This is a collection of five stories which all won the sf Hugo Award voted on by the fans; one also won the Nebula Award voted by fellow sf authors. They are all well-written,but I do not like the philosophy behind some of them.
"No Truce with Kings" is about the defeat of an attempt to reunite America (or parts of it) after an apocalyptic war. Anderson prefers the feudal fragments to the possibility of reunion, but i do not. I prefer Brin's The Postman for the opposite side. "The Longest Voyage" is about a fictional equivalent of Sir Francis Drake sailing around his world an encountering stranded spaceman (a situation Anderson often used from the side of the spaceman in stories like War of the Wingmen). The Drake figure (Rovik) ultimately chooses to destroy the spaceman in the belief that early exposure to a superior culture would inhibit the development of his own people's independent civilization. Again, I am not very sympathetic, both because I think Rovik's culture would probably have benefited from the contact and also because the spaceman is such a harmless fellow. If he had been a ruthless imperialist or the like, it would have been different. "The Sharing of Flesh" I admire without enjoying not for its philosophy but simply because it is so grim. It is about a woman space scientist whose husband is killed and eaten by an alien for reasons which make sense to the alien; the woman comes to understand the reasons and does not punish the alien. "The Queen of Air and Darkness" is about a deliberate imitator of Sherlock Holmes --the only private detective on a pioneering planet -- helping a widow find her son who has been taken by beings who according to local tradition resemble the legendary elves of earth. When I first read this, I disliked it because the solution seemed too simple -in effect the detective just turns on the lights and shows the beings as they really are --but I have grown to like it --in particular, I like the folksong incorporated in the story, about how the Ranger Arvid encounters the "Queen of Air and Darkness," as the leader of the pseudo-elves is called. The last story, "Goat Song" is a retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in which a very advanced intelligent machine can preserve the data of dead people and the protagonist first wants, and then does not want, to get his dead wife back from it. I found his chance in motivation unsatisfactory. "Goat Song" the title derives from the Green etymology of the word "tragedy." ( )