A Treasury of Great Science Fiction Volume II

Boucher, Anthony
A Treasury of Great Science Fiction
Volume II
Copyright 1959
Doubleday

Contains the following stories:

Brain Wave
by Poul Anderson

The Earth passes through a mysterious energy field that dramatically increases the entire human race’s IQ. Shortly thereafter, labor is hard to find when a super-intelligent race finds themselves unable to do menial chores. There is great social and psychological upheaval across the globe. A group of scientists work together to quickly solve the problems while dealing with their own issues and those of their family members.

This is intelligent Golden Age science fiction. The events and characters are entirely believable and the story is well paced and engaging. The only drawback is the shortness of the novella prohibited more development of the story’s characters and their interpersonal relationships. Anderson gives us just barely enough to make the characters interesting.

Bullard Reflection
by Malcolm Jameson

A star ship’s crew’s athletic ability saves them when they are double-crossed on one of the moon’s of Jupiter.

Dull, uninteresting story by an author of whom I’ve never heard.

The Lost Years
by Oscar Lewis

What would have happened had Abraham Lincoln been saved by a surgeon instead of dying the morning after being shot? Lewis explores the possibilities in this alternative history short story.

Not really sci-fi, but engaging nonetheless.

Dead Center
by Judith Merril

A woman designed it and a man is piloting it to the moon. The newest rocket, the KIM III malfunctions as it lands on the moon. Its lone astronaut must be rescued. His wife, who designed the rocket, works frantically to put together the team that will save her husband before he runs out of food and oxygen. Meanwhile, their young son is left to wonder about all the frantic activity about him.

This was a tightly told story . A lot of action and character development crammed into 20 pages of text. Merril makes it work. Merril was envisioning woman engineers leading design teams back in 1953.

Lost Art
by George O. Smith

Two brothers discover a device in the Martian desert and use trial and error learning how to make it work . In a parallel story, a Martian father and son assemble and deploy the device.

Perhaps the most useless story I’ve ever read. I kept thinking “something bad is going to happen when these guys figure out what this thing does.” Nothing bad ever happened. Nothing ever happened. What a pointless waste of twenty pages.

The Other Side of the Sky
by Arthur C. Clarke

The narrator is an engineer aboard a space station that he is confident will be a stepping stone into deep space. Set in the 1990s, the narrator relates anecdotes from his space adventures that show how prescient Clarke was in judging the success of satellite-based communications. It was written in 1957. The space stations he describes would be the same ones that Stanley Kubrick would bring to celluloid in the Clarke story 2001: A Space Oddysey.


The Man Who Sold the Moon
by Robert Heinlein

Man, how I hated this story. I could not finish it. I’ve read two Heinlein stories and hated them both. I’ve always thought about reading Stranger in a Strange Land but now I will not.

This is a story about a corporate pig-dog who wants to acquire the moon and take title to it so he can subdivide it and sell the parcels. In a real story, he would have taken it by force through war or something exciting like that. Instead, in Heinlein’s painfully boring story, he takes it through the drawing up of contracts and the structuring of corporations --- all described in painstaking detail in Heinlein’s narrative and the dialogue.

Imagine reading a low-level corporate attorney’s journal entries. It’s not that exciting.

Heinlein may be the most overrated writer in the history!

Magic City
by Nelson S. Bond

Set more than 1500 years in the future, after the fall of civilization, women lead society. Most societies shun men and need them for little more than breeding stock. Advanced civilizations are slowly integrating men into their society as equals.

In this setting a couple journeys from their home in Jinnia to Newyalk to slay the demon Death, who constantly claims their weak, infirm, and old. Swords and daggers are their weapons of choice as they enter the dangerous city and the temple of Slukes.

The names of the various cities and territories are very clever phonetics and plays on words. They live in a country called Tizzathee (as in my country ‘tis of thee). I usually hate such cute word play, but Bond’s are clever enough to be engaging. The battle scenes are well written and his descriptions of the post-apocalyptic east coast are riveting. This was a great story.


The Morning of the Day They Did It
by E.B. White

A television executive now located on a remote planet relates the story of Earth’s final day and how its destruction came about from the placement of the ultimate weapon in space.

I read this on the heels of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and, as in Bradbury’s classic, this story describes how television destroyed society. This story is not nearly as brilliant as Bradbury’s. The narrator uses mundane (very mundane) events from his day along with dialogue from mundane newscasts and shows to set the stage for the Earth’s discussion. This was a creative idea not well executed.

Piggy Bank
by Henry Kuttner

A greedy man has figured out how to manufacture synthetic diamonds, but keeps losing his fortune to burglars. He asks his chief scientist to develop the ultimate safe that can flee when someone attempts to rob it. But when it flees when the man wants to access his fortune contained therein, he tries every conceivable method to get access.

Letters from Laura
by Mildred Clingerman

A woman’s time travel is documented in a series of letters – first to her mother, then to the company that helped her time travel on vacation.

Dull, dull, dull!

The Stars My Destination
by Alfred Bester

A roughneck spaceman pursues vengeance against the crew of a ship that left him in space to die, marooned on a wrecked ship. Meanwhile, the government and various businessmen want to exploit his knowledge of his doomed ship to retrieve its priceless cargo for use in an interstellar war.

I am somewhat familiar with Bester, who ended his career writing radio sci-fi for the CBS Radio Mystery Theater in the 1970s. Stephen King references this work as Bester’s best in his tome On Writing. It is obvious that King used one of Bester’s ideas for one of his better short stories, The Jaunt because jaunting plays a key role in Bester’s novella. For Bester, jaunting is but part of the story. In King’s story, the science of jaunting is explored.

I think this story must have been serialized because every two or three chapters seems to be a story unto itself.

A Treasury of Great Science Fiction Volume I

A Treasury of Great Science Fiction
Volume 1
edited by Anthony Boucher
Copyright 1959
Doubleday

Contains the following stories:

Rebirth
by John Wyndham
This is a powerful novella about post-apocalyptic Newfoundland and a young boy’s coming of age in a profoundly religious society

David, the son of THE local minister in a society where any physical deviation from the normal makeup of the human body, encounters a little girl with six toes. They try in vain to hide the secret, but are unsuccessful and the girl and her family are forced to flee. David, meanwhile, shares a small mental abnormality -- telepathic ability -- with several other local youths who all work hard to conceal it. When David’s new sister is born, they soon find their own abilities pale in comparison to hers. They fear their secret will get out.

This book is dripping with social commentary on religion versus intellectual progress and the role of religion in our society. The characters lack the alienation of a Kafka hero, but it is not hard to sympathize with them as their culture tells them they are abominations before God. While the bit about collectivism at the end smacks a little of socialistic superiority, the story blends just the right amount of social analysis with action to make a truly engaging story.

The Shape of Things That Came
by Richard Deming
A scientist’s nephew finds his time traveling T-shirt and uses it to travel from the year 1900 to 1950. Upon his return, he writes a short story about the experience that his editor simply finds implausible. The man explains what he saw.

Pillar of Fire
by Ray Bradbury
This was the antithesis of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. In this story, the vampire struggles against the humans who dominate society. The last existing corpse comes to life in the 25th century to fight for its existence and to exterminate humans. In a perfectly ordered society, nobody suspects any abnormalities despite the chaos around them

Bradbury gives hints at what would come in Fahrenheit 451, which he wrote later. Our vampire compares himself favorably to the anti-heroes of the works of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft in a society that has burned such disorderly books.

Waldo
by Robert Heinlein
The world’s greatest scientist is presented with an engineering problem that could threaten civilization. He is forced to appeal to a much older and arcane form of problem solving to develop the solution.

This was science fiction for engineers. WAY too much technology and not nearly enough story. I struggled to finish it.

The Father Thing
by Phillip K. Dick
Aliens have eaten Charles Watsons’ father. He must flee from the awful thing that has taken its place and take revenge on its evil master.

This story contains that theme of impostors and conspirators that was so common in the Golden Age Science Fiction of the 1950s. This is comparable to Invasion of the Body Snatchers which was also published in 1954.

The Children’s Hour
by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore
A man goes to a psychologist to be hypnotized so he can recall what happened to missing hours and days in his life. He recalls a young, beautiful girl to whom he was engaged. But fate -- or the intervention of some higher power -- always seems to get in the way.

This was a somewhat intriguing story that built the tension nicely, then veers off in a really odd direction that can't really be called a twist. Melds contemporary psycho-drama with mythology, and in the end, plain old fashioned sci-fi.

Gomez
by C.M. Kornbluth
A prominent scientist receives a letter from an immigrant dishwasher asking him to verify his theory regarding nuclear physics. When the government finds out about it, the young immigrant dishwasher finds his life dramatically altered.

An ok, if non-descript story

The Widget, the Wadget, and Boff
by Theodore Sturgeon
Aliens conduct sociological and scientific experiments on a group of boarding house residents to ascertain whether or not the human race has the necessary mental capacity and ability to survive. As they engage their science from a higher plane of existence, they behave like a typical human married couple.

I don’t normally like character studies like this, but Sturgeon’s characters were meaningful and engaging. The story’s sci-fi tie-in is really tertiary to how human beings of various backgrounds dwell in the same habitat and how they see each other and themselves within that habitat.

Sandra
by George P. Elliot
A first person narrative about a man who purchases a female slave who is obedient and dutiful (and willing to sleep with him). He falls in love with her and she becomes lazy, disobedient, and independent. So he puts her back into slavery and she reverts to her normal form.

I guess this story qualifies as some alternative reality story since the guy purchased his slave at an Oakland department store, but nothing else in the text indicates any hint of sci-fi or alternative reality. It was racy for its time, I’m sure, but today would be dismissed as highly misogynistic.

Beyond Space and Time
by Joel Townsley Rogers
A brilliant scientist teams with a brilliant engineer to design and build the first rocket-ship designed to leave the galaxy. When the engineer is launched, he learns more about what is going on on Earth and his personal life from billions of miles away than he ever did while on Earth.

Ok, if somewhat light, story.


The Martian Crown Jewels
by Poul Anderson

A locked room whodunit in space. The Martian Crown Jewels are being transferred from Earth --- where they were being studied --- to the Mars moon Phobe where they will be unloaded and returned to Mars. They are stowed in a locked cabinet aboard an unmanned freighter. When that freighter arrives, the jewels are gone. Terrified diplomats turned to a skilled Martian detective to help them solve the unsolvable case.

The Weapon Shops of Isher
by A.E. Van Vogt

A group of dissidents operate transient weapons shops that move from town to town and village to village to sell specialized self-defense weapons to help repress the tyranny of an imperial government. A young man defies his father who finds the weapon shops offensive and strikes out on his own with the help of a young woman associated with the weapon shops.

This story was superb and embodied everything that is good about Golden Age science fiction. The characters are strong and the story plot driven. The pro-2nd amendment advocacy is not even thinly veiled, but allows the reader to identify with characters confronting the same issues 5000 years in the future that we confront today.

A website I found describes Van Vogt as the third pillar of Golden Age sci-fi along with Bradbury and Asimov. It also claims that this novella was actually a series of short stories published separately.