Judy-Lynn del ReyCritiques

F/SF

F/SF

F/SF

F/SF

ISFDB 33186. LCCN 77004376.

It's as if the editor phoned a bunch of sci-fi authors and asked them to send her whatever scraps of paper they had lying on their desks so she could slap together this anthology. I made it 2/3 of the way through before deciding not to waste any more of my time. The names may be epic but the stories are flat and boring.

These were indeed stellar stories - more so in their day than now, but still worth reading.

I'm not geeky enough to understand for sure, but I think Hogan, in the thriller 'Assasin,' predicted not only the internet (though the PC is only a terminal and doesn't seem to do much on its own) but also 3D printing.

Tiptree's story was deeply moving, as per usual from her.
Donaldson's might appeal to fans of [b:The Hunger Games|2767052|The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games #1)|Suzanne Collins|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1358275334s/2767052.jpg|2792775].
Sheffield's and Foster's were both rather light adventures, but I def. do not mean that in a derogatory sense.
And Bova's was styled and thoughtful in the manner of the golden classics.

6 short stories by some very well known authors;

This is a simple collection of science fiction tales, published back in 1980. None of the tales are particularly "stellar", but my fondness for the lead tale, "The Sword of Damocles" by James P. Hogan, led me to keep the book on my shelf. "Damocles" is a tale of temporal blackmail, where an alien artifact enables unscrupulous fellows from the past hold the future for ransom. The other tales in the book are:

"Chains of Air, Web of Aether" by Philip K. Dick, a tale of two people stationed in at communications outposts in the depths of space.
"Grimm's Law" by L. Neil Smith, in which a time courier kills some time in a bar, regaling the bartender with an account of a recent job.
"Corpus Cryptic" by Lee Killough, a murder mystery solved by the scientific research of an assistant coroner.
"Elbow Room" by Marion Zimmer Bradley, another tale about a woman carrying out vital work in the lonely reaches of the cosmos.
"The Nobel Laureate" by Robert H. Curtis, a glimpse of what might have been if the gods had not chosen to intervene.
"All that Glitters" by G.C. Edmondson, a tale of another lonesome soul, this time in the nearby Yukon, who gets an interesting new neighbor.
"The Subtle Serpent" by Charles Sheffield, a story about a starfaring crew searching for the resources to repair their ship and escape from a primitive planet.
--J