Another of my re-reads of old collections, revealing interesting perspectives when looking at short stories with forty years' (!) hindsight.

There are stories in this collection that are very much of their time but still resonate (Ian Watson's 'Slow birds', which is an allegory of the cruise missile debate); there are some that seem very dated (Frederik Pohl's 'Servant of the people', about civil rights for robots; and Robert Silverberg's 'Amanda and the Alien'). There were two stories that I just did not connect with at all - Connie Willis' 'The Sidon in the Mirror' and Greg Bear's 'Hardfought' (which won a Nebula, so someone must have liked it, but not me!). Richard Cowper's 'The Tithonian Factor' was elegiac and sweet; John Sladek's 'Scenes from the Country of the Blind' was typical Sladek and none the worse for that. And then there was Michael Bishop's 'Her Habilene Husband', about a woman in the US South who discovers a prehistoric hominid in her garden. This story was a great surprise for me; I remembered it as a story very much set in place, with the attitudes expected from the South. By our standards, it reads as fairly non-PC; but it was perhaps the stand-out story of the collection for me (along with 'Slow Birds'). ( )

F/SF