Leading SF authors asked to submit their favourite story with a blurb on how they wrote the story or SF in general.
First published in 1968.
Not sure how I would have viewed the stories back then, but in the present time I find none of them particularly memorable. ( )

In this anthology, various authors were asked to select their favourite of their own un-anthologised stories and to provide a contextual commentary on it. All the stories come from the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, and it's interesting to see whether they have dated or not. Of course, their images of the future are not ours; but surprisingly, many of them hold up really well. Each story is accompanied by comments from their authors on what made them write the stories and what ideas lie behind them.

As an example, take Poul Anderson's 'The last of the deliverers' in this collection, dating from 1958; in a utopian, agrarian, medium- to high-tech future USA, the last Republican and the last Communist both fail to come to terms with the new world or each other. It's many years since I'd read this story, and I was struck by the things Anderson got right - especially the way state Communism collapsed in on itself - and the things that remain utopian, like practical solar power replacing oil as an energy source. Indeed, Anderson hardly felt any need to point out the disappearance of oil dependency yet it was one of the most noticeable things about the story to me on this re-reading.

Other notable stories in this collection are: 'Judas danced' (Brian Aldiss); 'End-game' (J.G.Ballard); 'Sail on! Sail on!' (Philip José Farmer); 'Day Million' (Frederik Pohl) and 'Retaliation' (Mack Reynolds). ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/854761.html

A baker’s dozen of stories by well-established authors (Aldiss, Anderson, Asimov, Ballard – they are printed by alphabetical order), some of which go some way to challenging comfortable political preconceptions (though one – L. Sprague de Camp’s “Proposal” – is I fear serious rather than satirical in its anti-feminism). It also struck me that a lot of the stories were really about death; the very first, Aldiss’ “Judas Danced”, is about an execution and the last, Mack Reynolds’ “Retaliation”, is a post-nuclear holocaust vignette (with a sting in the tale – the viewpoint characters, for whom the author has developed our sympathy, are Russians not Americans). Anyway, a good collection. ( )