The completist collector of Kim Stanley Robinson is going to end up with a lot of duplication when it comes to short story collections. This book and the later collections 'Vinland the Dream' and 'Down and Out in the Year 2000' have a high level of duplication in them. (There is an earlier collection, 'The Planet on the Table', which as I recollect has at least one story - 'Black Air' - duplicated in 'Vinland the Dream'.)

On the strength of this volume, I'd say it is probably the weakest of the three previously named. Ostensibly, the stories hinge around history and its re-interpretation or remodelling, either through reconstruction or re-imagining through the device of the alternate reality. But some of the stories in this collection have only a tenuous connection to that theme, such as 'The part of us that loves', 'The Translator', 'Before I wake', 'Muir on Shasta' and the 'South African sequence' (a description picked from the jacket blurb which is meaningless to me as this apparently dates from the last four stories' first magazine appearances between 1986 and 1990).

The title story, however, is probably the most entertaining one, showing a group of amateur film-makers in a Lunar colony making imaginatively revisionist films about 20th Century history. We find out that their remaking of history - partly through the passage of time, partly through their application of film theory - is also affected by other factors we only learn about as the story unfolds.

Of the overtly historically inclined stories, 'A History of the Twentieth Century, with illustrations' and 'A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions' are both meditations on history itself, each treating history as a science that can be written about as science fiction. The first is about an historian failing to write a book, whilst the other is a discussion about alternate histories. Both are interesting pieces; I was particularly taken with the decription of what I know to be the Camden flat of John and Judith Clute (he is a noted science fiction scholar, critic and writer; she is an equally noted artist) in "A History..."; the same flat is referenced in one of William Gibson's novels, and Amanda Palmer wrote about it in her blog (http://blog.amandapalmer.net/a-snowy-night-in-camdentown/); I suspect her husband Neil Gaiman introduced her to the Clutes... but I digress.

Some of the other stories seem a little nebulous, and of course 'Down and Out in the Year 2000' has been overtaken by history, if not completely by events.

Overall, then, a volume for completists only. ( )