Reading the original Buck Rogers novels helped kindle within me a fondness for pulp sci-fi. And Doc Smith is a legend of that period. So I was really prepared to enjoy this book. But ultimately I couldn't even finish it. The style is so overwrought, I could practically hear the voice of a Radio Drama Announcer reading the descriptions. ("...through raging beam, through blasting ray, through crushing force; through storm of explosive and through rain of metal the Dresden remained apparently unscathed. Her screens were radiating high into the violet, but they showed no signs of weakening or of going down...Since she was...being fought by inhumanly intelligent monstrosities, she was invulnerable to any one ship of the Fleet as long as her generators could be fed.") The opening story ("The Galaxy Primes") is so badly plotted and the characters so broadly drawn, I had to just thumb through the last half of it. If these stories are examples of good science fiction from the Pulps era, it is no wonder that sci-fi had a bad reputation for decades. ( )