Where I Take a Sip From a Near-Forgotten Well

Creatures of the Cosmos (Pern by Catherine Crook de Camp
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of those books I never would have owned if it had not been set out at the high school where I taught, left for the taking as a discard. It lived briefly in my classroom library then came home with me forever--

--where it sat for a long time until recently when I opened it on a whim.

What I forget about many such collections is that they are pretty fun to read, and that they're designed to be the right length to read at a single sitting. That's what I found here. The stories are aimed sort of at young people, and there is nothing technical or sophisticated about any of these stories, but that doesn't mean they're not interesting or have no impact. On the contrary.

"The Bear Who Saved the World" is an uplift story told from the bear's point of view. "Old Man Henderson" gives us a near future where the kind, elderly hero of moon landings is treated as a bore by younger generations who have grown up accustomed to the wonder of space travel. "The Million Dollar Pup" is the story of a handy young girl and an elderly mentor inventing a robotic pet where dogs and cats are outlawed. "The Smallest Dragonboy," the most fantasy-like of the collection, is the story of a bullied underdog coming up big. "The Large Ant" is a first-contact story where we find that humanity's first instinct is violence. "Dead Man's Chest" tells about following a treasure map to a Lovecraftian horror. "Socrates" is the melancholy story of a sweet dog born with human intelligence. And "The Horse Show" tells about a nerdy boy learning confidence from the horse-like creature he brings back from a distant planet.

TL;DR--All of the stories center on an animal or pet or creature, though the character of the creatures and the tone and vibe of every story was quite different.

These stories are all simple, in a way. Quick reads. Limited characters. But they all have surprising depth, leaving the reader to ponder the nature of other intelligences--bears, alien ants, alien horses--and whether they might not be kinder and more generous than we are. They cause one to consider the significance of pets and why we want to lavish our love on them, as well as wonder whether those animals, on the whole, are better or worse off for that attention. They make one think about how small man is compared to the universe. And so on.

On another level, this collection makes me think about all the stories written over the years, the ones showing up in magazines and Hugo-winners collections, where they are read by a few people and then forgotten. Most of the stories are from the 50's and 60's, and one comes from 1938, so that even when the collection was published in 1977, they were being brought back from oblivion. It's nobody's job to keep them alive, I suppose, but it still makes me kinda sad to imagine them languishing in silence on increasingly obscure bookshelves...

I won't try to make the case that there's anything essential here, and this exact book is probably of limited interest to most readers. It's a little dated, obviously. (The words "rocket ship" are used unironically by the authors. It's like that.) This is just one collection, like a hundred or thousand others, which have been mostly forgotten. Any of them might be worthy of opening up if you happen on it, but are not really worth hunting down. However, I wouldn't mind someone else reading these 60-, 70-, 80-year-old stories and comparing their thoughts with mine.

That would be welcome.

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