ON OUR WAY TO THE FUTURE edited by Terry Carr

TITLE: ON OUR WAY TO THE FUTURE
EDITED BY: Terry Carr
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Anthology
PUBLISHER: Ace Books, New York, 1970
FORMAT: Paperback, 253 pages.

That's the various general details, here's a listing of the contents:

• Introduction by Terry Carr
• Greenslaves by Frank Herbert (1965)
• A Better Mousehole by Edgar Pangborn (1965)
• Ballenger's People by Kris Neville (1967)
• King Solomon's Ring by Roger Zelazny (1963)
• Sundance by Robert Silverberg (1969)
• Be Merry by Algis Budrys (1966)
• Under the Dragon's Tail by Philip Latham (1966)
• A Taste for Dostoevsky by Brian W. Aldiss (1967)
• Cyclops by Fritz Leiber (1965)
• Goblin Night by James H. Schmitz (1965)

We've certainly got an interesting anthology here, an oldish one from 1970. It's also the first anthology posting (but definitely will not be the last) on this blog from another of my favourite SF anthologists, Terry Carr.

This anthology isn't restricted to a single theme, as were the two Robert Silverberg anthologies in my previous posts, and is more of a general multi-theme "ten science fiction adventures in tomorrow" kind of thing, charting our journey into infinity, our way into the future. There's a wider variety of stories here by big-name SF authors, stories which, up until the time of publication, had never appeared in paperback before.

As usual, I'll continue working my way through the stories in this, and the previous anthologies, completely at random, in a totally haphazard fashion, pretty much as the whim takes me and when I get free time to do so. I usually just lift a book, any book, from the "to read" stack, and read any story that takes my fancy. Next time, I might do the same, but with a completely different anthology, and so on.

I don't have any real system for reading, but usually pick my favourite authors first, then work my way down to least favourite (or authors I haven't encountered before), The main postings themselves are more for providing general overall information about the various anthologies and individual author collections, but will also be interspersed with posts on the individual stories as and when I have read them.

"Try and Change the Past" by Fritz Leiber (1958)

TITLE: "Try and Change the Past" (1958)
AUTHOR: Fritz Leiber
CATEGORY: Short Story
SUB-CATEGORY: Time Travel, Temporal Paradox
SOURCE: TRIPS IN TIME edited by Robert Silverberg (Wildside Press, 1977)
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: Astounding, March 1958

Okay, I'll just start picking stories at random from the two Robert Silverberg edited anthologies that I've been reading. The first one is from TRIPS IN TIME, and is "Try and Change the Past" by Fritz Leiber.

In the never-ending temporal conflict between the Snakes and the Spiders, one particularly shifty member of the Snakes (a well-deserved description, in the case of this dude) gets the bright idea of illicitly using his side's time travel facilities to go back and change his own personal history, so that he doesn't die and end up fighting in this damned war. Unfortunately for him, he ends up finding out the hard way that the four-dimensional spacetime universe has its own Law of the Conservation of Reality, and doesn't like things to be changed, no siree.

"Try and Change the Past" is a clever and quite amusing story set during the Change War milieu of Leiber's classic time travel/temporal paradox novel THE BIG TIME. The story was first published in the March 1958 edition of Astounding, at the same time that THE BIG TIME was being serialized in the March and April 1958 editions of Galaxy magazine.

I've always enjoyed Leiber's writing, both SF and fantasy (despite the fact that I'm not a huge fan of fantasy in general), and THE BIG TIME and its Change War setting has always been a favourite of mine. This particular short story, while I certainly wouldn't rank it among my "most favourite short stories of all time", is still an enjoyable and worthy addition to the Change War universe.

Rated: 3.0 out of 5.0