The lead story in this, "No Truce with Kings" is often considered one of Anderson's best, and I admit it is well written, but ideologically I dislike it because it is about a struggle to reunite a post-apocolyptic U.S., and the "good guys" are those who want to keep it disunited. I prefer David Brin's The Postman, in which the hero is working to revive the U.S. The other stories are a mixed bag. "Turning Piint" is about a human explorer faced with an alien (though humanoid) race smarter than humans. Escape from Orbit is a straight hard science story about rescuing a stranded spaceship crew near the moon. Epilogue is about humans discovering a culture in which machines have evolved human-level intelligent life (complete with two sexes). The Critique of Impure Reason has some heavy-handed satire of modern literature and literary criticism in which a robot obsessed with literature is persuaded to fulfill its original purpose of going into space by a coupe who reinvent the pulp sf story. Eve Times Four is, to me, the most agreeable story, about a lustful spaceship officer who arranges to have himself marooned on a supposedly uninhibited but human-friendly planet with four women and a couple of aliens, and announces there is a law that requires all the women to mate with him to produce a biologically diverse colony. However,one of the women is a mathematician who sees through his plot and persuades two other women to join in escaping. Most of the characters (especially the two aliens) are comic stereotypes, but it is still clever. The issue of reproduction in a marooned space colony recurs as a serious question in Bradley's Darkover Landfall. ( )

Indeholder "Fredsapostlene", "Vendepunkt", "Kritik af den usunde fornuft", "Epilog".

"Fredsapostlene" handler om ???
"Vendepunkt" handler om ???
"Kritik af den usunde fornuft" handler om ???
"Epilog" handler om ??? ( )

Generally a very strong short story collection written in the early 60s whose main drawbrack is the occasional implicit misogyny.

i) No Truce With Kings: 5/5
In a post-apocalypse America divided into different states and just beginning to recover technologically, a hidden alien species interferes with the political and religious system in order to ‘guide’ humanity to better itself. However it’s psychoanalytical science is not as exact as they would like it to be and a civil war breaks out in which they play an increasingly active part. An engrossing rejoinder to Asimov’s Foundation with its positivistic vision of a technocratic elite guiding humanity into the future under a centralised government.

ii) Turning Point: 4/5
Humans discover a planet with a very primitive civilization, whose inhabitants are all geniuses and from the moment of initial contact they started developing at an alarming rate. The explorers realize that if something is not done, this species will outstrip humanity in very short order.

iii) Escape From Orbit: 2/5
A manned mission to the moon has an accident and mission control has to come up with a way to get the astronauts abroad down to the surface of the moon. Also notable for a vague and oddly misogynistic subplot concerning the protagonist’s wife.

iv) Epilogue: 4/5
A manned spaceship whose drive malfunctioned returns to Earth after 3 billion years have elapsed to find humanity wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. However self-replicating machines have evolved a new ecology on the planet, with intelligent hunter-gatherer machines at the top of the food chain. Wonderfully imaginative apart from the stereotypical female machines that stay at home and gestate new machines and are helpless and cry a great deal. Thankfully there is a relatively strong, dynamic human female character. The confusion of the humans and machines, each of whom keep thinking that the other must be some kind of drone/automaton controlled by other 'really alive' beings is excellently done.

v) The Critique of Impure Reason: 2/5
A robot learns a sense of adventure and duty from reading a pastiche of 30s sci-fi fiction, in a story that also takes a shot at literary criticism and modern literature. Probably the weakest story in the collection. ( )