The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction
edited by Isaac Asimov, Charles Waugh, and Martin Greenberg
Fawcett Crest
1980
The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction is an anthology of short stories that are ostensibly about things like pride, lust, envy, etc. As a collection, it's not very coherent. There are nine stories - three set in something like the present, the rest at varying points in the future. And while the book itself was published in 1980, six of the stories are from the 50s, two from the 60s, and only one from the 70s. There are nine because gluttony gets two (ha ha) and avarice and covetousness are counted separately.
It kind of feels like some of the stories got picked because Asimov had a publishing intern run a search for ones that literally include the name of the vice somewhere in the text. A couple seem to include a character who actually has the vice, a couple others perhaps seem like ironic commentary on the vice, and in the other cases, the connection is more tenuous. To the extent the stories have anything in common, it's that most of them would make okay Twilight Zone episodes.
It kind of feels like some of the stories got picked because Asimov had a publishing intern run a search for ones that literally include the name of the vice somewhere in the text. A couple seem to include a character who actually has the vice, a couple others perhaps seem like ironic commentary on the vice, and in the other cases, the connection is more tenuous. To the extent the stories have anything in common, it's that most of them would make okay Twilight Zone episodes.
Jack Vance's "Sail 25" gets sloth. It's about a student crew taking a solar sail spaceship to Mars and back. Their hardass, House-like instructor spends the whole flight in his captain's quarters, telling them they'll live or die on their own merits, and berating for not living up to his standards. He's probably also sabotaging the ship to really put them through their paces. One nice detail - when we first meet the instructor, his appearance suggests he was badly burned; half the story later, his one helpful suggestion is that he once saw a student set on fire by the reflection from the sail. In retrospect, he himself must've been that student.
Judith Merril's "Peeping Tom," the lust selection, is about a guy who learns psychic powers from a village elder during the Vietnam War and uses them to have sex with a lot of women. This story and the next one probably fit the supposed theme of the book best; they were also the two I enjoyed least.
For envy, we get "The Invisible Man Murder Case" by Henry Slesar. An aging locked-room mystery writer who hates the new pulp and noir crime novels uses an invisibility device to commit seemingly impossible murders and drive up sales of his own books. This story was at least twice as long as it needed to be, making everything belabored and obvious.
Judith Merril's "Peeping Tom," the lust selection, is about a guy who learns psychic powers from a village elder during the Vietnam War and uses them to have sex with a lot of women. This story and the next one probably fit the supposed theme of the book best; they were also the two I enjoyed least.
For envy, we get "The Invisible Man Murder Case" by Henry Slesar. An aging locked-room mystery writer who hates the new pulp and noir crime novels uses an invisibility device to commit seemingly impossible murders and drive up sales of his own books. This story was at least twice as long as it needed to be, making everything belabored and obvious.
Asimov chose one of his own stories for pride - "Galley Slave," which is about a robot company that leases a university a new robot that's supposed to free up faculty time for research by performing 'intellectual drudgery' like copy-editing the galley proofs of books before they're published ... or grading student papers! I was disappointed that Asimov didn't seem to consider the possible downsides of this robot - in light of all the downsides we're experiencing from generative AI right now - but in fairness, the invention of Spell Check, for example, probably did in fact mostly enable people to do more of the good parts of writing.
The story takes place at a trial after something has gone wrong. It turns out the ignorant, prejudiced sociology professor tricked the poor robot into sabotaging his forthcoming book, then ordered it to lie about this. Then he sued the manufacturer for the robot ruining his professional reputation. Fortunately, the heroic robot psychologist deduces what happened, and tricks the sociologist into revealing what he did at trial.
Asimov seems pretty triumphalist about all this, as though this was the one and only possible way someone could misuse the robot. I feel like if someone can get the robot to hurt themselves to embarrass the manufacturer, they can probably get the robot to hurt someone else for more comprehensible motives, a possibility Asimov doesn't really seem to consider. And in our world today, the people getting killed by self-driving cars, for example, aren't activists committing suicide, they're not even the victims of a hacker using the cars as weapons, they're simply people who put too much trust in a device and a manufacturer that doesn't deserve it.
For anger, we get "Divine Madness" by Roger Zelazny, a good and very short story that doesn't at all belong in this collection, about a man grieving his girlfriend who recently died in a car crash. He then lives several days backward in time, then resumes going forward at just the right moment to fix what he regrets and stop her from driving off and getting in a wreck after they argued. The descriptions of time moving backward were quite well-done.
For gluttony, we get two by Frederick Pohl. First, the best story in here, "The Midas Plague." In a future where all manufacturing is automated, the robots who make everything make way too much of it. Allowing any of this stuff to be 'wasted' by storing it, destroying it, recycling it, is unthinkable. And so, it is every citizen's patriotic duty to consume, use, and use up all this bounty. Everyone has ration cards to track their required consumption, with the poor required to live in overstuffed mansions while the rich get to enjoy minimalism.
The story takes place at a trial after something has gone wrong. It turns out the ignorant, prejudiced sociology professor tricked the poor robot into sabotaging his forthcoming book, then ordered it to lie about this. Then he sued the manufacturer for the robot ruining his professional reputation. Fortunately, the heroic robot psychologist deduces what happened, and tricks the sociologist into revealing what he did at trial.
Asimov seems pretty triumphalist about all this, as though this was the one and only possible way someone could misuse the robot. I feel like if someone can get the robot to hurt themselves to embarrass the manufacturer, they can probably get the robot to hurt someone else for more comprehensible motives, a possibility Asimov doesn't really seem to consider. And in our world today, the people getting killed by self-driving cars, for example, aren't activists committing suicide, they're not even the victims of a hacker using the cars as weapons, they're simply people who put too much trust in a device and a manufacturer that doesn't deserve it.
For anger, we get "Divine Madness" by Roger Zelazny, a good and very short story that doesn't at all belong in this collection, about a man grieving his girlfriend who recently died in a car crash. He then lives several days backward in time, then resumes going forward at just the right moment to fix what he regrets and stop her from driving off and getting in a wreck after they argued. The descriptions of time moving backward were quite well-done.
For gluttony, we get two by Frederick Pohl. First, the best story in here, "The Midas Plague." In a future where all manufacturing is automated, the robots who make everything make way too much of it. Allowing any of this stuff to be 'wasted' by storing it, destroying it, recycling it, is unthinkable. And so, it is every citizen's patriotic duty to consume, use, and use up all this bounty. Everyone has ration cards to track their required consumption, with the poor required to live in overstuffed mansions while the rich get to enjoy minimalism.
Pohl's not trying to establish a rigorously plausible future economy here, he's writing satire. And at one go, his upside-down world manages capture the hardship of going hungry and doing without on WWII-era rations, and the shocking reversal of burgeoning post-war consumer economy, and the way that new forms of credit could lead to debt traps. It's kind of brilliant that he speak to both experiences at once!
And I think he manages to speak to our current situation, when people are using LLMs and generative AI to pump an endless streams of 'content' into an already oversaturated internet, where everyone wants likes and clicks and subscribes, our money sure, but especially our attention and our time. Pohl's world reminds me of how online ads are just riots of bright colors, autoplaying videos, annoying sounds, while so many people who are able are creating quiet minimalist spaces instead.
Pohl's story tells us nothing about gluttony, though it does force us to think about what counts as 'waste.' I say this as someone who only even read this book because I was trying to pare down my bookshelves, but somehow it felt like 'a waste' to get rid of it without reading it first - an impossible standard to follow in every case, but a trap that caught me this time nonetheless.
The Internet Archive has a copy of the story as it originally appeared in Galaxy magazine, and an audio play version produced by the BBC.
Pohl's "The Man Who Ate the World" takes place a bit in the future, when mandatory over-consumption has been replaced by Star Trek-like post-scarcity. Except for one man, who grew up during the bad old days, and is making a problem by using too much because he's trying to be a virtuous person. It's fine, but not as interesting as the original.
Averice is Poul Anderson's "Margin of Profit," which kind of reads like a math word problem padded out to a story. Space pirates are kidnapping and enslaving crews in one region of space. The crew union is threatening a strike rather than keep flying through that region. What's an interstellar shipping magnate to do? Anderson's guy heroically does the math, and discovers that as long as he remains sociopathically indifferent to crew safety, he can arm a fraction of his ships and eventually outlast the pirates in a war of attrition. And since the pirates are also perfectly rational profit maximizers, they surrender to his superior logic once he explains it.
The last story is the one from the 70s, "The Hook, the Eye, and the Whip" by Michael Conley, which is cast as covetousness. This was pretty good, but also awfully bleak in its view of human nature. The plot revolves around people getting ready for, and then competing in, a higher speed, more dangerous version of parasail racing. In this future, criminals can get sentence reductions by becoming the personal slave, and on-call organ donor, for a specific free person. There's a women's antislavery club, but Conely writes them as essentially insincere. They don't care about anyone's well-being; they just want an excuse to have club functions and occasionally yell at someone.
One of the racers has a slave, and people have been maimed and killed in previous races, but don't worry, even when things go wrong, he manages to not get hurt, and actually his slave was never in any real danger, since his prison sentence ended a few days before the race, so wouldn't have been forced to donate an organ regardless. So, that ending is far too convenient, and despite how dismal the world was, Conely seemed waaay too sympathetic to the men who used enslaved labor. I also found most of his descriptions of the boat race, or even the boats themselves, difficult to translate into a mental picture. But I liked that his characters were basically ordinary people without the power to simply change the world by personal fiat.
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