★ Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 1961 (pg. 3-9)

Here, Vonnegut petulantly cringes against society’s trends toward equality and equal opportunity, and satirizes them by carrying them to absurd extremes. It has a very strong “Get off my lawn” vibe, as well an awful lot of privileged white male angst.

★ Forgetfulness, by John W. Campbell Jr., 1937 (pg. 10-33)

Originally published under the pseudonym “Don A. Stuart”, Campbell here imagines farflung civilizations searching space for planets to colonize. Having found one with an ancient race of men (somehow, Campbell thinks civilization is entirely comprised of males), the exploring men are magically sent back in time to their homeworld. The story is very unclear, written as if by a child. Vast buildings! Mighty ships! Sailing the spaceways! Neither dialog nor narration imparts much information. From this single example, it’s difficult to imagine that this is the man who gave us Heinlein and Asimov.

★★★ Special Flight, by John Berryman, 1939 (pg. 34-69)

A rocket crew of men (“their wives”, mentioned only once as safely at home, are the only women characters in the book) just returned from the Moon must return on an emergency mission to rescue trapped moon miners. Through a meteor shower. With punch-card computers envisioned by this 1930s writer. It’s tense, but they make it.

★★★ Chronopolis, by J.G. Ballard, 1960 (pg. 70-91)

After humans grew too time-conscious, clocks were outlawed and now no one knows what time it is. The writing is clear enough; it’s the world-building that I took issue with. And the message. This story’s past had humans, in at least one giant city, organized down to the minute in order that the city could serve everyone, but then executives revolted and outlawed clocks. That part seemed weird because wouldn’t it have been the executives who came up with an installed the time rules in the first place? And the message seems to be that organization and efficiency is inherently bad.

(Side note: I have often thought cities would be more efficient if various businesses opened/closed at different times instead of all opening during the same couple of hours in the morning and all closing during the same couple of hours in the evening. And imagine if different religious groups could agree to variate their holy days throughout the week, so seven of them could share the same temple/church/mosque, each worshipping on a different day.)

★★★ Triceratops, by Kono Tensei, 1974 (pg. 92-103)

A father and son, while cycling, suddenly develop the magical ability to see into a time period 70 million years earlier, when dinosaurs roamed their neighborhood. They see these animals superimposed over the current world, though no one else seems to see them. There is a great battle between species. Life goes on.

★★★★ The Man Who Lost The Sea, by Theodore Sturgeon, 1959 (pg. 104-114)

• nominee, Hugo, short story, 1960, lost to Keyes’ Flowers For Algernon

This story begins confusingly, with thick metaphor and a confusing use of the second person, but quickly straightens out into what it might actually be like to die of radiation poisoning and a head injury after crash landing during the first peopled mission to Mars.

★★★★★ On The Inside Track, by Karl Michael Armer, 1986 (pg. 115-134)

This was a pleasant, engaging story about an older man who has been taken over by an extra-terrestrial consciousness. There were several poignant insights into aging and how society treats the elderly. (It was translated from a German original.)

★ The Golem, by Avram Davidson, 1983 (pg. 135-140)

Blessed brevity was the best part of this one.

★★ The New Prehistory, by René Rebetez-Cortes, 1972 (pg. 141-145)

This absurd and childish story is about groups of people magically forming into larger creatures; for example lines/queues become serpents and crowds turn into amoebae. I took it as a complaint about humans acting in concert as groups — as opposed to individualism.

★★★★★ A Meeting With Medusa, by Arthur C. Clarke, 1972 (pg. 146-183)

• winner, Nebula, best novella, 1973
• nominee, Hugo, best novella, 1972, lost to Anderson’s The Queen Of Air And Darkness

Opening with an airship crash on Earth, this story is mostly about an explorer who uses an airship (of sorts) to explore the atmosphere of Jupiter, where his discoveries are startling. And there’s one final twist at the end. One of the best sci-fi stories I’ve read in a long time.

★★ The Valley Of Echoes, by Gérard Klein, 1973 (pg. 184-192)

Translated from French, this story of Mars exploration was better than most of what Ray Bradbury came up with in The Martian Chronicles, but still not terribly profound or interesting. The explorers find, as the title suggests, a valley that echoes.

★★ The Fifth Head Of Cerberus, by Gene Wolfe, 1972 (pg. 193-244)

• nominee, Nebula, best novella, 1973, lost to Clarke’s A Meeting With Medusa
• nominee, Hugo, best novella, 1973, lost to Le Guin’s The Word For World Is Forest
• nominee, Locus, best novella, 1973, lost to Pohl’s The Gold At The Starbow’s End

I gave this a point for complex world-building (much of which was hidden behind the scenes), but good grief. The writing was needlessly convoluted, the plot nonexistent, deeper questions left uninvestigated, personalities wooden. For the curious: the first-person narrator is apparently a clone of his father, who runs an underage prostitution house and has produced many clones — some of which are sold as slaves. The narrator eventually kills his “father” (offscreen) and spends some time in prison, but then comes home later to write poorly about his childhood.

(Note: I read on Wikipedia that Wolfe died less than a year ago. He was known “for his dense, allusive prose”, which was evident in abundance here. From this example, it is unfathomable to me that he “is highly regarded by critics”.)

★★ The Chaste Planet, by John Updike, 1983 (pg. 245-249)

Updike seems obsessed with sex in this short tale of humanity’s first contact with a new species on a hidden planet orbiting Jupiter. Disturbingly, he refers to human “females” as a “subspecies” of which “disagreeability” is a prime characteristic. The writing was at least clear and moved quickly while also providing plenty of detail.

★★ The Blind Pilot, by Nathalie-Charles Henneberg, 1959 (pg. 250-265)

Apparently (the prose wasn’t always clear) an alien version of a manatee has been brought back to Earth by an explorer, and the manatee is a real-life “siren”, luring Earth men to their deaths via telepathy. Or something. I gave the story an extra point for the two main characters having physical disabilities.

(The 14th story in this anthology, it was the first by a woman. I don’t think any of the characters were women.)

★★★★ The Men Who Murdered Mohammed, by Alfred Bester, 1958 (pg. 266-277)

• nominee, Hugo, short story, 1959, lost to Bloch’s That Hell-Bound Train

The last word of the title must have been chosen for its alliterative value, because Mohammed doesn’t figure prominently in the story; the men also murdered other historical figures in this somewhat unique and fast-paced time travel story.

★★★ Pairpuppets, by Manuel van Loggem, 1974 (pg. 278-285)

A story that mostly conflates sex and love, this one explores the idea of future sexual relationships among humans, including the titular “pairpuppets”, which are mechanical replacements for lovers. I gave an extra point for the semi-surprise ending.

★★★ Two Dooms, by C.M. Kornbluth, 1958 (pg. 286-327)

A nuclear scientist during World War 2 eats some mushrooms and is magically (so not sci-fi?) transported to an alternate timeline in which the Axis has won the war, splitting North American into a Japanese west and a German east. What I got out of it is a morality tale about why it was a good idea to use the Bomb. It was well-written, but brimming over with racism — despite the anti-Nazi tone, the author and main character are still convinced of a heirarchy of races. Surprisingly, it was a tad feminist (“Women are people too!” the main character shouts at one point.)

(Note: I was surprised to not see this story listed as an influence on Philip K. Dick’s The Man In the High Castle, which is an alt-history story along the same lines, published four years later.)

★★ Tale Of The Computer That Fought A Dragon, by Stanislaw Lem, 1977 (pg. 328-333)

This was, I think, meant to be cute and/or funny rather than serious sci-fi, with a strong underlying anti-technology bent. It’s about a king who overly trusts in cyberdoodads which results in his undoing.

★★★★★ The Green Hills Of Earth, by Robert A. Heinlein, 1947 (pg. 334-344)

I’ve read this multiple times in the past and it’s been in multiple anthologies over the years (including Heinlein collections like The Green Hills Of Earth) — perhaps because it’s one of Heinlein’s better works. It might be his best. It’s a tear-jerker vignette of one man, the blind poet Rhysling, an engine wrangler on atomic spaceships who also writes some of the future’s most memorable songs. While on his way home to Earth, where he believes he will soon die, the ship Rhysling has hitchhiked on suffers a malfunction and Rhysling moves to repair it, knowing the radiation exposure will kill him. His last act, after saving the ship, is to sing the entirety of his final song, The Green Hills Of Earth. For the story, Heinlein wrote several full stanzas and numerous other fragments of the song, including the most memorable:

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.

Both Rhysling and his song are mentioned in several other Heinlein works, as well as in real life: Apollo 15 astronauts named a lunar crater “Rhysling” and part of the song was quoted in radio communications during this lunar mission. The Science Fiction Poetry Associations annual awards are named after Rhysling as well.

★★★ Ghost V, by Robert Sheckley, 1957 (pg. 345-358)

A two-man private contracting crew takes over the “decontamination” job on a “haunted” planet only to discover that it’s rich in hallucinogens. The story was humorous but not particularly memorable.

★★★★ The Phantom Of Kansas, by John Varley, 1976 (pg. 359-391)

The 21st story in this anthology, this was the first one with a woman as the main character (first-person narrator). It also seemed more modern than the other tales, even the others ones from the ‘70s. It depicts humans storing memories digitally (to be downloaded into a clone in the event of death), regular sex-change operations, and detective work using algorithms and statistics via a powerful computer.

★★ Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure, by Josef Nesvadba, 1973 (pg. 392-414)

There was little of redeeming value in this absurdly unscientific story, which seemed like it was from the 1930s instead of the ‘70s. For example, a character takes a drink of whiskey from a glass while wearing a spacesuit. All spacefaring people are males who resent technology and automation. I only ranked it as high as I did for including a woman of color as a scientist — extremely rare among stories in this collection.

★★★★ Inconstant Moon, by Larry Niven, 1971 (pg. 415-438)

Compelling and emotional, this is a story (which I’ve read before) about two people who see that the end is coming. It emphasizes the frailty of life on Earth and describes how some people might respond to unstoppable doom. Its only imperfection for me was the sudden twist to optimism at the end (I had imperfectly remembered the story as ending badly).

“You don’t stop planning just because there’s no hope.”

—page 437, Inconstant Moon, by Larry Niven

★★ The Gold At The Starbow’s End, by Frederik Pohl, 1971 (pg. 439-484)

• winner, Locus, best novella, 1973
• nominee, Hugo, best novella, 1973, lost to Le Guin’s The Word For World Is Forest
• nominee, Nebula, best novella, 1973, lost to Clarke’s A Meeting With Medusa

Personally, I prefer Clarke’s A Meeting With Medusa, so I’m with the Nebula Award camp on this one. Pohl’s novella has interesting ideas but seems to lean on some sort of psi powers or New Age style mystical mumbo-jumbo. It’s difficult to tell because the really interesting stuff takes place in the background. Basically: a starship has been launched toward Alpha Centauri under false pretenses (a scientist has lied and said there’s a planet out there), and meanwhile on Earth things continue to deteriorate. The impetus to send a crew light years away to their certain doom was to encourage science. I can’t explain that in a paragraph the way it’s explained in the story, but I didn’t find it believable that such an effort would be made for such a reason. Somehow the crew becomes magically enlightened and masters powers beyond previous imaginings. Points off for leaving the interesting stuff off-stage, for constant derogatory references to civil rights protesters, and for there being no ending. Extra point for women being included in the starship’s crew (and one is even Vice President of the U.S.).

★ A Sign In Space, by Italo Calvino, 1965 (pg. 485-492)

The story could have been one sentence: “I tried to build a sign in space to help measure the rotational period of the galaxy, but it didn’t work as I intended.” The rest is filler, a mishmash of pointless words.

★ The Spiral, by Italo Calvino, 1965 (pg. 493-502)

Take the previous story, but then use “shell” and “sea” instead of “sign” and “space”, move a lot of the other words around (but keep the same sentence structure), and you’ll get this story. Also pointless.

★★★★ The Dead Past, by Isaac Asimov, 1956 (pg. 503-544)

In the future, scientific discovery will be so confined, directed, and restricted by combined government/industry that any tangential curiosity will be punished as “anarchistic thought”. Unless one manages to do it secretly, as in this story of a historian joining forces with a physicist to build a “chronoscope” (a device that harnesses neutrinos to look back in time). It was tense, emotionally realistic (rare for Asimov in my experience), and well worth reading. My only complaint was the illogical conclusion (64-year-old spoiler alert!), in which the government agency in question doesn’t have the ability to stop an effort by a handful of persons, despite previously having nearly unlimited power to censor information and stop all research into a particular subject.

★★ The Lens, by Annemarie van Ewyck, 1977 (pg. 545-553)

Told as a series of vignettes, this is the story of a human ambassador to a planet populated by sentient beings. Most of the writing is clear, but the ending was not — I think she changed her mind about her career at the end, but I’m not sure whether she did, or why.

(The 28th story in this anthology, it was the second by a woman.)

★★★ The Hurkle Is A Happy Beast, by Theodore Sturgeon, 1949 (pg. 554-561)

Like the previous story, this one was clear and interesting until the end — when it wasn’t clear to me what happened. Did the hurkles take over the Earth due to excessive breeding? I’m not sure. (Hurkles are like alien six-legged dog/cats, and one of them accidentally went through a dimensional warp to arrive unexpectedly on Earth.)

★★ Zero Hour, by Ray Bradbury, 1947 (pg. 562-571)

Building on my disappointment from The Martian Chronicles, this Bradbury story felt childish and insincere. The style made me think a middle-schooler had been assigned to parody Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Basically: some ETs want to take over Earth but couldn’t get past the “perfect” weapons of a united world government, so they secretly enlisted the help of Earth’s children.

★★★ Nine Lives, by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969 (pg. 572-594)

The story of two miners on an inhospitable planet who welcome a set of 10 identical clones to assist them, this is at times tense, always emotionally believable, and yet fell short of the mark for me. There was an undercurrent that smelled like racism (like using “golden” to describe the clones, who were Asian in origin) and some weird pseudoscience bits in a story that set itself up as hard sci-fi (like when the clones apparently had some sort of psychic connection, one of them experiencing death when another one died, for example.)

(The 31st story in this anthology, it was the third by a woman. Still, the two main characters were men.)

★★ The Muse, by Anthony Burgess, 1964 (pg. 595-610)

The ending was fine, but the majority of the story either went over my head or was gibberish (either way, pointless).

★★ The Public Hating, by Steve Allen, 1955 (pg. 611-617)

In the future, people gather in stadiums to direct hate at convicted criminals, and somehow their psychic power inflicts actual physical damage on the victims. This story is just a vignette of one of these “public hatings”.

★★★ Poor Superman, by Fritz Leiber, 1951 (pg. 618-641)

I’ve read this one before, in an anthology from the 1950s, and remembered liking it more the first time. It describes a future in which pseudoscientific charlatans called “Thinkers” have duped society and government into giving them money and power; their output is entirely faked.

★ Angouleme, by Thomas M. Disch, 1974 (pg. 642-656)

This story, about a group of pre-teens who decide to murder people (if there was a reason given, I couldn’t deduce it), was one the most-poorly written in this anthology.

★★★ Stranger Station, by Damon Knight, 1956 (pg. 657-678)

After contacting an extraterrestrial species, humans learn that a substance created naturally by the ETs imbibes longevity to humans. This story is about the man who must live on the space station during the aliens’ occasional visit (to gift us with the mysterious substance). It’s not clear why he must be alone, nor is it clear why he (and the other men who’ve done it before him) goes insane during this process, though the description of him going mad was interesting to read.

★ The Dead Fish, by Boris Vian, 1955 (pg. 679-689)

This story never says what it’s about or why, nor could I divine any relationship between the title and the story. Some hints are dropped that this world isn’t anything like our world, but they’re never elucidated. Perhaps something was lost in the translation? Emotions come through clearly, but descriptions do not.

★★★★ I Was The First To Find You, by Kirill Bulychev, 1977 (pg. 690-700)

This was a decent enough story about an early team of interstellar explorers who headed back after a many years only to find that (spoiler!) Earth’s technology had advanced far beyond them.

★★★ The Lineman, by Walter M. Miller Jr., 1957 (pg. 701-754)

This lengthy piece is well-written in the sense that the action, descriptions, and exposition are clear. It’s about a crew of electrical linemen on the Moon, in the midst of labor unrest and political malfunction, who discover a brothel spaceship has landed nearby. My not-great rating comes from the overly-simplistic characters, blatant sexism, gratutitous homophobia, and my inability to determine whether these are the author’s viewpoints or if the author is attempting to portray other people has having those characteristics for some purpose I can’t grasp.

★★ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, by Jorge Luis Borges, 1962 (pg. 755-768)

The anthology lists “1962” as the copyright year for this story, but all other sources (for example, Wikipedia) say it was first published in 1940. Clearly a lot of work went into it — world-building and research, not to mention philosophical and literary knowledge. But the story itself did nothing for me. It’s written as if true, listing actual historical people and writers (including the author) and is about apparent clever forgeries of encyclopedia entries discussing imaginary worlds.

★★★ Codemus, by Tor Ĺge Bringsvaerd, 1968 (pg. 769-781)

The “introduction” to this story reads more like notes or an outline, the kind of sloppy, non-sentence notes I make to myself before beginning to write a story. The rest isn’t terribly compelling, interesting, or well-written. It’s about a future in which everyone has a “little brother” (or sister), which is a small companion computer for conversation, reminders, etc. One guy gets upset and feels lost when his little brother malfunctions. (Bonus: It was strangely predictive of today, in the ways we sometimes feel lost or disconnected if our wifi goes out or when we lose our phones.)

★★ A Kind Of Artistry, by Brian Aldiss, 1962 (pg. 782-802)

Set in an extremely distant future, when humanity is so widespread throughout the galaxy that various groups have evolved into different types of beings, one man — an explorer — tries to come to grips with the differences between societies and the restrictive culture of his own planet. Apparently meant as a surprise plot twist, the reader learns that this man’s wife is also his mother. I added a point for complex world-building.

★★★★★ Second Variety, by Philip K. Dick, 1953 (pg. 803-843)

I’ve read this one before, multiple times. Each time it unfolds slightly differently than I’d remembered. Each time it is powerful, stark, thought-provoking. Though some of Dick’s stories are notoriously fantastic, surreal, and/or paranoid, this one carries the weight of realistic descriptions, a believable near future (certainly for a 1950s reader), and shared human fears. It’s set in a relatively near-future world-war scenario, in which the Soviet Union had almost defeated the UN, but the UN developed hunter-killer robots — which have now evolved.

★★ Weihnachtsabend, by Keith Roberts, 1972 (pg. 844-875)

I’m not sure of the exact title because the copyright page spells it differently: Weinachtsabend. An alternate history story set in Great Britain some time after Germany won World War 2 (it was published ten years after Dick’s The Man In The High Castle and fourteen years after Kornbluth’s Two Dooms), it takes place around Christmas time in a mansion. It was never clear to me what was happening — yes, I got that there were feasts and conversations, but the really important stuff was only referred to obliquely, hinted at, danced around. What was the main character (“Mainwaring”) afraid of? Why did he have a pistol and attempt to shoot the Minister? I have no idea. Though Roberts did well at describing sounds, rooms, smells, fear, hangovers, and other intimate details, the plot itself was weirdly hidden.

★ I Do Not Love Thee, Doctor Fell, by Robert Bloch, 1955 (pg. 876-884)

A publicist suffering from mental illness hallucinates his own psychiatrist, who eventually reveals that he is merely a hallucination. By the end, though, the publicist believes he is the psychiatrist, and that the publicist was the hallucination. I’m not sure why this was included in an anthology of science fiction. It also treated the topic of mental illness very flippantly. The two women in the story (both barely mentioned and both of whom turned out to be the same person) were referred to only as “girl”.

★ Aye, And Gomorrah..., by Samuel R. Delany, 1967 (pg. 885-894)

• winner, Nebula, short story, 1968
• nominee, Hugo, short story, 1968, lost to Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

I think this is my first Delany story; it didn’t make a great impression. Set in a future in which “spacers” are medically altered to be neither male nor female, it seems to be about the fetishists back on Earth who desire the spacers. Delany invents a less-understandable form of grammar for his narrative, and throws in gratuitous derogatory references to “Moslems”, homosexuals, and anyone who doesn’t fit traditional binary gender roles (including his first-person narrator).

★★★★ How Erg The Self-Inducting Slew A Paleface, by Stanislaw Lem, 1977 (pg. 895-905)

Written in the style of a medieval fable, except with tons of sci-fi sounding technical words thrown in, this was funny, had a moral, and showed quite a bit of imagination. It was substantially better than the other Lem story in this collection.

★★ Nobody’s Home, by Joanna Russ, 1972 (pg. 906-919)

While this story included many surprisingly progressive ideas (relative to the rest of the anthology) — like interracial marriages, unrestricted cross-border travel, and non-traditional cohabitation mores (such as phasing out of nudity taboos) — the story itself was pointless and not really there, as far as I could tell. It was just a lot of people talking in incomplete sentences, telling inside jokes (which weren’t explained to the reader, and mentioning a lot of specific events or items that were never explained to the reader in any way.

(The 48th story in this anthology, it was the fourth by a woman — and the last.)

★★★★ Party Line, by Gérard Klein, 1973 (pg. 920-947)

A writer receives two phone calls simultaneously and both voices sound identical; he eventually realizes both voices are his own, calling from two different futures. One warns him not to accept an impending offer and the other insists that he accept it. He comes to learn that time travel itself isn’t possible, but because the internation phone system is the most complex system ever devised by man (millions of miles of wires and millions of connection circuits) that one can call through time. He decides, reluctantly, to accept the offer and boards a plane. The story cuts off before the readers learns what happens, but the impression is that there are multiple possible futures, each with differing consequences, and it can be difficult to discern beforehand how those consequences will play out.

★★★ The Proud Robot, by Lewis Padgett, 1943 (pg. 948-979)

Interestingly, there are fairly accurate predictions in this story for the 1940s — consolidation of movie studios and other entertainment conglomerates, consumers preferring to pay for streaming content on highly technical entertainment systems at home (rather than congregating in cinemas), and patent battles over various streaming/broadcast technologies. But the story itself and the personal interactions were sloppy at best, including too many irrelevant details. There was a scene of gratuitous mockery of Italian Americans and the whole story was a glamorization of dangerous overconsumption of alcohol. (It also turns out to have been authored by Henry Kuttner. Some claim his wife C.L. Moore helped him write it; she later stated he wrote it without her help.)

★★★★ Vintage Season, by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, 1946 (pg. 980-1,018)

If the previous story was written by Kuttner alone, and this one was done with the help of his wife C.L. Moore, then it’s clear who was the writer of the pair. This story was better by far. In style, it seemed as if someone took the offspring of H.G. Wells and Edgar Allen Poe and then sanded off the disjointed distracting parts via expert editing. The “surprise” (the strangers are from the future) was fairly predictable, but the way it was managed was superb for a 1940s pulp story.

★★★★ The Way To Amalteia, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, 1960 (pg. 1,019-1,077)

Note: the anthology lists this story’s year as 1984, though it was first published in 1960. The anthology also consistently uses “Amalteia” for the title and the name of the satellite of Jupiter, though all other sources spell it “Amalthea”. It’s about a research station on Amalthea running out of food, and the supply ship Takhmasib sent to resupply the station. The Takhmasib is pelted by dust and rocks as it passed over Jupiter and falls into the giant planet’s thick and heavy atmosphere, seemingly lost forever. The heroic crew comes to terms with impending death before making it out at the last minute. I took off points for a poor translation (it was obvious in spots) and numerous typographical errors, not to mention introducing dozens of character names in the first few pages. But the story itself was gripping and well carried out.