Exiles Book

Evil Earths is an anthology that belonged to my Dad and one I found stored in the garage during my moving process, the copy so old the front and back covers were missing as well as anything past the latter half of William Tenn's "Down Among the Dead". As such I can only review some of the stories here, starting with Chad Oliver's and Charles Beaumont's "The Last Word."
The story starts with a, uh, physicist? calmly noting his time machine has sent him so far into the future he found himself as the Last Man in the World, so he decides to go back so far he finds himself as the First Man in the World. The creation of humanity is apparently theorized here as having something to do with Martians, green men who leave him with a fifties housewife in an android body as a reward for him fixing their ship. Yep, a man helps some other dudes out and they actually reward him with a woman. With whom he has a super special son. He gets tired of the wifey machine, ditches her by traveling to the future, where he finds the Martians also rewarding him by saving humanity from anything that could kill us.
As a result, a highly complex machine runs the world and imprisons Claude for curiosity. Wifemachine Eve, who had stowed away, apparently "meshed circuits" with the machine, so Claude "killed" it by taking the advice of Son and unplugging it. Civilization is destroyed and Claude decides the best way to restart humanity is by producing a female child with Eve, as a wife for Son. What.
If you thought Nora Helmer was an exaggerated take on the role of women in the mid 1900's, read this story knowing it probably wasn't being ironic and it's pretty evident Henrik Ibsen had a point.
The most memorable story was probably Philip K Dick's "The Golden Man", which inspired the loose, looose film adaptation "Next". This is a strange story to read in the present day as it doesn't just bring up questions and observations about humanity's reaction to that which is different, but also provokes thoughts about the role of women as interesting and disturbing when applying fridge logic to it. Anita Farris's role takes a different meaning beyond being the Director of the Semantics Agency and Baines's fiance when the mutant Cris Johnson bursts into her room.
Anita is conveniently midway through undressing when he barges in on her and she is at first appropriately terrified and ready to strike him. When he touches her though, grabs her arms before she can attack him she finds herself captivated by his beauty and deduces he specifically came to her because he knew she wouldn't-couldn't-hurt him. She ends up so captivated by his beauty that she has sex with him, then gets him out of the building so he could escape while leaving her behind.
She realizes she had been tricked and the other agents figure out that this too is one of Johnson's powers beyond seeing the future, to be able to seduce women with just his looks to the point where they lose all sense, even their will as Anita thinks of it. Which means he essentially rapes them. This whole concept turns the main female character in the story into a major liability as well as a hapless victim of the male mutant, adding a whole new level of creepy to Cris Johnson.
Allen K. Lang's "Guest Expert" treats women in a similarly unfortunate fashion by pulling a Thanos' Snap with gender in mind. It also raises questions similar to that film, of how much better would the world be with significantly less life? Other stories like J.S. Campbell's "Film of Death", Howard Fast's "The Wound" and Richard Stockham's "The Valley" explore similar themes of humanity's effects on the ecological system as well as how we could possibly help, showing that while aspects of this anthology are dated as hell, others demonstrated at least some awareness of the state of things and used this to delve into some genuinely creative ideas about how to address it.