Alpha 2

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 Alpha 2, ed. Robert Silverberg

This 1971 collection features short stories that were considered to be excellent in a literary sense -- they were well-written, wonderful stories that should be preserved.  They were pulled from the last twenty years, so there's quite a date range.  Some I enjoyed very much, and others not so much.  Also, if this is a collection of excellently-written SF, why was Ray Bradbury left out?  Maybe because he was so very famous, there was no danger of his stories falling through the cracks?  Otherwise there were some famous names and some I'm not familiar with. 

"Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson was very good.  On the fifth moon of Jupiter, a small outpost runs a program for exploring Jupiter itself, by means of psychic transfer into a body built for Jovian conditions (as in Avatar, the one with the blue people).  The man who runs "Joe" would much rather live in Joe than in his own body; is it possible?

I was not so impressed with Wilma Shore's "Goodbye Amanda Jean," which posits a future in which the only meat available comes from...well, whoever of your neighbors you manage to hunt down according to the rules.  

"Faith of Our Fathers," by Philip K. Dick, has a fantastic premise which then sort of peters out into a nothing ending, which is a characteristic PKD problem.  In a future in which Communist China has conquered much of the Pacific, including the western US, an up-and-coming young Hanoi apparatchik discovers that the Great Leader may not be human.  Has there been an alien infiltration?  Or what?  He begins a quest to discover the truth.

I was quite excited about Gerald Jonas' "Quaker Revival," which asks the question, "What happens when today's freaks become tomorrow's bourgeoisie?"  In other words, what if the adult hippies are running the world?  It's set in 1995, so it's a story about Gen X kids (me!).  And it was really stupid, so I was really disappointed.  Although, come to think of it, it did predict raves....!

Other stories ask, what if a society had no metals?  What if cause and effect broke?  What if everyone developed sleeping sickness?  What if space travel was accomplished by melding mind with machine?

It was a fun collection, if disappointing in spots.  Fifty years after re-publication,  with many of the stories being from the early 50s, I guess that was inveitable.  So, pretty good.  The Alpha series lasted for 9 volumes.


Comments

  1. mudpuddleJanuary 31, 2022 at 9:34 AM

    ha: shades of "Soylent Green"... agree re PKD altho i think he had his own version of brilliance...

    ReplyDelete

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