Lester del Rey. Mortals and Monsters (1965) Del Rey was a good journeyman writer. He supplied the pulp fiction trade with reliably entertaining tales, many of which suggested deeper questions than his protagonists tangled with. The irony wasn’t lost on his readers, though: The guy who invented time-travel by stealing a time-travel machine from a museum erected in his memory gets himself trapped in an eternal loop, a whirlpool in the river of time. The reader exists outside the fictional universe and sees the loop that’s hidden from the thief. So who or what is the observer of our universe, watching us drifting on the river of time?
A man whose body rejects the rejuvenation treatments realises that a limited life-span has more value than an unlimited one. An autonomous robot who doesn’t understand instinct learns what it is when his team recreates a human. An alien stranded on Earth manages to persuade a human to help him get home (but it’s a tougher story than the movie ET). And many more. Pulp fiction is underrated: the authors use the expected tropes and stereotypes, but the must make their tales newer than last month’s publications, so they ask questions that can lead us into the most subtle and profound of the enigmas that puzzle us.
A good collection. ** to ***
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