Weekly Short Stories: 1975 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I begin reviewing science fiction short stories from the year 1975 as they appeared in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1976 Annual World's Best SF, with the editor's picks from the previous year.  1975 was the year in history that Gerald Ford was president (and shot at a couple of times) and South Vietnam and Cambodia fell to the communists America had been fighting for years.  I was still living in Hollywood and attending college in Davie...more about that in another article. For now, back to the first two stories in the book...

CATCH THAT ZEPPELIN! by Fritz Leiber

A man walking through Midtown Manhattan, circa 1973, walks though a shaded area in front of him on the sidewalk as he is making his way to the Empire State Building and finds his city, country...and himself transformed into an alternate history where World War II and Hitler's Nazis never happened and zeppelins...moored to the tops of skyscrapers...were the dominant form of air transportation.  I thought Leiber did a great job of envisioning things...especially including a much greater economic and cultural influence of Germany over America had not the horrors and shame of Naziism drastically diminished that influence...

THE PEDDLER'S APPRENTICE by Joan D. Vinge and Vernor Vinge

This story is set far off into the future when humans have already explored and settled other star systems and cultures on Earth have come and gone in cycles of growth and self-destruction.  Now it's a worldwide, stagnate society, except for remote pockets such as the Highlands.  Wim Buckry, a rowdy young man leading his gang of crooks, accompanies a strange peddler passing through the area into the more civilized Flatlands and finally the area's capital of Fyffe.  Just who is this peddler who seems to possess and wield great magic and what is the dark secret that the leader of Fyffe is withholding from his strangely passive Flatlands populations?  The moral of this tale seems to be that, sure, growth involves risk and danger...but it's necessary...

Next week I continue looking out sci-fi short stories from 1975...