http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1951611.html

This was one of the sf anthologies that made a huge impression on me as a teenager, and I think about half of the ten stories fully retain their magic for me - "We Purchased People" by Fred Pohl, "The Hole Man" by Larry Niven, "The Author of the Acacia Seeds [etc]" by Ursula Le Guin, "A Little Something For Us Tempunauts" by Philip K. Dick, and "If The Stars Are Gods" by Gordon Eklund and Gregory Benford. (And the other five aren't bad either.) God be with the days when you could credibly do a Year's Best SF with only ten stories, though. Also notable that there is only one woman (Le Guin) of the ten, which I hope would be impossible today. ( )

Another re-read of this collection of stories dating mainly from 1974. The surprising thing I found was how some of these stories had aged better than others; in more than one story set at some point in the early years of the 21st century or later, it was surprising how many of the protagonists had to find a telephone box to contact someone!

The stories are quite variable. There's a fairly minor piece of Frederik Pohl cleverness ('We purchased people'); one of Michael Moorcock's stories of utter decadence from the End of Time ('Pale Roses'), whose denouement I remembered when I was about a third of the way through; and a story by Larry Niven ('the hole man') which read like something from the 1950s except for the presence of a micro black hole as a plot device.

The longest story in the collection is Robert Silverberg's 'Born with the dead', which is about a time where the recently dead can be "re-kindled", but at the cost of their appearing to living people as almost autistic. It is notable for being partly set in Zanzibar, and it has some interesting sidelines on racism which probably were not noticed at the time of publication.

Ursula LeGuin's story is an interesting exercise in other sciences; Bob Shaw's 'Dark Icarus' (sometimes known as 'A little night flying') became the springboard for his novel 'Vertigo' (vt 'Terminal velocity'); and Philip Dick's 'A little something for us tempunauts' has a new twist on time travel paradoxes. William Tenn contributes 'On Venus, have we got us a rabbi', which I remembered partly from my first reading thirty and more years ago. On re-reading, I found myself irritated by the density of what is effectively a New York Jewish monologue which was about how Judaism has changed 600 years into the future with interstellar travel, whilst coming over as a 1960s Jewish New York monologue, with some odd revisionist ideas about how history's perspective might affect the future.

Roger Zelazny's 'The engine at heartspring's centre' seemed lacklustre, partly because it covered some of the same ground as the Silverberg story. Finally, there was what for me was the outstanding story of the collection, Gordon Eklund and Gregory Benford's "If the stars are gods", about first contact with an alien race whose view of the universe is vastly different to ours, set against the background of a near future where NASA is in decline (prescient for 1974, though 1974's 'decline' would be considered quite advanced to us now!). ( )

F/SF

ISFDB 4166. OCLC 2012995.