For old fashioned, futuristic space operas, you can't do better than these old pulps. They reveal more about the past than about the future, but that's part of the charm. This one contains a story of shape-shifting aliens (The Green Forest); one about a doctor/investigator/all-around bad ass for a respected interplanetary medical society who thwarts a megalomaniac's plans to obtain ownership of a planet by killing almost everyone on it (A Sound Investment), A mysterious black object found in some alien ruins (Entity); the second part of a two-part story about a symbiotic alien (Needle); and one about distant planets made entirely of antimatter (Minority Report). Yes, the stories are unthinkingly sexist in that the crews of the spaceships are all men, and those men tend to smoke and drink a great deal, but that was the culture in 1949. The stories reflect that. They also imply that people had great hopes for the future and really seemed to feel confident that some day we'd be out there exploring strange, new worlds and all that. Who knows, we could still manage to do that, although not as soon or as easily as the writers and readers of 1949 may have imagined. ( )