this is sort of a mixed bag, some horrible, a couple transcendent, most in the middle somewhere. ( )

I bought this book for Nina. 3 stories for $.99 but I also picked out some others to read also.

Only read these:

~ Nina Kiriki Hoffman - COMPANDROID 1990 - 3* Not enough of a story for me. We meet an android and the little boy he is caring for. We learn that his mind was wiped for this assignment. He was assigned to the boy's mother previously. Parts of his previous assignment start being accessible to this assignment and it indicates that he is becoming self aware...

~ Nina Kiriki Hoffman - UNIVERSAL DONOR 1989 - 4* Very unique. A vat that grows donor parts has a bit of conscienceness.

~ Nina Kiriki Hoffman - KNOTWORK 2002 - 3.5* a story that shows the reasons I love her. The way she writes magic is always interesting and unique. I can't say I loved the story/plot that much tho.

~ Lawrence Watt-Evans - FOXY LADY 1992 4* I usually love his shorts stories so I never skip them when I come across them in a anthology. Done now. I liked it. Easy to read, interesting, futuristic. A man wins a AI as a game show prize...

~ Fritz Leiber - WHAT'S HE DOING IN THERE? 1957 2* alien comes to earth, human & alien misunderstand each other.

~ Darrell Schweitzer - GHOST 1999 1* The ghost in the title is referring to "ghost writers" in the future. I wasn't fond of the way the author wrote the story so I couldn't absorb it well but if I understood the gist, in the future, the actors can be replaced by AIs but the writers can't be.

~ Philip K. Dick - MR. SPACESHIP 1953 DNF war stuff that just went through my eyes and out my ears and disappeared.

~ Jerry Sohl - BRKNK'S BOUNTY 1955 3* cute. Aliens were touring earth and one slipped away. It became friends with the MC and when the alien's family finally found it, the MC was gifted with something that helped him get his current job in the carnival.

~ Robert Silverberg - POSTMARK GANYMEDE 1957 3* an experienced spaceship patrol man is reassigned to postal worker. Surprisingly his old skills were very needed on his first delivery. ( )

Normally, I love golden age science fiction, but this collection just didn't do it for me. The first megapack was good, this one, not so much.

A mix of Golden Age and relatively modern stories (mostly from the 90s), but overall a bit weak. Apart from "The Marching Morons", the older stories are very minor, even those by big name authors. None of the modern stories really did much of anything for me either.

Perhaps the biggest problem was the lack of quality control. The book is riddled with typos and formatting problems. Almost any time one word is italicized either the leading or trailing space is missing. Worst was the first story, "What's He Doing in There?" by Fritz Leiber. A nice little tale, but whole sections were repeated, making it rather difficult to read.

Still, at the incredibly low price, there isn't much to complain about. ( )