Let's read four more stories from My Best Science Fiction Story, those from titan of crime fiction Fredric Brown (I fear it is a joke story, but let's soldier on regardless), reliable pro Murray Leinster, the often disappointing Frank Belknap Long, and Grand Master Theodore Sturgeon.
"Nothing Sirius" by Fredric Brown (1944)
Oy, "Nothing Sirius" is a yawn-inducing humor piece full of boring and obvious jokes that as you are trudging through it feels like it will never end. Thumbs down!
Our narrator is a middle-aged married man; he and the wife are small business people. They fly from planet to planet, setting up a tent full of coin-operated entertainment devices at each stop and then moving on. In the space ship with them is their sexy daughter Ellen and the pilot of their ship, Johnny. Johnny graduated from the space academy just two years ago, and one of the foundational jokes of the story is that Johnny is serious to a fault, a rule-follower who has no social skills and won't let his hair down to drink, smoke or chew the fat with the narrator and doesn't notice that Ellen has a crush on him.
One day the Johnny unexpectedly spots a new planet, and the narrator decides they should explore it on foot. They come upon disconcerting evidence that Earth people have already been there. They meet an old friend who tells them this planet has been kept a secret by the film production company that is renting it. They also meet a beautiful movie star with whom Johnny falls in love at first sight, upsetting poor Ellen. But then the narrator realizes that everything seems wrong, and proves that all the people and buildings on the planet, including their old pal and the actress, are just illusions, making them vanish.
The natives of the planet, people almost identical to little cockroaches, admit what is going on. Like so many of the aliens in these old stories, they can read human minds, and they have been projecting those illusions, basing them on the memories of the narrator and his companions. The bug people assert that their civilization and human civilization are totally incompatible--humans are concerned with material things, while the insect people are concerned with thought. This planet has no mineral wealth and the soil is not fit for agriculture, so there is no reason for humans to ever come here.
The four humans return to the ship. Johnny has been shaken up by the experience of falling in love with an illusion projected by a telepathic bug, and for the first time in his life gets drunk. This triggers or presages a welcome evolution of his personality--he becomes less stiff and serious and it is not long before he and Ellen are engaged.
Though celebrated, "Nothing Serious" is totally lame filler with no drama or excitement. All the SF stuff and all the jokes are banal. Sad!
"The Lost Race" by Murray Leinster (1949)
*Like Charles Schulz, Ray Bradbury is a wholesome American institution whose brilliant work has broad appeal but which attentive readers may find surprisingly misogynistic.
"The Lost Race" hasn't been reprinted much (though if you read German you can catch it in a 1966 issue of Utopia, and if Croatian is more your speed an issue of Sirius from 1985 has you covered), but it was one of the dozen stories that was included in the paperback version of My Best Science Fiction Story, so I can read Leinster's intro to it in the scan of that paperback at the internet archive. Leinster talks about why he is particularly proud of the story and spoils all the min themes, telling us "The Lost Race" deals with the issue of the value of rocket fuel on the market, and that high value might impede the development of space travel, with psychic powers, and with how spacers will have to deal with the problem of boredom.
The first page of "The Lost Race" is more like a soap opera than a space opera. Spaceman Jimmy Briggs is engaged to Sally; to amass enough money to marry her, he has signed up on a year-long space voyage. The crew of the vessel is made up of eight men. One of them is Danton, who is pathologically jealous about his wife Jane, who is Sally's best friend. Another is Ken Howell. Howell was engaged to Jane, but then while he was away on a voyage, Danton married Jane. According to Sally, Danton employed some underhanded methods to achieve this feat. Both Jimmy and Ken regret signing up for a voyage with the difficult Danton.
Mankind has explored and colonized many planets, and many more have been charted but await examination. So commercial ships like the one Jimmy, Ken and Danton are aboard are obliged to make little stops along the way to investigate planets that might be viable for colonization. On scores of planets, human explorers have discovered the remains of a highly sophisticated star-faring civilization. This "Lost Race" raised hundreds of magnificent cities, but all have been thoroughly destroyed, apparently deliberately, as if the entire culture, a space empire spanning hundreds of light years, had committed suicide. Many space men have seen these ruins, and many of them, as a little hobby, theorize as to why the Lost Race destroyed itself. Ken Howell's theory is that the members of the lost race were able to see into the future and saw something so horrible they would rather die than live through it--he suggests that if Earth's people had foreseen the horrors of the, now long past, Third World War, they also might have opted to commit suicide rather than suffer through that tragedy.
Ken and Jimmy make an unprecedented find--a Lost Race installation that miraculously escaped destruction (it seems it was sheltered by a hill from the blast that flattened the nearby city.) Their discovery is an amphitheater with a seat at one end--when Jimmy sits there, a holographic projection fills the amphitheater--the moving image is of Sally back on Earth, thinking longingly of Jimmy! Jimmy figures that the amphitheater is a kind of televising remote viewer, and shows the places and people you are thinking about in real time.
All the crewmen use the amphitheater and see images of their people back home living happily--this is a relief, as under ordinary circumstances the spacers would have no news from home for a year, their ship moving much faster than light. Danton is an exception, however--he sees Jane cheating on him! Danton goes berserk, and there is a whole drama involving ray pistol fire, stolen fuel, and hijacked life boats as Danton pursues a scheme of stranding the ship here and escaping on his own to get revenge on Jane and her lover. Ken Howell foils the plot by diagnosing Danton's psychology. Howell is one canny figure; he also realizes the Lost Race's projection device is not a real-time televiewer but simply projects images of a person's thoughts and expectations--Danton only saw Jane cheating because of his own paranoia. Even more astoundingly, Howell solves the mystery of the Lost Race after finding some bones--the Lost Race were a people who had tails and other particular features, but their use of atomic energy was mutating them so that they were going to lose their tails and other characteristics--they would become what they saw as hideous monsters! So they all killed themselves. The shocking ending is the revelation that the people of the Lost Race were going to evolve so that they looked just like we Earth people do! Could it be that we are the degenerate descendants of a Lost Race colony that didn't commit suicide?
This is a fun classic-style science fiction story with lots of technical, sociological, and psychological speculation, plus decent action and adventure elements and human drama elements. Thumbs up for "The Lost Race!"
"The House of Rising Winds" by Frank Belknap Long (1948)
A young orphan boy, Jimmy, is living with his aunt and uncle--who keep arranging accidents in hopes of killing the kid so they can enjoy his inheritance! Long does a good job at describing the cruelty and the schemes of the aunt and uncle--it is actually kind of creepy and at times shocking.
Jimmy is hiding in the woods when he is approached by a space alien who calls himself Lacula! Long, something of a poet, comes up with a long list of metaphors to describe Lacula and how he makes Jimmy feel.
Lacula was like many things at once--things that Jimmy had seen and imagined and dreamed about. A big twisted tree trunk....the gold and russet splendor of the autumn woods....the sea, wide and boundless....a mountain, rising pale and purple....a maze of complicated machinery....Lacula is a kindly gent...and also a big game hunter! He has with him cages full of vicious beasts from Mars, Venus, and other worlds. With a little device, Lacula makes these cages float hither and thither. I guess the cages are like intersections between different points in space or something--when Jimmy looks into one cage he sees the broad expanse of a Martian desert leading to mountains in the far distance, but he can also see through the cage to the mundane surface of the Earth neighborhood with which he is familiar. Long relishes describing two of the ravenous monsters. Lacula gives Jimmy a little pipe, and instructions on how to use it. Later that day, when aunt and uncle contrive yet another attempt on Jimmy's life (they make the kid take a bath and arrange an electric hair curler--still plugged in--to fall into the bath to electrocute him), Jimmy blows the pipe and a ferocious wind hurls aunt and uncle out of the house and into one of Lacula's cages. Lacula leaves Earth with his latest specimens of vicious beasts, and Jimmy can look forward to living his own life, inheriting the house and turning it from a place of fear and misery to one of joy by marrying and building a happy family within it.
The parts with the aunt and uncle are chilling, and the alien monsters are fun; the stuff with Lacula is maybe a little fey and a little too verbose, but I can still mildly recommend "The House of the Rising Winds" as a weird horror story that mixes fairy tale and science fiction elements.
"Thunder and Roses" by Theodore Sturgeon (1947)
"Thunder and Roses" is a well-written melodrama that counsels turning the other cheek, unilaterally disarming yourself in the face of your enemies. It is set in the near future at a remote military base after a sneak attack has nuked the United States--the attack was so successful that the US didn't even fire back at the unnamed enemies, and the land of the free and home of the brave is practically wiped out, save for this remote base, where people are despondent and suffering radiation sickness that dooms them to early graves. Sturgeon does a good job describing the struggles of the men not to commit suicide under these dire conditions.
The second half of the story expands on the don't-commit-suicide angle. A beautiful woman singer, apparently the most popular celebrity in America, who regularly broadcast performances weekly to military bases, is still alive, and arrives at the base, her terrible wounds concealed by cosmetics. Her final performance has the object of convincing the survivors not to retaliate against the enemies who just murdered the entire United States, as this will result in the total destruction of all humanity. She argues that a decent civilization might arise someday from the rest of the world, but if the United States launches its weapons then all life on Earth--even lizards!--will be killed so no new intelligent life can arise. In the same way individuals struggled in the first half of the story to resist the inclination to commit suicide, in the second half of the story the handful of surviving Americans characters struggle against each other to resist the temptation to launch a retaliatory strike, which would amount to the suicide of the human race and all life on Earth.
"Thunder and Roses" is well structured and well written, so I must, albeit grudgingly, judge it a good story. Some may think it over the top, that Sturgeon's depiction of the singer's martyrdom, for example, goes so far as to become comical, or that many individual scenes are too long or that some scenes are superfluous and repetitive (how many guys do we have to hear have committed suicide?) but it all works in my opinion. My gripe is with the story's ideology--Sturgeon seems to think you shouldn't resist or deter aggressors and so he contrives an unlikely scenario in which resistance and deterrence are somehow unjustifiable. This is the kind of thing the science fiction that aspires to be a literature of ideas does, and that Sturgeon and Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in particular, do--question conventional wisdom, like that slavery and incest are bad, by coming up with crazy scenarios and counterintuitive theories that demonstrate that slavery and incest might actually be good. I obviously think it is the duty of decent people to resist and deter those who would trespass against others and so I recoil from Sturgeon's ideas here, but I guess that is part of the point of the story and "serious" science fiction, to get a rise out of you. ("Don't worry about it son," Campbell told a young Barry Malzberg after a long argument in the year 1969, "I just like to shake 'em up."*)
*As reported in Malzberg's 1980 essay on Campbell, available in Engines of the Night and Breakfast in the Ruins.
An important story in SF history, likely of value to those interested in science fiction written in response to the use of atomic weapons in World War II and to the Cold War, and science fiction influenced by Christian thought--though Sturgeon never directly mentions Hiroshima, the Soviet Union, or any religious figure or establishment--and science fiction that depicts stress and psychological trauma.
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