Review by Booklist Review
The 29 classic stories in this anthology are as well chosen as you might expect, given editor Card's formidable knowledge of the field and his fellow writers, knowledge that makes his introductory comments on each story very good, further enhancing the book's considerable value for the classroom and as an introduction to major stories and writers for nonstudents. Card's selections span the period from 1936 to 1995, and from Edmond Hamilton's "Devolution" through Lisa Goldstein's "Tourist," they are outstanding. The authors represented constitute an sf hall of fame: Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Pohl, Ellison, Le Guin, and others as famous and beloved. Toward the end of the collection, a few stories, like so much current sf, blur the lines between sf and fantasy, which makes one hope that Card, a man of mighty prowess in both genres, will compile a companion volume of fantasy stories. Should he, buy that book, too. --Roland Green
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Card (Shadow of the Hegemon, 2000, etc.), science fiction's popular neo-pastoral writer, picks his 27 favorites of the century-most of which are undisputed classics, even if Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe," Brian Aldiss's "Who Can Replace Man?" and Arthur C. Clarke's "Nine Billion Names of God" have been included in so many best-of and college textbook collections that they are almost canonical. Others are good, but not necessarily representative of their authors' finest work. Card reaches back to the 1930s with Edmund Hamilton's silly alien-encounter story, "Devolution," ignoring the author's more significant space-opera stories. He includes a charmingly sentimental Isaac Asimov robot tale, "Robot Dreams," instead of the immortal "Nightfall." Robert Heinlein's gimmicky time-travel paradox "All You Zombies" gets in instead of his tear-jerking "The Green Hills of Earth." Ursula K. Le Guin's "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas" pales beside the blinding eccentricity of R.A. Lafferty in "Eurema's Dam," though Card leaves out anything by other paradigm-shifting iconoclasts like Avram Davidson, Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, and Gene Wolfe. He nods at major trends: Harlan Ellison's rebel-without-a-clue experimentalism (" Repent Harlequin!' said the Ticktockman"), cyberpunk ("Dogfight," from William Gibson and Michael Swanwick), neo-pastoralism (Terry Bisson's sly "Bears Discover Fire"), and alternate-history (Harry Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken"), ending with George Alec Effinger's comforting, mystical twist on the search for intelligent life ("One"). In his introduction, Card explains that, rather than mulling over what best represents the authors, what stories were most influential in the field, or what might be the criteria of a masterpiece, he merely picked stories he liked when he first read them and liked again when he thought about collecting them. Duh?
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
