Alpha 4 Book

I'm continuing with my reading of Robert Silverberg's Alpha series of anthologies. Alpha 4 is another strong entry in the series, with great stories by Edgar Pangborn, Thomas Disch, Damon Knight, R.A. Lafferty, James Blish, Philip Jose Farmer, and others.

"Angel's Egg" by Edgar Pangborn is perhaps the strongest story in the book. A man finds a strange blue transparent glowing egg in a hen's nest. The egg hatches a small creature that looks like an angel that can talk to him telepathically. This is a remarkable, memorable first contact story.

When I reviewed Alpha 3, I said that the Phil Farmer story was the weakest in the book: OK, a fun read, but a lesser story that the others in the volume. "Mother," the Farmer story in Alpha 4, is much better. It's one of his most famous stories. A young man who is heavily dependent on his mother crashes with her on an alien planet. He is grabbed and pulled into a large egg like structure, which turns out to be a living being. This being, this mother, provides food, warmth, and safety for her children and for the young man she's captured. It's all Farmer at his most Freudian.

"Casablanca" by Thomas Disch is a chilling story of two Americans who are vacationing in Casablanca when a nuclear war breaks out. They are isolated and scared, and things are not made better by the fact that both have aspects of "the ugly American."

"Dio" by Damon Knight is set on a future Earth when everyone is immortal and most spend their time idly. It looks at what happens when one of them becomes mortal and has only a limited time left to live.

"We All Die Naked" by James Blish is a story about James Blish that is about climate change, written in 1969, before that was really a focus for anyone. In Blish's story, the final collapse comes faster that it's happening for us, and he also focuses on other issues like waste management and pollution. But it's a bleak look at the future.

I don't think there are any weak stories in this one. Well worth reading.