaxy, with human Ben Pertin sending onto it a copy of himself to replace an earlier, dying "Ben"...doomed to perished from the ship's radiation...along with a genetically-altered chimpanzee for help, to join the various alien life forms there working for the probe's mission. Only once he arrives, Ben quickly discovers a serious civil war going on and he must act quickly...
Next week I continue my look at old sci-fi short stories from 1973...
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