SF Short Fiction – Page 3

PLANETS OF WONDER edited by Terry Carr

TITLE: PLANETS OF WONDER – A TREASURY OF SPACE OPERA
EDITED BY: Terry Carr
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Anthology
PUBLISHER: Thomas Nelson Inc., Nashville, Tennessee, 1976
FORMAT: Hardback, 1st Edition, 189 pages, ISBN: 0-8407-6526-6

CONTENTS:

Introduction by Terry Carr
\”Dust of Gods\” by C. L. Moore (Weird Tales, August 1934)
\”We Guard the Black Planet!\” by Henry Kuttner (Super Science Stories, November 1942)
\”The Veil of Astellar\” by Leigh Brackett (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Spring 1944)
\”Kingdoms of the Stars\” by Edmond Hamilton (Amazing Stories, September 1964)

This is one of my favourite SF anthologies, edited by one of the best anthologists out there, Terry Carr. It\’s also a pretty short one, at only 189 pages, with only four stories, but what stories they are.

What we have here are four of the genuine Classic Space Opera adventures from days gone by, one from the 1930s, two from the 1940s and one from the 1960s. Even more importantly, all of these stories were authored by four of the greatest proponents of that sub-genre of SF, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton. These two great husband and wife author teams of the Thirties and Forties, are among my favourite SF writers of that era, and I\’ll read pretty much anything written by the four of them. Kuttner, Moore and Brackett, in particular, are three of my favourite SF authors ever.

This is a gem of an anthology, with four great stories and an excellent introduction by Terry Car. I reckon that it\’s been out of print for many years, but it would be well worth tracking down in used book stores. I wish that far more old anthologies like this would again be made available in electronic format for the Kindle, Nook and various other eReader devices out there, For the enjoyment of newer generations of SF readers, who have never seen these old classics before.

Poor kids. They don\’t know what they\’re missing!

BEACHHEADS IN SPACE edited by August Derleth

TITLE: BEACHHEADS IN SPACE
EDITED BY: August Derleth
CATEGORY: Anthology
SUB-CATEGORY: Short Fiction
FORMAT: Hardback, 224 pages
PUBLISHER: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1954 (Originally published in the US in 1952 by Pellegrini & Cudahy).

That\’s the various general details, here\’s a listing of the contents:

\”Beachhead\” by Clifford D. Simak (1951)
\”The Years Draw Nigh\” by Lester del Rey (1951)
\”Metamorphosite\” by Eric Frank Russell (1946)
\”Breeds There a Man…?\” by Isaac Asimov (1951)
\”And the Walls Came Tumbling Down\” by John Wyndham (1951)
\”The Blinding Shadows\” by Donald Wandrei (1934)
\”The Metamorphosis of Earth\” by Clark Ashton Smith (1951)

This is an interesting old anthology, edited by another of my favourite SF anthologists, August Derleth. The theme of this anthology, according to the book\’s jacket blurb, is \”invasion from another world, or counter-attack from Earth against the planets\”.

I haven\’t read this one in many years, maybe twenty-five years or more, but I remember that it was a favourite of mine way back in the day, and it still has a special place on my bookshelves. Obviously my memories of the individual stories are vague after all this time, and I don\’t remember all of them clearly, and a couple of them not at all. But the ones that I do recall really liking are Clifford D. Simak\’s very clever short story \”Beachhead\” (AKA \”You\’ll Never Go Home Again!\”, first published in Fantastic Adventures, July 1951), Eric Frank Russell\’s excellent novella \”Metamorphosite\”, (from Astounding, December 1946), and Clark Ashton Smith\’s scary and unusual alien invasion SF/Horror novelette \”The Metamorphosis of Earth\” (Weird Tales, September 1951).

I also remember liking Lester del Rey\’s \”The Years Draw Nigh\” and Isaac Asimov\’s \”Breeds There a Man…?\”, although for some reason I remember a lot less about them than I do about the Russell, Simak and Smith stories. I don\’t recall anything at all about the Wyndham and Wandrei stories. I\’m surprised about not remembering the Wyndham story, as I\’m usually a big fan of his writing.

But as good as my recollections are of the Simak and Smith stories, the stand-out story for me in this anthology has always been Eric Frank Russell\’s classic \”Metamorphosite\”, which I recall having a huge impact on me back when I was a young guy in my twenties. I don\’t think this story is in any of my other anthologies (and I have zillions of the darned things!), so I reckon it hasn\’t been reprinted very often. It\’s far, far too many years since I last read it, and indeed this entire anthology, so it\’s long overdue for a re-read. I\’ve already started on the Simak story, and, so far, it\’s at least as good as I remember it, if not better. If the rest of the stories hold up as well as this one is doing, I\’m going to really enjoy reading this anthology again.

Please take note that this is the 1954 UK edition, which is different from the original 1952 US hardcover edition, published by Pellegrini & Cudahy. Apparently all editions aside from the original hardcover edition have been \”butchered\” in some way, missing stories, etc. This UK edition is missing the Introduction and seven of the stories from the US edition. Also note that John Wyndham has two stories in the original US edition, one under his usual John Wyndham pseudonym, and the other as John Benyon.

Here is the full Contents Listing of the original 1952 US edition:

Introduction by August Derleth
\”The Star\” by David H. Keller, M.D.
\”The Man from Outside\” by Jack Williamson
\”Beachhead\” by Clifford D. Simak
\”The Years Draw Nigh\” by Lester del Rey
\”Metamorphosite\” by Eric Frank Russell
\”The Ordeal of Professor Klein\” by L. Sprague de Camp
\”Repetition\” by A. E. van Vogt
\”Breeds There a Man…?\” by Isaac Asimov
\”Meteor\” by John Beynon
\”And the Walls Came Tumbling Down\” by John Wyndham
\”Blinding Shadows\” by Donald Wandrei
\”The Metamorphosis of Earth\” by Clark Ashton Smith
\”The Ambassadors from Venus\” by Kendell F. Crossen
\”To People a New World\” by Nelson S. Bond

For lovers of old-style, classic SF short fiction, this anthology would be right up their alley. If you can actually find it, that is. As it\’s such an old book, it\’s obviously long out of print, and you\’ll have to hunt through used book stores to find this anthology. But it\’ll be well worth the trouble it takes to find it, as are any other anthologies edited by August Derleth.

After all these years, I think I\’ll actually make a major effort to get off my butt and track down the longer original US hardcover edition, which I didn\’t even realize was different/longer until I recently read the Wikipedia entry on the anthology.

Highly recommended, particularly the original US hardcover edition.

EMPIRE by H. Beam Piper

TITLE: EMPIRE
AUTHOR: H. Beam Piper
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Collection
FORMAT: Paperback
PUBLISHER: Ace Books, New York, 1981 (ISBN: 0-441-20557-7-250)

CONTENTS:

Terro-Human Future History Chronology
Introduction, by John F. Carr
The Edge of the Knife
A Slave is a Slave
Ministry of Disturbance
The Return (with John J. McGuire)
The Keeper

Last time out, I featured FEDERATION, the first of two collections gathering together the short fiction of H. Beam Piper\’s classic Terro-Human Future History cycle. This time it\’s the turn of EMPIRE, the second collection of stories set in that future history.

The book starts with an excellent three-page chronology of Piper\’s Terro-Human Future History, put together from dates, events and other data spread over all of Piper\’s short fiction and novels. This is followed by yet another fascinating and detailed ten-page Introduction by Piper scholar John F. Carr, which gives a lot of useful additional details on the future history as related in the five stories in this collection.

The five stories in the FEDERATION collection are from the earlier phase of Piper\’s Future History, whereas the five stories in EMPIRE cover the later stages of that Future History, with the exception of The Edge of the Knife, which is unique in that it is set in the more contemporary timeframe of the early 1970s, pre-dating the formation of the Federation, and thus placing the story effectively outside of the future history itself.

I haven\’t read this collection for years, but I have fond memories of The Keeper, Ministry of Disturbance, and The Edge of the Knife, although I remember very little about either A Slave is a Slave or The Return (which are lined up for a much-needed re-read in the not-too-distant future). If they turn out to be even half as good as the other stories, that will be the cream on top of the cake, as far as I\’m concerned.

The Keeper, in particular, is very moody and atmospheric, and is one of my favourite Piper stories, in my opinion bettered by only Omnilingual (I\’ve always found it funny that my two favourite stories in Piper\’s Future History chronology are, by their positions in that future history, the very first, Omnilingual, and the very last, The Keeper). The Keeper allows us the only available brief and tantalizing glimpses into the mysterious far future of the Fifth Empire, and is also the only known story written by Piper which is set beyond the end of the First Empire. The rest of the existing Terro-Human Future History Chronology doesn\’t go beyond the First Empire, which makes The Keeper seem strange and out of place compared to the other stories, until we accept that it is the only surviving proof that Piper intended to write other stories extending his future history far into the distant future.

Aside from the few snippets of background information contained in The Keeper, we know absolutely nothing about Piper\’s plans for developing the details of these distant far-future eras of his chronology. According to Jerry Pournelle, who had a lot of contact with Piper back in the day, he had certainly planned something much bigger. Pournelle has always asserted that he had seen Piper\’s folders full of extensive notes and details of a much longer and more complex future history chronology. Tragically, those notes were lost after Piper\’s suicide, and all that we\’re left with is a big bunch of \”maybes\” and \”what-might-have-beens\”, only too aware that the future history material which (fortunately) still exists in print, as good as it is, gives us only a tiny portion of the greatness that might have been.

As it stands, EMPIRE is a very strong collection, and already contains at least three of my favourite Piper stories, plus the excellent chronology and introduction. And as such, it\’s definitely well worth adding to any aspiring SF reader\’s bookshelf.

FEDERATION by H. Beam Piper

TITLE: FEDERATION
AUTHOR: H. Beam Piper
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Collection
PUBLISHER: Ace Books, New York, 1981, ISBN: 0-441-23189-6-295
FORMAT: Paperback, 284 pages

CONTENTS:

Preface, by Jerry Pournelle
Introduction, by John F. Carr
Omnilingual
Naudsonce
Oomphel in the Sky
Graveyard of Dreams
When in the Course-

The book starts with a brief Preface by Jerry Pournelle, a short but fitting tribute to H. Beam Piper and his writing. This is followed by a lengthy twenty-page Introduction by John F. Carr, which is a much more detailed and even more fascinating essay on the life and writings of Piper.

The five stories themselves are from Piper\’s acclaimed TerroHuman Future History cycle, one of the most complex and detailed future histories in science fiction literature. This collection, Federation, is made up of stories from the earlier stages of that Future History, and a later collection, Empire, completes the stories from the later part of the cycle.

There are certainly some very good stories in this collection, but the stand-out for me is definitely Omnilingual, which I first read a long time ago, way back in my teens. Along with He Walked Around the Horses (which isn\’t in this collection, and isn\’t part of the Future History), this has always been one of my favourite pieces of SF short fiction, and I\’ve always regarded both Omnilingual and He Walked Around the Horses as Piper\’s two best short stories, although his other stories are also of an extremely high calibre.

As far as I\’m concerned, the collection is worth buying just for Omnilingual alone. But the other four stories are nothing to turn your nose up at either. This is H. Beam Piper we\’re talking about here, and he simply did not write bad SF stories.

A very good collection.

ON OUR WAY TO THE FUTURE edited by Terry Carr

[W]e\’ve certainly got an interesting anthology here, an oldish one from 1970. It\’s also the first anthology posting (but definitely will not be the last) on this blog from another of my favourite SF anthologists, Terry Carr.

TITLE: ON OUR WAY TO THE FUTURE
EDITED BY: Terry Carr
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Anthology
PUBLISHER: Ace Books, New York, 1970
FORMAT: Paperback, 253 pages.

CONTENTS:

Introduction by Terry Carr
Greenslaves by Frank Herbert (1965)
A Better Mousehole by Edgar Pangborn (1965)
Ballenger\’s People by Kris Neville (1967)
King Solomon\’s Ring by Roger Zelazny (1963)
Sundance by Robert Silverberg (1969)
Be Merry by Algis Budrys (1966)
Under the Dragon\’s Tail by Philip Latham (1966)
A Taste for Dostoevsky by Brian W. Aldiss (1967)
Cyclops by Fritz Leiber (1965)
Goblin Night by James H. Schmitz (1965)

This anthology isn\’t restricted to a single theme, as were the two Robert Silverberg anthologies in my previous posts, and is more of a general multi-theme \”ten science fiction adventures in tomorrow\” kind of thing, charting our journey into infinity, our way into the future. There\’s a wider variety of stories here by big-name SF authors, stories which, up until the time of publication, had never appeared in paperback before.

As usual, I\’ll continue working my way through the stories in this, and the previous anthologies, completely at random, in a totally haphazard fashion, pretty much as the whim takes me and when I get free time to do so. I usually just lift a book, any book, from the \”to read\” stack, and read any story that takes my fancy. Next time, I might do the same, but with a completely different anthology, and so on.

I don\’t have any real system for reading, but usually pick my favourite authors first, then work my way down to least favourite (or authors I haven\’t encountered before), The main postings themselves are more for providing general overall information about the various anthologies and individual author collections, but will also be interspersed with posts on the individual stories as and when I have read them.

The Best of Arthur C. Clarke 1937-71

[H]ere\’s another book of excellent short fiction, this time it\’s a single-author collection, THE BEST OF ARTHUR C. CLARKE 1937-71.

TITLE: THE BEST OF ARTHUR C. CLARKE 1937-71
AUTHOR: Arthur C. Clarke
EDITED BY: Angus Wells
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Collection
FORMAT: Hardback – Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1973, ISBN: 0 283 97979 8); Paperback – Sphere Books, London, 1973, ISBN: 0 7221 2426 0)

I have both the above hardback and paperback editions. The paperback was initially released as one volume, but later reissues were split into two volumes. Here is a listing of the contents:

1937: Travel by Wire
1938: Retreat from Earth
1942: The Awakening
1942: Whacky
1947: Castaway
1949: History Lesson
1949: Hide and Seek
1951: Second Dawn
1954: The Sentinel*
1955: The Star
1955: Refugee
1956: Venture to the Moon
1960: Into the Comet
1960: Summertime on Icarus
1961: Death and the Senator
1961: Hate
1965: Sunjammer
1972: A Meeting with Medusa**

This is an interesting one, although there are certainly some stories missing from it that you might expect to appear in any self-respecting Arthur C. Clarke Best of…. To name but a few: The Nine Billion Names of God, \”If I Forget Thee, O Earth…\”, The Wind from the Sun, Transit of Earth, I Remember Babylon, and Expedition to Earth, among others.

And there are also quite a few personal favourites that I thought should\’ve definitely been in there – Rescue Party, All the Time in the World, The Forgotten Enemy, The Fires Within, Time\’s Arrow, Out of the Sun, and a few others.

But that\’s the problem with all Best of… collections, isn\’t it? There\’s never enough room for every story that the readers (or editors) think should definitely be in there. And, in the end, it\’s totally up to the personal choice of the editor. Still, even with the omissions, this is still a nice collection of Clarke\’s short fiction.

This was the very first collection of Arthur C. Clarke short stories that I ever read, way back when I was a kid (we\’re talking forty years ago here), so it holds significant sentimental value for me, even though it isn\’t by any means the most comprehensive collection of Clarke\’s best short fiction. For that, read instead the later collection MORE THAN ONE UNIVERSE: THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ARTHUR C. CLARKE (US, 1991), which would be much more deserving of the title THE BEST OF ARTHUR C. CLARKE.

* The Sentinel is erroneously dated in the contents listing as being published in 1954. The correct publication date is 1951.

** The collection is dated 1937-1971, but one story in the collection, A Meeting with Medusa, was published in 1972.

The Best of Arthur C. Clarke 1937-71

Here\’s another book of excellent short fiction, this time a single-author collection, THE BEST OF ARTHUR C. CLARKE 1937-71.

TITLE: THE BEST OF ARTHUR C. CLARKE 1937-71
AUTHOR: Arthur C. Clarke
EDITED BY: Angus Wells
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Collection
PUBLISHER: Hardback – Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1973, ISBN: 0 283 97979 8); Paperback – Sphere Books, London, 1973, ISBN: 0 7221 2426 0)

I have both the above hardback and paperback editions. The paperback was initially released as one volume, but later reissues were split into two volumes. Here is a listing of the contents:

1937: Travel by Wire
1938: Retreat from Earth
1942: The Awakening
1942: Whacky
1947: Castaway
1949: History Lesson
1949: Hide and Seek
1951: Second Dawn
1954: The Sentinel*
1955: The Star
1955: Refugee
1956: Venture to the Moon
1960: Into the Comet
1960: Summertime on Icarus
1961: Death and the Senator
1961: Hate
1965: Sunjammer
1972: A Meeting with Medusa**

* The Sentinel is erroneously dated in the contents listing as being published in 1954. The correct publication date is 1951.

** The collection is dated 1937-1971, but one story in the collection, A Meeting with Medusa, was published in 1972.

\”Divine Madness\” by Roger Zelazny (1966)

[O]kay, here\’s my second random pick from TRIPS IN TIME, \”Divine Madness\” by Roger Zelazny.

TITLE: \”Divine Madness\” (1966)
AUTHOR: Roger Zelazny
CATEGORY: Short Story
SUB-CATEGORY: Time Travel, Temporal Paradox
SOURCE: TRIPS IN TIME edited by Robert Silverberg (Wildside Press, 1977)
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: Magazine of Horror (Summer 1966), published again in New Worlds (October 1966)

A tortured man is having seizures, during which he is seemingly being forced to relive a sequence of recent events in reverse. The doctors claim that this is all unreal, and that he is enduring a strange hallucination caused by a combination of epilepsy and grief from some unspecified recent trauma or loss. But we are led to believe otherwise, that he is actually trapped in some kind of temporal paradox, during which he really is reliving these recent events in reverse.

The seizures/time reversals are getting longer, starting off at a few minutes long, then hours, then seemingly days in length. And they are rushing inexorably backwards towards the point of origin, the mysterious unnamed trauma which seems to be the cause of everything. He can watch these events, but it seems he is helpless to change any of them. The laws of cause and effect have been turned upside down, and the actions which started the chain of events would not be revealed until the end of the story.

Things begin to become clear as actions continue to unfold backwards, through the funeral, the tragic phone call in which he is informed of his girlfriend\’s death in an 80mph car crash, and finally onto the initial event which caused everything, that fateful final argument between them that led to her storming off in anger. Will he be able to say those all-important words to her once he actually reaches the crucial moment, or will he once again be unable to change anything, and be forced to watch helplessly as events unfold tragically, yet again?

\”Divine Madness\” is at heart a tragic love story with an ingenious SF twist at it\’s core. There never is any explanation given for the strange time reversal paradox, why it was happening to this guy or what was causing it. Nor is there any need for an explanation. It just IS. I know that many SF authors and readers like to have the clever stuff revealed in every detail (I can be one of those people, at times), but sometimes I do think it\’s nice to leave the occasional thing unexplained and mysterious.

Zelazny\’s beautiful use of language always was a cut above many of his contemporaries, and I really liked the lucid descriptions of the reversal scenes – birds flying backwards, the cigarette growing longer and unlighting back into the lighter, the Martini being undrunk back into the glass, the fountain sucking the water back into itself, the birds replacing the bits of the candy bar that they were uneating, and various other everyday minutae unfolding in the opposite direction from the one they are supposed to occur. Some of these scenes are both beautiful and ingenious.

Over the years, the \”time reversal\” story has become a fairly familiar gimmick in SF literature, sci-fi movies and television series. I certainly remember an entire episode of the UK comedy sci-fi television series Red Dwarf built on the idea – I wonder if the creators, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, ever read \”Divine Madness\”, as I know they\’re huge SF literature fans. But when Zelazny\’s story was published in 1966, (twice, first in the Summer edition of Magazine of Horror, and again in the October edition of New Worlds magazine), \”time reversal\” was a much fresher and less clichéd SF device than it is today.

Whilst this may not be the only \”time reversal\” story in SF, I can only think of one other off the top of my head that tackled the subject in such an elaborate manner, the much more light-hearted and comedic \”Round Trip to Esidarap\”, written by Lloyd Biggle, Jr., which was published six years earlier than \”Divine Madness\”, as \”Esidarap ot Pirt Dnuor\” in the November 1960 edition of If magazine. Maybe there are other \”time reversal\” stories of this type out there, but I can\’t think of any right now.

However one thing\’s for sure. Few, if any, SF authors could write as fine an example of the form as Roger Zelazny has given us with \”Divine Madness\”.

Rated: 3.5 out of 5.0

\”Try and Change the Past\” by Fritz Leiber (1958)

[I]\’m just going to start picking stories at random from the two Robert Silverberg edited anthologies that I\’ve been reading. The first one is from TRIPS IN TIME, and is \”Try and Change the Past\” by Fritz Leiber.

TITLE: \”Try and Change the Past\” (1958)
AUTHOR: Fritz Leiber
CATEGORY: Short Story
SUB-CATEGORY: Time Travel, Temporal Paradox
SOURCE: TRIPS IN TIME edited by Robert Silverberg (Wildside Press, 1977)
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: Astounding, March 1958

In the never-ending temporal conflict between the Snakes and the Spiders, one particularly shifty member of the Snakes (a well-deserved description, in the case of this dude) gets the bright idea of illicitly using his side\’s time travel facilities to go back and change his own personal history, so that he doesn\’t die and end up fighting in this damned war. Unfortunately for him, he ends up finding out the hard way that the four-dimensional spacetime universe has its own Law of the Conservation of Reality, and doesn\’t like things to be changed, no siree.

\”Try and Change the Past\” is a clever and quite amusing story set during the Change War milieu of Leiber\’s classic time travel/temporal paradox novel THE BIG TIME. The story was first published in the March 1958 edition of Astounding, at the same time that THE BIG TIME was being serialized in the March and April 1958 editions of Galaxy magazine.

I\’ve always enjoyed Leiber\’s writing, both SF and fantasy (despite the fact that I\’m not a huge fan of fantasy in general), and THE BIG TIME and its Change War setting has always been a favourite of mine. This particular short story, while I certainly wouldn\’t rank it among my \”most favourite short stories of all time\”, is still an enjoyable and worthy addition to the Change War universe.

Rated: 3.0 out of 5.0

VOYAGERS IN TIME edited by Robert Silverberg

[I]n my last SF Anthologies post I commented that I\’d recently bought a couple of nice old SF anthologies from Amazon UK. I made a few comments about the newer of the two anthologies, TRIPS IN TIME and gave a contents listing for it. Here\’s the same routine for the second anthology, which was published ten years earlier, but can be considered a \”companion\” anthology, from a thematic viewpoint, since both books contain short stories about time travel. This one is VOYAGERS IN TIME, edited by Robert Silverberg.

TITLE: VOYAGERS IN TIME – Twelve Stories of Science Fiction
EDITED BY: Robert Silverberg
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Anthology
PUBLISHER: Meredith Press, New York, 1967
FORMAT: Hardcover, 243 pages.

This anthology is a collection of more traditional (but still fun) time travel stories than those in TRIPS IN TIME. The stories in this one span a thirty year period, the earliest originally published in 1937, and the last in 1967. Here\’s a listing of the contents:

The Sands of Time by P. Schuyler Miller (1937)
…And It Comes Out Here by Lester del Rey (1950)
Brooklyn Project by William Tenn (1948)
The Men Who Murdered Mohammed by Alfred Bester (1964)
Time Heals by Poul Anderson (1949)
Wrong-Way Street by Larry Niven (1965)
Flux by Michael Moorcock (1963)
Dominoes by C. M. Kornbluth (1953)
A Bulletin from the Trustees by Wilma Shore (1964)
Traveler\’s Rest by David I. Masson (1965)
Absolutely Inflexible by Robert Silverberg (1956, revised version 1967)
THE TIME MACHINE [Chapter XI, XII – part] by H. G. Wells (1895)

This looks like another very interesting anthology of short fiction. Silverbob certainly does know how to put together a good anthology of stories. Again, some of them I remember well (Wells, Bester, Tenn, and Moorcock), others I vaguely remember (Miller, del Rey, Anderson, Niven, Kornbluth and Silverberg), and the last two I\’m not familiar with at all (Shore, Masson).

As I\’ve already said, this is a kinda/sorta \”sister\” anthology to the later TRIPS IN TIME (1977), which is a more unusual and quirky collection of time travel tales. I\’ve already read several of the stories in TRIPS IN TIME, but now I\’ve started reading some of the stories in VOYAGERS IN TIME as well. I\’m dipping in and out of both books, and it will be nice to compare the two anthologies when I\’ve finished both of them.

As usual, I\’m working my way through the stories in both books slowly, as and when I get free time to do so, and not in any kind of order. I\’ll just pick stories at random, usually with favourite authors first and working my way to least favourite or least familiar. Once I\’ve finished I\’ll start posting comments on individual stories (with the exception of the excerpts from The Time Machine, as I\’ll be reviewing the novel at some point), and comments on the two anthologies as a whole.