Quiz: Early Women Science Fiction Writers (etc.)

As I do many years, I created a quiz for the online trivia league I play in (Learned League.) This year the subject was "Early Women Science Fiction Writers" -- generally focussing on writers who started before 1950, but with a couple questions about editor, TV writers, and even fictional characters, and with a couple questions leaking into the 1950s and even 1960s.

The format of the quiz is 12 questions. But I always create alternative questions, to give me a choice, especially if the people who playtest the quiz uncover issues, or if something else happens, such as, for one question this year, a very similar question happening to be asked on the Learned League site shortly before my quiz appeared. The first 12 questions below are the ones that were part of the official quiz, and the last 3 are alternates. 

I usually try to make these quizzes of middling difficulty for the general player, but in this case the quiz played very hard (for the most part) -- and I regarded this as a virtue of sorts, because the whole aim of the quiz was to bring oft-neglected writers to broader notice. That said, while it was very hard for the general reader, it will play quite a bit easier for science fiction fans, as I imagine many of my readers here are.

I will post the answers in a few days. Put your guesses in the comments if you wish.

1.  One of the earliest women to hold major creative roles in television science fiction, D. C. Fontana followed the producer of The Lieutenant to a new franchise where she became a writer, story editor, and later associate producer, helping shape much of its early mythology. Name this franchise.

2.  The very first woman to be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America began writing historical fiction for young readers in the 1930s, adopting a male pseudonym as was common in that era. She turned to science fiction with the short story "People of the Crater" in 1947, and published her first science fiction novel, Star Man's Son, 2250 A. D., in 1952. Dozens of novels followed until (and beyond!) her death in 2005. Her most famous series is probably Witch World. Name this writer (either her given name or the male-coded pseudonym (which she later took as her legal name.))

3.  Any quiz about pioneering women science fiction writers could hardly omit mentioning Mary Shelley, whom Brian W. Aldiss championed as the first SF writer, thanks to her first novel, Frankenstein (1818). But Shelley was no one-hit wonder -- she published six further novels as well as short fiction, poetry, travel narratives, and biographies. Name the 1826 post-apocalyptic novel that was her final venture into science fiction.

4.  While Mary Shelley is now widely cited as the first "true" science fiction writer, there were earlier works involving science-fictional tropes, such as Lucian of Samosota's True History (late 2nd Century CE), Johannes Kepler's Somnium (1634), and The Blazing World (1666). Name the Englishwoman, a prominent natural philosopher in her time, who wrote the latter novel.

5.  Possibly no science fiction/fantasy magazine has been so closely associated with a single artist as Weird Tales between 1932 and 1945, when 66 covers, for almost half the magazine's issues, were painted by which woman? The most iconic of these covers is shown in the image below.

6.  One of the very best SF writers of all time had a career in the field that lasted from 1933 to 1958, after which she mostly wrote for television. She was known for her early series about Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith, and for later masterworks including "No Woman Born" and "Vintage Season", and while much of her work was in collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner, the best of it (in my opinion) was her work alone. Name this woman -- but don't use her married name(s) nor any of her pseudonyms, which included Lawrence O'Donnell, Lewis Padgett, and C. H. Liddell among others.

7.  Women editors were rare in science fiction magazines before the 1970s -- Dorothy McIlwraith at the aforementioned Weird Tales in the 1940s, and Bea Mahaffey, at Other Worlds, Universe and others in the early 1950s, were the most notable before the great Cele Goldsmith Lalli, who took over two companion magazines in 1958 and edited them until 1965, publishing major early work by such writers as Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, J. G. Ballard, and Thomas Disch. Name either of these two magazines, one of which still survives today, and which is famed as the first magazine devoted primarily to science fiction. 

8.  Begum Rokeya Hossain, a Bengali Muslim woman, published which remarkable story in The Indian Ladies' Magazine in 1905? The story is a reverie about a future utopia, characterized by women in power, solar energy, world peace, and even flying cars (but not grapes or raisins).

9.  Name the writer, editor, critic, and anthologist whose first sale, "That Only a Mother" (1948) ended up in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I. Her most significant contributions to SF include an early and eclectic series of anthologies collecting the best short SF of the year. After moving to Canada in the late 1960s she had a profound effect on that country's SF scene, initiating the Tesseracts series of anthologies of Canadian SF, and donating her collection of SF-related material to the Toronto Public Library to establish a research library now named for her.

10.  Margaret St. Clair, who also wrote as Idris Seabright, is in my opinion an underrated early master of modern science fiction. She began selling science fiction and detective fiction in 1946, and her work includes brilliant short fiction like "Short in the Chest", "An Egg a Month from All Over", and "The Sacred Martian Pig", as well as novels including Sign of the Labrys. She was a relatively early convert to which modern religion? Her beliefs are reflected in much of her later work. This religion was recently removed from the US Department of Defense list of accepted faiths.

11.  Now for a fictional character, who qualifies as a pioneering woman as she was one of the first female superheroes in the comics, debuting in 1941. The character was created by psychiatrist William Marston, and was influenced, he sometimes suggested, by his two polyamorous wives*, Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne, and perhaps also by Olive's aunt, the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. (*Holloway was Marston's legal wife, but it seems that all three regarded themselves as part of the marriage.) Who was this superhero?

12.  Leigh Brackett sold her first story in 1940, and went on to have a brilliant multi-faceted career, including science fiction novels like The Sword of Rhiannon and The Long Tomorrow (first novel by a woman to be shortlisted for the Hugo Award), crime fiction such as No Good From a Corpse, and writing for films (she collaborated with William Faulkner on the screenplay for The Big Sleep.) Shortly before her death in 1978 she turned in the first draft of the screenplay for which blockbuster science fiction movie?

13. Some important science fiction was produced by women outside the science fiction genre. What Not is a satrical novel published just as the first World War was ending, about a future in which war is outlawed and breeding is controlled on strictly eugenic grounds (by a Ministry of Brains!). Who was this author, a committed pacifist who published many other novels, gaining greatest success with her last, The Towers of Trebizond (1956).

14. The first woman writer to publish original fiction under her own name in the science fiction magazines was Clare Winger Harris, who placed a dozen stories in magazines such as Science Wonder Stories between 1926 and 1933, including "The Fate of the Poseidonia" and "The Miracle of the Lily". She was posthumously given which award in 2024, given annually to an unfairly neglected science fiction writer.

15. Thea von Harbou wrote the novel and co-wrote the screenplay for which classic 1927 science fiction film, directed by her husband Fritz Lang. Von Harbou pulled the same trick for another Lang-directed science fiction film, Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon (1928)). Alas, her marriage and collaboration with Lang collapsed in part because of mutual infidelity but also due to von Harbou's involvement with the Nazi party.

A recent novella: Making History, by K. J. Parker

Making History, by K. J. Parker

a review by Rich Horton

K. J. Parker's latest novella is Making History, from 2025. Parker is a very enjoyable writer, either under his real name (Tom Holt) or Parker pseudonym. His work is almost always comic, but the tone varies, with the Tom Holt stories being rather lighter, even daffier; while the Parker stories are profoundly cynical, and often verge on tragedy. (Holt's greatest work, in my admittedly unconventional opinion, is a diptych (latterly republished in a single volume) called Goat Song/The Walled Orchard, a bleakly funny and ultimately truly tragic historical novel about the Athenian invasion of Syracuse. Holt published a few more historical novels set in Ancient Greece, some loosely connected to this book.) 

Most of Parker's work is set in a sort of secondary world that roughly resembles, maybe, our world at something like the time of the Byzantine Emperor. These stories occasionally contain explicit fantastical elements, but usually do not. The geography of that "world" is somewhat consistent, the history, not so much -- it serves primarily as a ready-made setting for these stories, giving him a stage with a reusable set of props -- a religion, a few perpetually rival countries, a consistent technological level, some cultural figures to reference. Parker's interests as a novelist are a cynical view of of political actions, a despairing view of human relationships (particularly those between men and women), and a fascinated view of the ins and outs of technology, art, and language. 

Making History is told by a linguist in the country of Aelia. Aelia has somewhat recently been taken over by a man called Gyges, who is seeking to pick a fight with a neighboring country. To do so, he needs to establish that this country was responsible for wiping out Aelia's Golden Age ancestors. So he recruits a team of the best academics in the country, and orders them to create a convincing archaeological dig that will prove this. The narrator has to invent a convincing proto-Aelian language, and his fellows have to design art, and buildings, and tools and such. This gives Parker the latitude to interestingly describe how such an enterprise would work ... which is right up Parker's alley.

The rub comes when somehow some of these artifacts start appearing, even though they haven't really been created yet. Eventually, even the whole city is unearthed. What could be happening? Is it possible that they did their job so well that they perfectly mimicked real history that no one had known about? Or is someone on their team leaking information to the enemy. Or is it something more sinister?

The narrator knows only one thing -- he has to escape. So he asks his mistress -- a prostitute who has plenty of connections among the criminal class -- to arrange this. Now, this being a Parker novel, you know that if a woman, especially a woman the protagonist cares about but who is probably out of his league, gets involved, well, things won't turn out so well... 

Bottom line for me, alas, is that while I enjoyed this story well enough, it ultimately seemed too much of a same with many previous Parker stories. The cynicism seemed overdetermined, and the plot really didn't convince. In the end, this is not one of K. J. Parker's best efforts.

Hugo Ballot Thoughts, Best Novella (and links to the rest)

Here are links to my reviews of all the Hugo nominated novellas. In what I think is not a terribly strong shortlist, I have a clear first place vote, a clear last place vote, and four stories in the middle. The list below is my current planned ballot. Each title is linked to my review.

The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar

Cinder House, by Freya Marske

What Stalks the Deep, by T. Kingfisher

Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz

The Summer War, by Naomi Novik

Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite

Here are links to my other ballot summaries for this year:

Best Novel

Best Novelette

Best Short Story

Reviewing the Hugo Nominees for Best Novel: 2026

Here are the my looks at the six novels on the shortlist for the 2026 Hugo for Best Novel. They are listed in my order of preference, and I will say that I consider the first on the list to be by far the best book on the shortlist. The others are all good novels, and to be honest my ordering of them is my best thoughts today -- but they are all close. The Everlasting, however, is on another level.

The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow

A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett

Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor

The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh

Retold Review: Travel Arrangements, by M. John Harrison

Here's another review taken from SF Site. I wrote it in 2000.

Retold Review: Travel Arrangements, by M. John Harrison

by Rich Horton

M. John Harrison recently won the Richard Evans Award (named after the near-legendary figure of UK publishing who died a couple of years ago), given to the author who has contributed significantly to the SF genre without concomitant commercial success. In other words, one might say, for the best underrated author. Immediately upon hearing about the award to Harrison, I thought "How entirely appropriate!" Granted that he made a mild splash with his second novel, The Pastel City (1971), and with its loose sequels about the city of Viriconium, he has for the most part stayed below the radar of SF readers. This goes extra in the United States. [It should be noted that right about this time, and especially after the publication of his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, beginning with Light in 2002, Harrison's profile was raised significantly, and there is no question that he is now considered -- as he should always have been -- one of the most important contemporary SF writers, or indeed writers period.]

I was lucky enough to find The Pastel City not too long after its publication, and I followed Harrison's work for a while, but after the later Viriconium books in the early 80s his stuff became very hard to find. But in 1997, he published a wonderful sort of "Magic Realist Science Fiction" novel called Signs of Life, and, at around the same time, I also noticed such fine short stories as "Seven Guesses of the Heart" and "Suicide Coast" (the latter my personal pick for best SF short story of 1999).

Travel Arrangements is a new collection of short stories, his fourth collection. (Earlier he published The Machine in Shaft Ten, Viriconium Nights, and The Ice Monkey.) For all the title refers to travel, this book is almost obsessively about contemporary England. One story, "Seven Guesses of the Heart," is set on a fantastical isle. All the others are primarily set in England. (Travel, however, is often an explicit theme: "The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It," for example, is about a series of train journeys inspired by the Tarot; while "Gifco" is partly about a vacation in Morocco.)

Speaking in some ignorance, as an American who has never been across the Atlantic, I still get a very strong sense of place from these stories. The England they depict is closely observed, and very real -- very much the post-Thatcherite land, trying to simultaneously shuck off and preserve the images and the myth of "Albion."

It might seem from those words that the stories here are rather "mainstream" in tone and aim, and indeed this is the case. Many of the stories here are mainstream stories, and several more use SFnal or fantastical tropes to illuminate concerns of character and contemporary life that are exactly those concerns that dominate contemporary realistic fiction. None of this is at all bad: the stories are beautifully written, evocative, moving and strange. The tone is usually very low key, very quiet, even as wrenching emotional events are depicted. All in all, I think this is an outstanding collection.

As with many writers' collections, hints and references to his most recent novel turn up. In particular, "Anima" is a fine story which later became part of Signs of Life: concentrating here on the wild character Choe Ashton, and on a strange sexual experience he had when an adolescent. Signs of Life turns up again as a novel that the narrator of "Science and the Arts," the collection's final story, inscribes to the woman he is involved with.

This woman, Mona, is one of many mysterious women to appear in these pages. Indeed, a common theme of these stories is mysterious women, strong enough to cause the male characters to become obsessed with them, but flighty or odd or just difficult to understand. Take, for example, Elaine in "Black Houses," of whom the narrator writes "I've met people before, but not you. Not you." and later, inevitably: "I'd do anything to get you back." Or the late middle-aged, vegetarian, rather nutty Elizabeth, from "Old Women."

My favourite two stories here are among my favourite SF stories of the 90s. "Seven Guesses of the Heart" first appeared in Katherine Kerr's original fantasy anthology The Shimmering Door (called Sorceries in the UK). An aging magician, whose specialty is gardens, confronts the loss of his daughter, apparently to a misapplied spell, and the loss of his own powers. The story is a good example of what I was mentioning earlier: a fantasy story with a theme straight from the mainstream -- the relationship of a man, his wife, and his daughter, and the man's mid-life crisis. The story is not about the fantastic elements at all. However, the story is immensely enriched by the fantastic elements: they are used wonderfully to illuminate and bring out the central themes. That is, it's essential to the story that it be fantasy, even though one could treat the same theme without the fantastical elements.

On the other hand, my other favourite, "Suicide Coast," is the most overtly SF of all the stories at hand, and its theme is overtly SFnal as well. The narrator, Mick, is a journalist who writes about adventure sports: rock climbing, BASE jumping, hang gliding, and so on. He also does his own rock climbing, and drives fast cars. He tells of his relationship with an even more committed daredevil, Ed Johnson. Soon we see Ed's current life: wheelchair bound, living with Mick's ex-girlfriend, obsessively playing Virtual Reality games, still trying to recapture the experiences he can't have in "reality" any more. The story is tensely written, in Harrison's familiar very quiet prose style. He reminds us again and again of Mick's beliefs about what makes life worth living: "Nobody drives themselves anymore" says Mick, as he takes his Mercedes on the empty highways. "A life without consequences isn't worth living at all," he writes. We learn about Mick's rock climbing, and his driving, and about Ed's dangerous work, and how he became paralyzed. Then comes the ending, sudden, and perhaps half-expected, and throwing the whole story in a new light. We realize that real life, life with "consequences," doesn't just mean risking your life on a mountain, or in a fast car, but also risking your "feelings," your "self," if you will, by connecting with other people. And "nobody drives themselves anymore."

M. John Harrison is one of the best SF writers of the present day. This collection shows off Harrison's current style and his thematic concerns quite excellently. "Quiet" might be the most appropriate description of the affect of these stories, although the effect is anything but quiet.

Remediated Review: Malignos, by Richard Calder

Here's another review that had been lost in the ether since SF Site disappeared. This one is from 2000. 

Remediated Review: Malignos, by Richard Calder

Malignos is an entertaining and baroque work, with a wonderfully imagined "journey to the centre of the Earth" as its centrepiece. It is full of action, full of weird landscapes, full of unusual characters, and it is fast-moving to boot. Definitely an enjoyable and different read.

Richard Calder is the author of such previous novels as Dead Girls and Frenzetta: ostentatiously colourful work, dark-tinged and motivated by a hyperactive imagination. Malignos is set several millennia in the future of Frenzetta. (The main characters of the earlier story are given a nod as characters in a brief tale told by the narrator). Malignos is again very colourful, though Calder's prose style seems perhaps a bit less extravagant than previously. Frenzetta was set relatively shortly after an event called "The Abortion," when "particles" from an alternate universe leaked into our universe, infecting a number of humans so that they became "perverse," and eventually leading to the failure of technology. At the time of Frenzetta the "perverse" have adopted body shapes to fit their conception of themselves: some are rat people, some cat people, and so on. Some time later, the unaltered humans win a war against the "perverse," who are driven underground -- literally.

Thousands of years later, the altered humans seem to have settled on a more or less standard body type, a rather "demonic" form: scales, horns, bat wings, and a tail. They are called demons or goblins or malignos (a word which is both singular and plural). In recent times, the malignos have invaded from their underground strongholds and, after centuries of war, an unstable truce has been declared. Ritchie Pike, the narrator of Malignos, was a noted soldier in that war. But Pike has been exiled from his home, the Darkling Isle (what was Great Britain), to the Pilipinas, because his lover, Gala, is herself a malignos, though a traitor to her kind. Pike and Gala eke out a living. Pike is a sort of private investigator, often heading into the underground strongholds of the malignos with Gala's guidance. Gala is a whore, and Pike is serially unfaithful.

One of Pike's investigations goes bad and Gala is captured by her former family and "simplified" (given a drug which removes her intelligence). Guilt-stricken, Pike decides to travel under the Earth to the legendary malignos capitol, Pandemonium, located at the very centre of the Earth. This journey occupies the great bulk of the novel. It's very well described, as Pike encounters a variety of differing underground environments and features, as well as any number of grotesque characters. Naturally, he finds his way to Pandemonium eventually and discovers that he himself is not quite what he thought.

As I've said, the story is fast-moving and it's a very enjoyable read. On the negative side, a certain amount of the plot is driven by coincidence. Also, the characteristics of the altered future landscape, especially the rationale for it all, seem a bit arbitrary at times and quite a bit strained. Pike himself is something of a cliché as a character: only too world-weary, only too cynical, and generally such an unlikable individual that it's hard to understand what Gala sees in him. But these criticisms aside, the originality of the scenery and Calder's always fecund imagination make the story well worth the reading. This is by no means a masterpiece but it is a sound, different entertainment.

Revived Review: Future on Ice, edited by Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card's reputation has taken a rather well-deserved hit over the past few decades in great part because of his repellent views about homosexuality, but also because the quality of his writing has not quite held up in recent years. As for the first, well, his views are truly repellent. As for the latter -- all I can say is that has happened to many writers over the years, and it should not cause us to denigrate the earlier, greater, work -- and for Card, I would hope readers don't ignore his brilliant Foundation novella "The Originist", nor the "good parts" of his Ender novel Xenocide (mostly included in the Analog story "Gloriously Bright".) 

He also did some fine work as anthologist with the pair of anthologies discussed her (in a review I did for SF Site in 1999), and as a publisher with the nice online magazine Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, which ran from 2005 to 2019.

Indeed, looking back on these anthologies -- the one I review here (Future on Ice) as well as its companion (Future on Fire) I have to say there truly represent an excellent portrait of the best SF of the 1980s.

Revived Review: Future on Ice, edited by Orson Scott Card

This anthology was planned as a companion to Card's Future on Fire (1991), and together the two were meant to showcase the best short science fiction of the 1980s. However, for one reason or another, some eight years have elapsed before publication of Future on Ice. Immediacy is thus lost, but a certain perspective is gained: it's valuable to reread these pieces more than a decade after the latest of them was first published. Apparently Card made the selections in 1989 (and, in fact, the stories are all from 1983-1987, with fully half of the 18 first appearing in 1985 alone), but for the most part, his choices stand up brilliantly. This is quite legitimately an anthology which can stand on its own as a "Best of the 80s" (even though Card intended it to stand not on its own, but rather to be paired with Future on Fire): no doubt these aren't the very best 18 stories from that decade, but on any given day, they'll do.

It's not clear to me whether Card meant the titles of the anthologies to reflect the nature of the stories within, but these 18 may, perhaps, have a cooler effect than the "hotter" stories in the earlier anthology. And, perhaps, it's no coincidence that this book includes a story called "Snow," while Future on Fire included "Fire Zone Emerald" and "I Am the Burning Bush."

My favourite story here, and in my opinion one of the best SF stories of all time, is Nancy Kress' "Out of All Them Bright Stars" (winner of the 1985 Nebula for Best Short Story). This quiet, quiet, story, about a waitress in a diner and her encounter with an alien, illustrates as clearly as I can imagine the use of SF to examine human nature. It's a story that simply wouldn't work without being SF, without aliens, or without the implication of star travel, but its theme is all about what's within us. Lovely writing, perfect characters: it's one of those stories that just stops me dead and makes me think for some time after I finish it.

Several other stories included won major SF awards. Among them, I think Greg Bear's "Blood Music" (winner of both Hugo and Nebula for Best Novelette), a truly terrifying story about the consequences of engineering bacteria-sized microchips and using them to maintain the body's health, holds up best. In this story, Bear took his idea and ran with it to the fullest extent, facing every implication. A story that is similarly chilling in implication, John Varley's novella "Press Enter []" (also winner of both the Hugo and Nebula), doesn't seem to hold up quite as well. His central notion of computers linking up and taking over really isn't very new (cf. Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" for just one example), and his mechanism, while well-depicted and creepy, doesn't convince. (The idea is still being used, in one form or another, and a much newer example which convinced me a lot more is in Ken MacLeod's novel The Star Fraction (1995).) Nor does the (well-depicted and engaging but also rather creepy) love story quite convince. But, the story is still a great read.

Also among my personal favourite 80s stories are "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler, "Snow" by John Crowley, and "The Pure Product" by John Kessel. The first is a moving story of life in near-future Los Angeles, after a plague has destroyed the speech centers of everyone. The horror of the loss of communication with other people is very well portrayed. "Snow" is a beautiful fable about memory and love. A woman of the jet set records incidents from her life over many years, and her one-time gigolo/lover/husband plays them back after her death. But the technology only allows random access to these "memories", and the memories degrade over time. The effect is quiet and profound. "The Pure Product" is quite another thing. A man (apparently from the future) goes on a rampage through 80s North America. The story is fast moving and scary. At one level, it's a harder-edged take on the same theme as C.L. Moore's classic "Vintage Season," but at another level, we worry that the empathy-deficient people from the future are us.

Any anthology which aims to be "definitive" will surely include prominent stories like those mentioned above, and like George R.R. Martin's Nebula winner "Portraits of His Children" and Isaac Asimov's well-known late story, "Robot Dreams". But I like an anthology to include some surprises, as well. S.C. Sykes has only published a couple of stories and one novel (Red Genesis (1991)) to my knowledge. "Rockabye Baby" is included here, and it's a fine story about a man who becomes paralyzed in an accident. He adjusts to his condition, and develops some unexpected facets. Then he has a chance to regain the use of his limbs, but at a surprising (and logical) cost. The story worked very well for me right until the end, where I thought there were a few missteps, but the central dilemma is brilliantly presented.

Another writer who hasn't published a whole lot (only one novel, (Station Gehenna (1982)), is Canadian Andrew Weiner. His quirky short stories, however, appeared with some regularity throughout the 80s, and Card has chosen the intriguing "Klein's Machine" for this book. It's about a science fiction fan who becomes obsessed with the idea of time travel, finally convincing himself that he has travelled far into the future. Upon his return, a psychiatrist cures him, and he becomes "normal." Ultimately, it's a meta-fiction meditation on what makes SF readers dream.

Card also chooses stories by Lisa Goldstein, Gregory Benford, David Zindell, C. J. Cherryh, Walter Jon Williams, Karen Joy Fowler, Lewis Shiner, and himself. Probably the only story in the book which doesn't quite seem to me to belong is Asimov's slight, gimmicky, "Robot Dreams." Of course, one could quibble about some other choices: likely, I'd have taken Fowler's "The Faithful Companion at Forty" or "Game Night at the Fox and Goose" over Card's pick of "Face Value," and I'd have taken Card's own utterly wonderful Foundation story "The Originist" over "The Fringe," but in neither case has he chosen a bad story. This anthology eminently succeeds in presenting a selection which represents the short SF of the 1980s at its best, and at its widest variety.