Gregg Wingo's Reviews > Alchemy and Academe

Anne McCaffrey has put together an interesting if fairly random collection of stories. Despite the wide-ranging subtitle, there really isn't a common thread to these stories other than they are generally well written. The collection surprised me by starting out with a poem by John Updike which was previously published in Scientific American. Entitled "The Dance of the Solids" it holds closer to the theme of the collection more than the rest of the stories.

I was drawn to the collection by the inclusion of James Blish's "More Light", a critical work in the evolution of King in Yellow mythology of Bierce, Chambers, and, of course, H. P. Lovecraft. Blish handles the material with both respect and humor, and delivers a successful Hastur tale and adds to the legendary horror.

Other stories of note for me included Norman Spinrad's "The Weed of Time", a tale of a mind-altering herb, Avram Davidson's "Big Sam", a rural love story, David Telfair's "In a Quart of Water", an alchemic tale set in a lightly disguised Swanee University, and Peter Tate's "Mainchance", an AI-human science fiction story. All told there are twenty stories and poems in the book and they are all good in their various ways. There are many heavy hitters in the group including Samuel R. Delany, Robert Silverberg, L. Sprague De Camp, and Keith Laumer whose pieces might strike your fancy!