Alice Sheldon's "The Man Who Walked Home" (as by James Tiptree, Jr) (short story, post apocalypse, free)

Apocalypse here results as a side effect of a time travel experiment. While I found the time travel part positively incomprehensible & boring, the rest of it is very readable - a dead world in the process of rebuilding itself.

Story summary.

At the site of the time travel experiment, there was an explosion, a crater, & the side effects that killed much life of earth. But there is also a curious physical phenomenon that is a side effect of original experiment: once a day, every year, at the same time, at a place in the original crater, a "monster" appears for a few seconds - a monster that appears to be moving but is not, it leaves bad smell after it's gone, & any attempt to touch it tends to cost you your limbs.

Story is mostly a view of this curious phenomenon, & eventually an explanation, from the point of view of sundry people who'll watch it over the centuries as the dead place keeps slowly getting inhabited.

Fact sheet.

First published: Amazing Science Fiction, November 1972.
Download full text from Baen eBooks.
Rating: A.
Related: Stories of Alice Sheldon (as by James Tiptree, Jr).

Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky's "Roadside Picnic" (novel, first contact): Aliens are to us what we are to ants!

While I didn't dislike it, there are long scenes of the kind you've probably read dozens of times: a band of hardy people on treasure hunt in a jungle full of dangers.

I think its classic status probably has to do with the central thesis: aliens so advanced they won't even notice us if they ever came to earth.

Story summary.

This is a first contact story, but we never actually see aliens. What we see are signs of their Visitation at 6 different locations on earth. "Imagine that you spin a huge globe & you start firing bullets into it. The bullet holes would lie on the surface in a smooth curve... all six Visitation Zones are situated on the surface of our planet as though someone had taken six shots at Earth from a pistol located somewhere along the Earth-Deneb line. Deneb is the alpha star in Cygnus."

Zones where they visited are dead places. And deadly ones. And contain a lot of alien stuff. Why did they visit? Why did they turn these places into ruins? Why did they leave all those artifacts behind? Many explanations are offered, but one is a particularly special one - the roadside picnic theory: "Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car drives off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out of the car carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios & cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, the birds, & insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Gas & oil spilled on the grass. Old spark plugs & old filters strewn around. Rags, burnt out bulbs, & a monkey wrench left behind. Oil slicks on the pond. And of course the usual mess--apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody's handkerchief, somebody's pen knife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow... A roadside picnic, on some road in the cosmos."

So the Visitation Zones contain litter from their "picnic". I could not find a satisfactory answer to why 6 parties would almost simultaneously decide to come for picnic on earth?

Story is mostly an adventure. Government claims to own the stuff left behind by aliens. But "stalkers" illegally smuggle a lot of stuff out.

Fact sheet.

First published: "Avrora literary magazine in 1972, issues 7-10."
Rating: B.

James E Gunn's "The Listeners" (fix up novel, hard sf, first contact): Just what does SETI do?

Another important classic that doesn't get included in many classics lists of genre. While a fix up novel constructed from stories published earlier, it doesn't really feel like a disjointed one.

It gives a realistic view of how impossible a task SETI has set for itself (but I found it occasionally over-dramatic, predictable & sometimes boring).

Listeners of title are scientists on "The Project", funded by US government, to listen to signals from the stars - hoping there are intelligent aliens out there broadcasting. It brings out starkly how remote are the odds of catching alien signals even if there are a lot of aliens out there. And how much patience & perseverance is required for the task.

Fact sheet.

First published: 1972.
Rating: A.
Related: Stories of James E Gunn, first contact fiction.

Hal Clement's "Planetfall" (novella, first contact): A hard-sf look at the problem of first contact

Note there are at least 2 versions of this story: original novella Hal Clement wrote, & longer "novel" that's the original story extensively padded by Sam Mervin. This post is based on Clement's solo novella.

This may be among the most weird first contact stories I've seen so far. With sufficiently different body chemistry & evolutionary environment, how hard can it get to recognize alien life & communicate with it, even if you notice there is (alien) intelligence somewhere around? This is actually a failed contact story, in spite of much effort from both sides.

Story summary.

A sessile, long-lived, technologically far in advance of us, star faring race of aliens extensively mines metals off all sorts of worlds. A "Conservationist", a sort of policeman to prevent unauthorized mining, has noticed some "poachers" attempting to steal metals off earth. His approach makes them run away, but they've left behind "mole robots", bombs that will cause much upheaval in earth's crust to turn its metals-denuded surface into a metals-rich surface again in a few million years. Which means death for much of local life.

He'll land here, & notice obvious signs of intelligence. But all through his attempts to communicate with humans, he won't even realize they're the ones he's trying to help.

Fact sheet.

First published: As a novel with additional material by Sam Merwin in Satellite Science Fiction, February 1957 as "Planet for Plunder". I'm not sure when the pure original novella version first saw the light of the day - probably 1972 in Robert Hoskins's anthology "Strange Tomorrows".
Rating: A. 
Related: Stories of Hal Clement.

Piers Anthony's "In the Barn" (novelette, animal rights, free): What if humans were cattle?

Touch it only if you can stand fiction that has extreme brutality & porn, & is primarily intended to shock. I'll not be surprised if reactions to it vary greatly - great to one person, hopeless to another.

In a way, this is more brutal variant of Pierre Boulle's "Planet of the Apes". Remove apes from the scene - both sentients & animals are human. And the "animals" have a far worse existence.

Story summary.

Imagine a parallel earth ("Counter-Earth #772") where there are no mammals save humans. Add slavery to the picture - some humans are the property of others. Now distort slavery to a point where slaves become truly animal:

1. Newborn babies are immediately separated from their mothers, have the use of thumb of their hands physically curtailed, tongue surgically cut off to ensure they will never speak, deprived of all sensory experience during their development years by being confined to a tank where they cannot sense anything & to a dark cell in older years, consciously malnourished so they will develop as mental retards, ...
2. Females are grown as "cows" in barns, & are used primarily as milk animals. With living conditions similar to those we see in cow sheds here.
3. Most male newborns are killed because they're useless. Only a few potential "studs" are saved for breeding.

The whole setup is to contrast the situation of these "animals" with the treatment cattle receive in our cowsheds.

Story is from the point of view of Hitch, an investigator from "Earth-Prime" (presumably our earth) to a newly discovered parallel one. He's out to discover why this world is overrun with barns, when there are no cattle. He will spend a day as a barn-hand there.

Fact sheet.

First published: Harlan Ellison (ed)'s "Again, Dangerous Visions" (anthology, 1972).
Download full text from Lycaeum. (Note the linked HTML page has multiple stories; "In the Barn" is the first.)
Rating: B.
Related: Fiction where humans are zoo/lab animals.

Joanna Russ' "When It Changed" (short story, free): It's a women's world!

Author introduces the key premise of this story in a note at the end of the copies linked below: "almost all the characterological sex differences we take for granted are in fact learned and not innate."

Story summary.

Human colonized world of Whileaway had a plague 600 years ago - an event that killed all men. Only women were spared. They figured out a way of breeding, & now have a normal all-women society.

Then come four men from long forgotten earth. And we get into serious (but sometimes funny) communications issues...

See also.

1. Alice Sheldon's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?": Time traveling men who arrived from the past must be killed, but only after harvesting their semen, in the all women society right here on earth (men died out long ago).

Fact sheet.

First published: Harlan Ellison's "Again, Dangerous Visions" (anthology, 1972).
Download full text from Internet Archive or Scribd (both links were very slow when I checked just before posting).
Rating: B.
Winner of Nebula Award 1972 in short story category.
Nominated for Hugo Award 1973 in short story category.
Among the Ellen Datlow's Sci Fiction's Classics.

Ursula K Le Guin's "The Word For World is Forest" (novella): Natives throw out ruthless & evil colonists

I'll put it among the essential reads of science fiction on colonialism.

In some sense, this is yet another precursor to Hollywood movie "Avatar". While Alan Dean Foster's "Midworld", often cited as the prototype after which Avatar is modeled, focuses more on world building, Le Guin's version has a more strongly demarcated conflict: human colonists ("yumens" to natives) are far more evil, natives (derisively called "creechies" by colonists) are able to repel them by themselves - making the reader root more strongly for the natives.

Story summary.

Colonists from earth want wood from the forest world of Athshe ("New Tahiti" to colonists). So they set about razing the local forests, destroying native cities & villages inside the
forest. There is general genocide of natives, taking some as slaves, routine rapes of their
women.

Natives finally wake up via the hero, Selver. He & his wife were taken slave, his wife
raped & killed by Captain Don Davidson - official villain & personification of the ultimate evil. From this point on, the days of humans on this world are numbered, with Selver organizing & leading the local military raids against colonist camps.

Another individual that is sketched in some detail is colonists' anthropologist, Captain Raj Lyubov - the "good" human.

Quotes.

1. "The world is always new, however old its roots."
2. "For four years they've behaved to us as they do to one another. Despite the physical differences, they recognized us as members of their species, as men. However, we have not responded as members of their species should respond... We have killed, raped, dispersed, & enslaved the native humans, destroyed their communities, and & down their forests. It wouldn't be surprising if they'd decided that we are not human."
   
   "And therefore can be killed, like animals".
   
3. "The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest."
   "Athshe, which meant the Forest, & the World."
   
   This is where the title comes from.

Fact sheet.

First published: Harlan Ellison (ed)'s "Again, Dangerous Visions" (anthology, 1972).
Rating: A.
Winner of Hugo award 1973 in novella category.
Nominated for Nebula Award 1972 in novella category.
Related: Stories of Ursula K Le Guin.

A Bertram Chander's "With Good Intentions" (short story, uplift, free): Idea of a pecking order is fundamental to all animal groups

Very similar in idea to the first story in Arthur Clarke's "2001 A Space Odyssey", though far less interesting: Lieutenant Grimes, a human explorer on Delta Sextans IV, a world with some animals in ape-like stage, helps the natives discover a primitive bone tool.

But his boss, Captain Tolliver - from a world called Worrall that was destroyed in a nuclear war, is not happy - perhaps disapproving the spreading of the killing madness of humanity.

Fact sheet.

First published: A Bertram Chandler's collection "The Hard Way Up" (1972), as part of an Ace Double.
Rating: B.
Download full text from Webscription.
Related: Stories of A Bertram Chandler.

Howard L Myers' "Out, Wit!" (short story, irony, free): Wrapper matters more than its contents!

Among the best of science fiction.

Story summary.

Jonathan Willis is a brilliant but brash young physicist who's figured out something fundamental about the universe. It's a sad story of his tactlessness hurting the pride of his seniors whose vengeance not only kills his reputation & career but lets someone else take credit for his work.

Fact sheet.

First published: Analog, June 1972.
Rating: A.
Download full text from Baen CD.
Listed among the stories from John Campbell's Astounding/Analog.
Related: Stories of Howard L Myers.

Robert Silverberg's "Caught in the Organ Draft" (short story, science fiction, free)

Dark, plausible, & quite readable. Theme is generally the same as Larry Niven's "The Jigsaw Man": a post-modern society that has found a justification for what can justifiably be called cannibalism - legally forcing others to donate their body organs for Mr X's benefit.

In Niven's story, it was by instituting capital punishment for even minor traffic offenders, & state gets to mine the organs of the executed! In this story, it's mandatory organ draft - state can forcibly draft anyone healthy & young in an organ donation program; if you have the right pull & a dying kidney, you can force me to "donate"! OK - the mechanics are a bit more complex, but that's the essential idea.

Story is narrated first person by a young man just drafted, & his anguish at the system. By the end of the story, he would have lost one kidney to draft program.

At a very fundamental level, this is also the traditional power broker's story: If you donate an organ, you get a higher right to someone else's organs than others. Obviously there are people who benefit more than others, when compared with the situation where everyone gets to keep their organs (rather than making power-brokers decide the distribution). How often do our dear politicians try this - for some resource or the other?

Indian readers will find an echo of our caste certificate racket here: story has an elaborate classification system on who has more organ reception rights than others. In fact, this classification system divides the society into castes in a manner not too different from those recognized by India's reservation laws.

Fact sheet.

First published: Roger Elwood (Ed)'s "And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire" (1972).
Rating: A
Download full text from Internet Archive.
Included in Ellen Datlow's Sci Fiction classics.

Larry Niven's "Cloak of Anarchy": An experiment in anarchy-based society

The dozen odd Niven stories I've read seem to fall in two broad classes: those focussed on a specific subject, & the school boy types where you are made to face a cacophony of all the ideas & gadgets the author can think up at the moment. This story falls in the second type. I prefer the former - so it's not high on my list of great stories.

Full text of this story is available online.

Story summary.

Key plot element here is an anarchical society - the kind you have probably seen in dozens of post-apocalypse stories. Just after the cataclysmic event, when there is no law or its enforcers, physical might rules.

Except that there is no great apocalypse here; it's a demonstration at a small scale. A public park where no law applies save one - no violence among humans please. There are some floating "copseyes" - small floating police robots with camera & with capacity to incapacitate anyone via some kind of a ray. They enforce this single law - if you hit someone, both attacker & victim are incapacitated by a copseye; they will wake up at different times, & can walk away. "copseyes" are powered by wirelessly transmitted power - Tesla style.

There are implications of only no violence among humans rule. You are free to kill copseyes! You are free to destroy public property like water fountains! You can even hit the guy destroying water fountain provided you are ready to take the hit from copseye.

Entries & exits to park are automated. Entry gates close at specific times in the evening.

People don't like copseyes - they keep getting destroyed regularly. Since they are cheap gadgets, administration doesn't really care.

As part of story buildup, we are treated to a variety of futuristic gadgets & social rules in this town in US.

Today, Ron Cole has a plan. He hires some boys to hit a certain copseye with stones. When it falls to ground, he switches off its power, & figures out its innards. Then he does something to its communications system, & all the remaining copseyes in the park fall down too - to be quickly destroyed by people.

Turns out - this act of vandalism has also killed power to exit gates of park! And it's closing time for entry gates. So you get a nice little park where there are no rules - none temporarily even against violence, no way to enter or exit, night about to fall, & many people.

We see familiar crowd behavior of post-apocalypse stories - girls are no longer safe, a gang has claimed water fountains as their property, some violence - till finally new copseyes arrive.

Fact sheet.

"Cloak of Anarchy", novel, review
First published: Analog, March 1972.
Rating: B