Richard A Lovett's "Carpe Mañana" (collection, stasis fields, free)

This is a themed collection of 4 independent stories, each exploring the implications of a rather old trope - what would the world look like if stasis field closets - closed volumes of space where time could be made to stop for specified period of real time at the press of a button - were common place consumer durables?

Table of contents.

1. "Tabitha in the Box" (B): A kid, bored because her only friend is going away during the weekend, wants to spend the weekend in the stasis closet.
2. "Night and Day" (B): A man is depressed on winter nights - so he begins spending them in stasis closet. A woman loves skiing - so chooses to live only during winters...
3. "Justice Delayed" (B): A death row convict is put in stasis field during the years the conviction goes through appeals, so he doesn't end up living that period! Don't ask why his years are taken away with friends who've aged if the sentence was overturned during appeal.
4. "A Hundred Billion and Counting" (B): Overpopulation has driven the government to rule that everyone cannot live simultaneously - so majority is in stasis fields at any given time.
   
   This story is obviously a rehash of one of the most famous stories of this class - Philip Jose Farmer's overpopulation dystopia "Sliced-Crosswise Only-on-Tuesday World" (download) - a story that was expanded later into a trilogy of novels.

Fact sheet.

First published: Abyss & Apex, #31 (Q3 2009).
Rating: B.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Listed in Rich Horton's "best of 2009" from Abyss & Apex magazine
Related: Stories that feature a stasis field.

Christopher Anvil's "Gadget vs Trend" (short story, humor, free): Small Brother get a weapon to fight the Big Brother

Interesting illustration of the classic formula for a good science fiction short story - take a simple idea, & keep beating it to get the last drop of juice you can get out of it.

Story summary.

An apparently innocuous invention - a soundproofing device - seems to have such wide ranging applications that it's causing major social upheaval...

Device in question is an electrically powered gadget called "QuietWall": attach it to a surface like a wall or door, & it will act as an impenetrable barrier to sound. Except that it's an impenetrable barrier to other things too...

See also.

1. Arthur Clarke's "Silence Please": Another piece of humor set around a sound proofing device, but with a very different plot.
2. Arthur Clarke's "What Goes Up": Another story with a device that has erected a practically impenetrable barrier to some volume of space. But this "barrier" has interesting properties, among them - it behaves differently on the two sides.
   

Collected in.

1. Isaac Asimov & Martin H Greenberg (Eds)' "Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 24 (1962)".
   

Fact sheet.

First published: Analog, October 1962.
Rating: A.
Download full text from Webscription.
Listed among the stories from John Campbell's Astounding/Analog.
Related: Stories of Christopher Anvil.

C L Moore's "Tryst in Time" (novelette, science fiction): A romance spanning multiple lifetimes!

While Moore throws in some unconventional ideas on how to build a time machine & a short discourse on philosophical implications of time travel here, overall it's among the least entertaining stories from her.

It might have been non-boring at flash fiction length; at current length, it's so draggy author herself has to tell us near end (via protagonist's loud thinking) that story end is near & we should not yet throw it out!

Story summary.

Eric Rosner is a restless man of 30 whom the circumstances have handed out a time machine (via Walter Dow, a friend inventor). The machine doesn't have very good controls - in fact, you have no clue to where you will end up - in past or future, or how far away.

This machine also works on a different principle than H G Wells' (as also the legions inspired by that): in Wells' machine, you are traveling as in just another vehicle - only the dimension across which you are moving is time & you can control speed. In Moore's version, you "anchor to that bedrock of essential, underlying inertia which is the base upon which matter builds & ... allow time itself to whirl by! ... & 'up-anchor' in another age". This anchoring is done by increasing "your inertia sufficiently to make you immune to time & space & matter. You will be inert mentally & physically. You'll sink down, so to speak, to the bedrock, while time flows past you." You throw a switch to begin this anchoring process. Machine will travel "until one small part, insulated from the inertia in a tiny time space of its own, trips the switches again & up-anchors."

So during travel, you yourself are effectively in some kind of stasis field. Machine is shoulder-worn via a harness.

Similar putting accepted wisdom on its head is also seen in Henry Kuttner's - "The Big Night" (I don't know if she contributed to that story). Here, hyperspace travel is by physically throwing your spaceship into the faster-than-light moving "currents" of hyperspace, & let these currents carry you to destination!

When discussing time travel, we also get a dose of philosophy: "I can transport you into the past, & you can create events there which never took place in the past we know - but the events are not new. They were ordained from the beginning, if you took that particular path. You are simply embarking upon a different path into a different future, a fixed & preordained future, yet one which will be strange to you because it lies outside your own layer of experience. So you have infinite freedom in all your actions, yet everything you can possibly do is already fixed in time."

Anyway, the current story is not really of time machine; that's just an aid. Once the time travel adventure starts, story is really a collection of lots of tiny stories. Time traveler ends up somewhere - always amidst people, though in different civilizations. Most of the time, he meets or sees a woman who seems to unconsciously recognize him & always looks the same; in many cases, she's about to die a horrible death. Slowly, he will realize the object of his travels - to fall in love with this woman.

Only it didn't quite come across as love. I mean - she's so completely dispensable! She exists in all time & he has a time machine; so if the version he's seeing now is about to die or cannot be had for some reason, he will meet her in a different avatar at a different time!

Of course, in the last episode we will see the happy union of this timeless romance.

At least one episode of his adventures is set in the mythological Cyclopean civilization (something from Greek mythology?).

There are parts near end that sound like from one of the schools of ancient Indian philosophy!

See also.

1. Paul J Nahin's "Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, & Science Fiction" makes a short reference to this story.

Collected in.

1. "The Best of C L Moore".

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding Stories, December 1936.
Rating: C
Related: All stories of C L Moore.

END.

** C M Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" (novelette, satire)

A variation on "selling ice to Eskimos" theme. A no-morals man from our time ends up in a future where average IQ is 45, & there is an exclusive breed of smarter people confined to Antarctica. In a deal that promises to make him the ultimate dictator, this man helps the smart ones kill off rest of humanity by selling them a story that makes them want to march off to their death.

Collected in.

1. Ben Bova (Ed)'s "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two A".
   

Fact sheet.

First published: Galaxy, April 1951.
Rating: A

Note: Why is this post so short?

* James Blish's "Common Time" (short story, science fiction): Speculations on how time will behave on an FTL ship

Assume you could build a space ship that moves faster than light. This story is some speculations on how time would behave for an observer inside the ship, & at terminals of the trip. Story is told from the perspective of the pilot inside the ship - to go to Alpha Centauri system & return. He meets intelligent locals there too!

Fact sheet.

First published: ...
Rating: B
Listed in "William G Contento's Top Ten Most Reprinted Stories".

Note: Why is this post so short?

** Fredric Brown's "Arena" (novelette, free)

A rather complicated version of gladiators' fight to death for amusement of onlookers in ancient Rome.

A decisive war is about to be fought between humans invading aliens from another galaxy beyond the orbit of Pluto. But god-like aliens with powers similar to Arisians & Eddorians of E E Smith's Lensman series have intervened: a single human soldier & a single soldier of invaders, stripped of their weapons, must fight to death in an "arena" - a very exotic environment. Winner's race will live; other's will be destroyed by these gods!

Collected in.

1. Robert Silverberg (Ed)'s "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume One, 1929-1964".
2. Isaac Asimov & Martin H Greenberg (Eds)' "Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 6 (1944)".
   

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, June 1944.
Rating: B.
Download full text, or comic book adaptation.

Note: Why is this post so short?

Larry Niven's "There Is a Tide" (short story, science fiction): Is this exotic world an alien trap?

Another space opera on weird world - humans fighting aliens & winning kind. I am getting rather bored with this kind of stories.

Story summary.

Year is 2830 AD. Louis Gridley Wu, "one hundred and eighty years old", is taking a pleasure trip a bit beyond the fringes of Known Space - alone. And he is always looking for devices called "Slaver stasis box" - sort of vaults holding valuables from long vanished aliens that seem to be scattered around galaxy.

He will spot one that looks like a good candidate near an unnamed planet. He will be challenged by an alien ship that has also just reached there. They will make a deal - both will land on the planet, & toss a coin. Winner takes the booty.

They go down to a beach on the planet's surface. While the coin tossing is going on, alien ship has vanished. Turns out the human was alone but alien wasn't. His friends are going to take the booty anyway. I don't recall how they planned to take the stranded alien - probably by using force against Louis.

So there is this one alien without his ship, & Louis with his ship - on this alien beach. That is when there is a big tide - sea level has gone substantially down near them. What caused it? Planet doesn't have a moon.

Brave deduction, & Louis concludes - the vault they saw above is not a vault but "ten feet of nearly solid neutronium, probably torn loose from a neutron star" (how?), & with "ten million gravities at the surface"; it apparently look similar to valuable stasis boxes. The two run panicky to warn the aliens that have gone to pick up the booty - too late. They will be eaten up by the neutron star.

Human is the kind type. Rigs up an environment for alien on his ship, & promises safe deposition on his planet.

Fact sheet.

"There Is a Tide", short story, review
First published: Galaxy magazine, July 1968.
Rating: B

Robert Heinlein's "Beyond This Horizon" (novel): A society of supermen

Main thread of the story is plausible enough, if psychologically extremely uncomfortable: a couple can choose to have the best child they can possibly have by carefully selecting a specific egg/sperm pair over their productive life, rather than an average child they normally have by random egg/sperm combination.

While the story treads on much darker things possible with genetics, I find even the apparently sensible thread extremely troublesome. While Heinlein's advocacy is generally limited to sane things like choosing children less immune to diseases, couples will eventually apply their own (obviously) definition of best. Results, even of a simple application like sex selection, can be extremely dangerous - as is currently happening in the Indian state of Punjab - the worst sex ratio in India, & still worsening.

Since such selection & more is going to be possible in days ahead, we might as well begin getting uncomfortable today - for whatever good it will do!

Even apart from the dark subject, this is not quite a normal Heinlein story. His political & economic views are muddled here, & the story keeps going on many irrelevant tangents.

Main thread of the story reads somewhat like Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". I collect the quotes here.

Story summary.
I think the story is set 100 or 200 years in future; I don't remember the dateline - it's provided indirectly. Place is the Capital of a Republic - some future version of some place in the US; and it appears to be part of some larger worldwide political grouping.

Gene selection is common in this society, though you can choose to stay natural. Naturals are the lower caste.

There is a benign government, "Policy Board" at highest level we meet in the story. They maintain the various gene lines; they advise who will mate whom; they choose the best kids; they raise most kids in well run nurseries. Too much wishful thinking, if you ask me.

The economic system has a very substantial communist tilt - something very unlike every Heinlein story I've read to-date.

Hamilton Felix is a man derived from the best genetic stock. His marriage to Longcourt Phyllis is being pushed for by Claude Mordan, a government bureaucrat who will eventually become a good friend. Longcourt is a "fifth cousin" of Hamilton, is also derived from the best stock, & they together have promising gene combinations.

Hamilton is resisting; girl is willing; eventually they will marry & have two kids - Theobald, a boy, & younger Justina. Turns out Theobald is telepathic! But that is a different thread.

This whole arrangement sounded like a very typical Suraj Barajatya film - replace horoscope match with gene compatibility, old friend of the dad that does marriage fixing with government bureaucrat, & minus a lot of color that makes these movies lovable - at least for first viewing.

Then there are villains. Very Hitlerian right-wingers. Want to keep the best genetic stock; breed people to meet government's needs; & kill off the inferiors. There are some ugly scenes, but they don't last long. They are led by McFee Norbert. When the revolution comes, it is quickly crushed.

And that is where the story should have ended. But it continues for half as long again, & this remaining part is very lame. Main thread is about the joys of parenting. A second thread is a governmental project to "enumerate and investigate all of the problems of philosophy", enlarged from originally proposed & simpler "effort to investigate the question of survival after death"! Third thread is the telepathic ability of Theobald.

All through the story, yet another lame thread is also running: life of Hamilton's close friend Monroe-Alpha Clifford (code number 32-847-106 B62!); his divorce with his orthowife Larsen Hazel; his erratic love affair & eventual marriage to Hartnett Marion; & his adventures with revolutionaries.

There is yet another significant thread through the story: a young man named John Smith Darlington was conned (when drunk) in the year 1926 to enter a stasis machine, & he ends up arriving in the time of this story! We see his confusion adjusting to this world. Best part of this thread is a humorous description of the game of US football; see near the end of quotes.

Fact sheet.
Beyond This Horizon, novel, review
First published: Originally published as 2-part serial in Astounding Science Fiction, April/May 1942, under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald
Rating: B

See also.

1. All stories about technology assisted human baby making.
2. This story ranked (by quality) among all stories.