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alibi_shopShort Science Fiction Collection 081, by various authors
full contents (9h 5m)
with: "Dr. Kometevsky's Day", by Fritz Leiber (1952) - text / audio (42m)
Some background: Like the Insomnia Collection, LibriVox's many short-story anthologies are semi-random assortments, based on whatever the volunteers happened to feel like reading and could find in a public-domain source. But since those sources happen to include so many mid-20th-century pulp magazines, the SF collections tend to be heavily weighted toward "Golden Age" stuff, and even more heavily weighted toward whichever issues of those pulps most recently got added to Project Gutenberg. So, while this installment includes material as old as 1894(*), and (due to the vagaries of US copyright law) as recent as 1962, it's mostly from 1952-1958 and mostly from the magazines Amazing Stories, If, Imagination, and Planet Stories.
What I read
Fritz Leiber is legendary for all kinds of reasons, but "Dr. Kometevsky's Day" isn't one of his better-known stories and I hadn't seen it before. It's an odd one for sure, even by his eclectic standards: a world-in-peril thriller that's almost all dialogue and interior monologue and theorizing until there's one weird special effect, followed by an exposition-dump from an alien-possessed kid, and the big question other than whether the world will end is whether the partners in a six-person polyamorous marriage will manage to feel like coequal parents.
I really like this story! It's not a classic and I can't say that the speculative ideas in it (what if a Velikovsky-type crank was kind of right, but also wrong; how would the world react to a bunch of moons suddenly disappearing; what would be a situation where totally good-hearted aliens would have no choice but to destroy us) are particularly well explored, they're just sort of tossed in, but I'm a sucker for that kind of unapologetic shagginess; I think what makes it work are the note of mystery (from that one weird special effect), the humor, and especially the character-focused style. Leiber clearly loves all of these characters.
And, is this the earliest depiction of a group marriage in SF? Maybe not but it's the earliest one I've seen; it's entirely sympathetic, and we get just enough of the characters's personalities to see how they would all go together. It's a bit dated of course—but Leiber makes a choice that helps him avoid the familiar pitfalls of "this future society seems too much like the 1950s" or "this future society is different but it's too perfect and homogenous", by setting it at a transitional time when this kind of family structure is starting to be accepted but is still considered a little daring. His characters are early adopters who didn't grow up with this, so I can believe that the main point-of-view character still has some conservative thoughts about it when she's feeling insecure. I'm curious about how it came across to readers at the time.
Other stories
These are all over the place in length and tone and quality, as usual. Two I particularly liked, for the writing and the reading and also because I didn't know them before, are "Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly?" by Bryce Walton a.k.a. Kenneth O'Hara (text/audio), and "A Little Journey" by Ray Bradbury (text/audio). Both have a tricky combination of sentimentality and bleakness, and they're read well in an easy-going style that lets the darkness of the situation creep up on you. "Kelly" is especially interesting because it takes some tropes that I think were pretty common in 1954—"human individualist asserts the value of good old-fashioned life over touchy-feely psychic oneness" and "daring resourceful guy deals with a dangerous space situation"—and subverts them in ways I definitely didn't see coming.
Among the rest, there are some of the kind of quasi-shaggy-dog story that seems to have been pretty common in '50s SF magazines, where the story noodles around with incidental detail to distract you from the punchline that you might otherwise see coming a mile away (in one case it's literally given away in the title). Philip K. Dick's "Beyond Lies the Wub" is kind of like that too, it's way longer than it really needs to be just to get to the thing that happens in the end—except the long setup is sly and enjoyable due to how the characters keep talking around the issue, and how the penny only drops in the end when you get who's talking. Unfortunately that's why the reading of "Wub" here doesn't work for me, because the dialogue is the heart of the story and it's just not done expressively in this case. However, LibriVox has no limit on how many versions of a thing there can be, and it looks like there have been at least ten other readings of "Wub" besides this one—including one in the very next volume, 082. So maybe I'll have to check those out.
(* Oh yeah, I forgot the one from 1894: H.G. Wells's "The Stolen Bacillus", which is noteworthy mostly for the weirdness of how it starts out as a hard-boiled thriller about the then-new concept of biological terrorism, and ends up in a deliberately goofy anticlimax. Wells can be funny when he wants to, but this was an odd choice.)
full contents (9h 5m)
with: "Dr. Kometevsky's Day", by Fritz Leiber (1952) - text / audio (42m)
Some background: Like the Insomnia Collection, LibriVox's many short-story anthologies are semi-random assortments, based on whatever the volunteers happened to feel like reading and could find in a public-domain source. But since those sources happen to include so many mid-20th-century pulp magazines, the SF collections tend to be heavily weighted toward "Golden Age" stuff, and even more heavily weighted toward whichever issues of those pulps most recently got added to Project Gutenberg. So, while this installment includes material as old as 1894(*), and (due to the vagaries of US copyright law) as recent as 1962, it's mostly from 1952-1958 and mostly from the magazines Amazing Stories, If, Imagination, and Planet Stories.
What I read
Fritz Leiber is legendary for all kinds of reasons, but "Dr. Kometevsky's Day" isn't one of his better-known stories and I hadn't seen it before. It's an odd one for sure, even by his eclectic standards: a world-in-peril thriller that's almost all dialogue and interior monologue and theorizing until there's one weird special effect, followed by an exposition-dump from an alien-possessed kid, and the big question other than whether the world will end is whether the partners in a six-person polyamorous marriage will manage to feel like coequal parents.
I really like this story! It's not a classic and I can't say that the speculative ideas in it (what if a Velikovsky-type crank was kind of right, but also wrong; how would the world react to a bunch of moons suddenly disappearing; what would be a situation where totally good-hearted aliens would have no choice but to destroy us) are particularly well explored, they're just sort of tossed in, but I'm a sucker for that kind of unapologetic shagginess; I think what makes it work are the note of mystery (from that one weird special effect), the humor, and especially the character-focused style. Leiber clearly loves all of these characters.
And, is this the earliest depiction of a group marriage in SF? Maybe not but it's the earliest one I've seen; it's entirely sympathetic, and we get just enough of the characters's personalities to see how they would all go together. It's a bit dated of course—but Leiber makes a choice that helps him avoid the familiar pitfalls of "this future society seems too much like the 1950s" or "this future society is different but it's too perfect and homogenous", by setting it at a transitional time when this kind of family structure is starting to be accepted but is still considered a little daring. His characters are early adopters who didn't grow up with this, so I can believe that the main point-of-view character still has some conservative thoughts about it when she's feeling insecure. I'm curious about how it came across to readers at the time.
Other stories
These are all over the place in length and tone and quality, as usual. Two I particularly liked, for the writing and the reading and also because I didn't know them before, are "Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly?" by Bryce Walton a.k.a. Kenneth O'Hara (text/audio), and "A Little Journey" by Ray Bradbury (text/audio). Both have a tricky combination of sentimentality and bleakness, and they're read well in an easy-going style that lets the darkness of the situation creep up on you. "Kelly" is especially interesting because it takes some tropes that I think were pretty common in 1954—"human individualist asserts the value of good old-fashioned life over touchy-feely psychic oneness" and "daring resourceful guy deals with a dangerous space situation"—and subverts them in ways I definitely didn't see coming.
Among the rest, there are some of the kind of quasi-shaggy-dog story that seems to have been pretty common in '50s SF magazines, where the story noodles around with incidental detail to distract you from the punchline that you might otherwise see coming a mile away (in one case it's literally given away in the title). Philip K. Dick's "Beyond Lies the Wub" is kind of like that too, it's way longer than it really needs to be just to get to the thing that happens in the end—except the long setup is sly and enjoyable due to how the characters keep talking around the issue, and how the penny only drops in the end when you get who's talking. Unfortunately that's why the reading of "Wub" here doesn't work for me, because the dialogue is the heart of the story and it's just not done expressively in this case. However, LibriVox has no limit on how many versions of a thing there can be, and it looks like there have been at least ten other readings of "Wub" besides this one—including one in the very next volume, 082. So maybe I'll have to check those out.
(* Oh yeah, I forgot the one from 1894: H.G. Wells's "The Stolen Bacillus", which is noteworthy mostly for the weirdness of how it starts out as a hard-boiled thriller about the then-new concept of biological terrorism, and ends up in a deliberately goofy anticlimax. Wells can be funny when he wants to, but this was an odd choice.)
