One year ago today…or just two posts ago (I am very neglectful of my blog)…I posted on the second anniversary of the death of my friend, Jerry Schattenburg.

I vividly remember receiving a call that Tuesday night, January 24th, 2017. It was a number I did not recognize, and the voice on the other end of the line was a police detective, informing me that Jerry had experienced a heart attack. A neighbor had tried to save him by performing CPR, to no avail. I wish I had know who that was so I could thank them for caring enough to try. Jerry wasn’t tremendously outgoing with his neighbors, so it is quite possible this person did not really even know him, and yet they tried to help.

I mentioned on my Instagram post today that Jerry had passed away “suddenly and unexpectedly”. In truth the sudden part is correct, but while the time of his death was unexpected, the cause of his death was by no means a surprise. He had experienced a massive heart attack prior to my knowing him, and he did not take good care of his health at all. Still, when I had last seen him just a few days prior, I didn’t expect that it would be the last time. As is to be expected, if it had been I would have said so much more.

Last year I shared that Jerry had bought copies of this book at a consignment shop for something like $1 apiece and he read each story, gave it a score on a 10-point scale, and then wrote some small review on the title page of each story. He gifted copies to three of us, his friends, and asked us to do the same. The idea was that we would pass these around and copy each other’s comments so that each book would contain the thoughts of four different people.

Alas, our various reading desires took us in different directions all the time and we never got around to finishing the project. To honor him I read a few of these stories last year. This week I decided to do the same.

These are the stories I read:

“The Only Thing We Learn” by C.M. Kornbluth. Told as a story within a story, a professor imperiously lectures his students about a battle between two people groups, one who is obviously in the right and the other obviously in the wrong. Or are they? Kornbluth’s story cleverly blurs the lines of who is good and who is evil, and how and why societies rise and fall. It is a good story. Not great, but well written and worth reading, particularly as it was written in 1949, at a time when the world had seen the rise and fall of a clearly evil leader and his followers. (My rating, 7/10, Jerry’s rating, 7/10)

“Trigger Tide” by Wyman Guin. I was not familiar with Guin and don’t recall reading any other short stories by him. I liked this one quite a lot. It starts with the protagonist struggling to survive what probably should have been a killing attack and follows him as he goes forth to complete the mission that landed him in this state in the first place. It is well written and imaginative and made me wish he had a longer novel written in this science fiction world of espionage and assassination. (My rating, 8/10, Jerry’s rating 6/10)

“The Aliens” by Murray Leinster. This is a fantastic story about humanity’s search for the only other sentient species they know of to exist in space, and humanity’s tendency towards suspicion and violence as a means of self-preservation. A “shoot first and ask questions later” mentality. The way in which Leinster shines a light on our distrust of others is clear throughout the story, particularly in the case of one particular officer who is assigned to the mission purely because he is a xenophobe and will act decisively should he feel the conditions warrant it. This character reminded me so much of Larry Niven and Edward Lerner’s character Sigmund Ausfaller in their prequel series to Ringworld. Other than a few dated descriptions of the way in which the technology of the human spacecraft functioned, this could have been written today. It’s message is very timely. (My rating, 9/10, Jerry’s rating 9/10).

It did not surprise me that we differed on the one story. What surprised me is that out of three stories we felt the same about two. That was pretty uncommon. Although when we both loved a story, we really loved it.

I miss you dearly, my friend, as I know do the others of our small circle of science fiction loving, book-collecting friends. Thank you for gifting me a love of classic science fiction that was much deeper and more rich than I had when we first met. Thank you for introducing me to authors I had not read, and some I might not have even known about had you not shared them with me (Cordwainer Smith, Fritz Leiber, Keith Laumer, to name a few).

Always tell your friends and family how you feel about them. And do not neglect to make time for yourself to read. Set aside time every day to crack open a book and just read a few pages. And share with those around you about the stories that excite you.