Jon Bing's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (short story, color blindness): When men refused to see colors!

The key idea is an unusual form of conjectured color blindness: humans living for generations on a cold, always snowy, world with no colors have their vision changed to the extent that they can no longer see bright colors! At least their brains don't register them anymore.

Story summary.

This is a shipwreck story. A star faring humanity, spread across many worlds. A shipwreck forces an unscheduled landing on the barren snowy world of its small crew. A world that was colonized by humans generations ago, but was forgotten.

But all attempts of the stranded travelers to get the attention of natives fail, until a man finally gets the idea...

Fact sheet.

First published: in English translation in Donald A Wollheim (ed)'s "The Best from the Rest of the World: European Science Fiction" (1976). Translated from the original the Norwegian by Steven T Murray.
Rating: B.

L Sprague de Camp's "Two Yards of Dragon" (novelette, fantasy, humor): Adventures dragon hunting

Among the best of de Camp, & one of the more entertaining stories by anyone.

Note: Dialogues are in funny English: E.g., "an ye were Emmerhard's son-in-law, he'd use his influence to get you your spurs. Here ye be, a strapping youth of three-and-twenty, not yet knighted. 'Tis a disgrace to our lineage."
I didn't follow every word, but there was no difficulty following the intent.

Story summary.

Enchanter Baldonius has promised the hand of his daughter Lusina to Eudoric Dambertson, esquire, provided the young man can bring him two square yards of dragon hide! Story is mostly adventures of Eudoric on this dragon hunt.

Collected in.

1. "The Best of L Sprague de Camp".

Fact sheet.

First published: Lin Carter (ed)'s "Flashing Swords! #3: Warriors and Wizards" (1976).
Rating: A.
Related: Stories of L Sprague de Camp.

Hal Clement's "A Question of Guilt" (novelette, medical research): Dark underbelly of healing profession

This is noteworthy among Clement's stories for 2 reasons:

1. It has the darkest ending among all his stories I've read so far. Should be among the darkest by anyone.
2. It's set in the past - during the time of Roman empire - rather than future. Of course, that doesn't come in the way of it being Clement's hallmark hard sf.

Story summary.

Having lost 3 of his sons to a genetic disorder that made their blood very slow to coagulate (meaning lot of blood loss on minor cuts), Marc of Bistrita is desperate to do whatever it takes to fix the problem that is also affecting his fourth & sole 5 year old surviving son Kyros.

He has tried everywhere & no healer in Roman empire seems to have an idea. During his own efforts to discover a cure, Marc will end up kidnapping & killing a little child from neighboring village.

By the end of the story, his son & wife Judith would be dead. And he would be determined to continue with research, with the support of his slave/maid Elitha - no matter how many more children need to be kidnapped & killed as guinea pigs!!

A curious gadget.

Main idea Marc pursues during the story is a gadget for blood transfusion. Both he & his wife are willing to donate as much blood as necessary to save the bleeding child, but how to transfer this blood?

He cooks up a funnel. Here is how he makes it:

1. Boil the head of a viper. Then carefully extract a fang. Nature has made its end small enough to enter a human vein!
2. It's larger end will be connected to the hollow of the stem of a chicken's wing. (I didn't know the stems of birds' wings were hollow!)
3. A cup of gold will be attacked to the top of the stem. Gold itself is easily available in the form of local currency (gold coins), & is easy enough to melt at home! He will use a clay vessel to shape it.
4. Joints of cup & feather, & feather & fang - are sealed with some sort of readily available sticky material.

Idea is to make a cut in the arm of donor, pour the blood in the cup with fang end connected to child's vein!

Contraption won't work because both parents have normal blood & it quickly coagulates in the hollow of the fang.

His own son will die when his wife tried donating the blood to bleeding child. Faced with coagulation problem in fang, she simply inserts feather into child's vein - bleeding the child even more. Guilt will make her kill herself.

Fact sheet.

First published: Gerald W Page (Ed)'s "The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series IV" (1976). DAW Books.
Rating: A.
Related: Stories of Hal Clement.

John Varley's "Bagatelle" (novelette, terrorism, free): Defusing a human bomb

In spite of the subject, it's a very light read - sometimes even funny.

Story summary.

Hans Leiter has agreed to become an unusual kind of suicide bomber - a cyborg bomb. Stripped of body - just his brain & nerves leading to it will go into this bomb. And it is a nuclear bomb - capable of devastating a whole city. The cyborg that is the man + bomb + a vehicle + the sensors that let the cyborg perceive & respond to environment. The bomb has planted itself in the middle of a busy shopping area, & has announced its intention to blast in 4 hours!

This is the story of defusing this complex bomb - Chief of Municipal Police for New Dresden, Anna-Louise Bach, has hired the bomb disposal expert Roger Birkson for the job. New Dresden is a city on moon, where the action happens.

Fact sheet.

First published: Galaxy, October 1976.
Rating: A.
Download full text from Internet Archive.
An audio version of this story is included, among other things, in Aural Delights #32 podcast of StarShipSofa.
Included in Ellen Datlow's SciFiction classics.
Related: Stories about terrorism, cyborgs, or moon.

Hal Clement's "Longline" (novelette, first contact): What if speed of light is not a limit but a divider?

What if we share space with a different kind of matter - stuff that cannot move slower than light! This is the story of human first contact with "tachyon people" made up of this alternate stuff.

Story summary.

Early part of the story is dedicated to establish alienness of "these tachyon people". They are supposed to be incomprehensible to us, as we are incomprehensible to them; this part is generally in the same spirit as Terry Carr's "The Dance of the Changer and the Three" (included in SciFiction's selected online classics).

There are parts in this section I found completely incomprehensible. These aliens cannot move slower than light, yet they can sort-of reverse direction of their movement, & can, in fact, stop in the sense that we understand the term (or the way I understood it!).

1. To them, "direction" is "as abstract a notion as I've ever heard of, and I can't put it into ordinary words."
2. "momentum is naturally as meaningless as direction, kinetic energy almost equally so, & the interactions between forces & the various fundamental particles follow very different rules."
3. These aliens don't have a "shape" in the sense we understand the term. They cannot perceive most of the matter we perceive - even most stars!
4. They're comfortable "Inside a neutron star"!
5. Their "time is not really commensurable with that in the Einstein-matter universe."
6. Their travel between two points comprises of a series of "casts" - move for a certain time (usually overshooting the target), then move the other way (except that other way is not exactly reverse!) decreasing the error, then repeat this process; humans perceive these movements as confined to some sort of a hemisphere centered at target location (if I recall correctly).
7. There is other weirdness.
   

To help us comprehend the weirdness, author offers this association: "just as a man groups the patterns of electrons & other force fields around him into perceived objects, so did Wattimlan & Feroxtant. A pattern capable of identity maintenance, growth, & duplication, which maintained its existence by ingesting & restructuring other such patterns, might be called a lion or a shark by a human being; such an entity would also possess an identification symbol in the minds of the explorers".

Experienced Feroxtant & young Wattimlan form the crew of the alien expedition to Sirius system - from someplace. A large human expedition also arrives at Sirius system about the same time. There is no way the two sides can perceive each other - except for neutrino discharge that accompanies the movement of both alien ship & human ship. "Longline", of title, is the name of the ship aliens have traveled in.

Both sides are puzzled by unexplained neutrino source, until Jeb Garabed of human expedition gets the wild idea. And generates first few integers & their squares in the form neutrino pulses by controlled movement of a small lifeboat; & gets responses with next higher numbers & their squares - thus beginning the process of contact.

See also.

1. A Bertram Chandler's "Chance Encounter": Another first contact story where aliens are made up of weird matter.

Fact sheet.

First published: Jack Dann & George Zebrowski (Ed)'s anthology Faster Than Light (1976).
Rating: A
Related: All stories of Hal Clement.

* Kono Tensei's "Hikari" (short story, fantasy): Normal humans being overrun by "luminous folks"!

A strange family - man, woman, & their three kids - are moving through the countryside. They are "not human... I don't even think they're alive... They don't sleep... They don't eat... They don't even sweat. They don't get angry. They don't argue. All they do is smile." When a blade cuts their skin, no blood pours out - there are no innards inside - only strange light shines out! Title is apparently the Japanese word for light.

Whichever town they land in soon ends up getting converted to their own kind - light folks. Rest of the people end up abandoning the town. So humanity is sort of getting divided into two - normal flesh-and-blood people, & light folks. Former are getting to be a minority, & they're afraid.

Collected in.

1. Gene van Troyer & Grania Davis (Ed)'s "Speculative Japan: Outstanding Tales of Japanese Science Fiction and Fantasy".
   

Fact sheet.

First published: Shukan Shosetsu, 3 May 1976; translated by Dana Lewis.
Rating: C
Download full text.

Note: Why is this post so short?