The Second Night of Summer, by James H. Schmitz
This story’s most interesting element, and probably its best claim to being in this anthology, is that the primary mover of the story is Granny Wannattel. Published in Galaxy Magazine in 1950, Wannattel is your basic Sci-Fi hero except for one important thing -- she is a woman -- putting Schmitz at the forefront of making space for women in the genre (indeed, some women would later name him as an influence in their future careers). Wannattel is a sort of psionic agent (yep, telepathy is ubiquitous in the Sci-Fi of this period), who comes to a planet to find and destroy a transmitter that will awaken a dormant hive-mind species, who will overrun the planet and wipe out the human(oid) population on the planet. It is a tricky business because to find the transmitter, Wannattel must enter the hive minds with her telepathy just as they are awakening and responding to the transmitter. What makes Wannatel such a cool character and Schmitz so important is that she just happens to be a woman. There are no men for her to love, there is no future of marriage for her to dream about, there is only the job at hand and her doing a little recruiting for her agency. And this was in 1950. Impressive and worthy of a place in this anthology. However, I must add a caveat: it is one of the least interesting plots in the anthology, making it a fair to middling story at best. Such a shame. Perhaps something else from Schmitz’s Agent of Vega series would have been better.
No comments:
Post a Comment