At some point Judith Merril's anthologies originated in hardback, but they were reprinted by Dell, where the series started. This one is typical in that Merril didn't confine herself to looking for stories in the usual suspects and in fact didn't confine herself to fiction. A John W. Campbell editorial and a newspaper article are included.I read a lot of these stories when they were first published, and it's surprising how much of them I remembered when I started rereading them. Some of them seem just as fresh now as they did 50-something years ago, though of course some are quite dated. I'm pretty sure Jack Finney couldn't get away with "The Other Wife" now, though in 1960 it was published in The Saturday Evening Post, which in those days must have sold well into the millions of copies. Time changes everything.
"Make a Prison" is, I believe, Lawrence Block's only SF story. It's short and clever, but it has a point to make. So do a lot of these stories, and I suspect many of you are familiar with them. "Flowers for Algernon," for example, and "The Man Who Lost the Sea." I'm a Clifford D. Simak fan, so of course I liked "A Death in the House," which is a bit different from some of his work, but still the same in others. And Leiber's "Mariana" is another good one. Well, they're all good.
And then there are Merril's introductions to the stories, which are distinguished by the strength of her animus for Kingsley Amis, whose New Maps of Hell had recently been published. She makes many catty remarks about him as she goes along.
Copies of the book are available cheap from the usual Internet sources if you want to read some of the good old stuff.
CONTENTS: “Introduction” by Judith Merril;
“The Handler” by Damon Knight (1960);
“The Other Wife” by Jack Finney (1960);
“No Fire Burns” by Avram Davidson (1959);
“No, No, Not Rogov!” by Cordwainer Smith (1958);
“Shoreline at Sunset” by Ray Bradbury (1959); “The Dreamsman” by Gordon R. Dickson (1959);
“Multum in Parvo” by Jack Sharkey (1959);
“Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes (1959);
“’What Do You Mean...Human?’” by John W. Campbell, Jr. (1959);
“Sierra Sam” by Ralph Dighton (1960);
“A Death in the House” by Clifford D. Simak (1959);
“Mariana” by Fritz Leiber (1960);
“An Inquiry Concerning the Curvature of the Earth’s Surface” by Roger Price (1958);
“Day at the Beach” by Carol Emshwiller (1959);
“Hot Argument” by Randall Garrett (1959);
“What the Left Hand Was Doing” by Darrel T. Langart (1960);
“The Sound-Sweep” by J. G. Ballard (1960);
“Plenitude” by Will Worthington (1959);
“The Man Who Lost the Sea” by Theodore Sturgeon (1959);
“Make a Prison” by Lawrence Block (1958);
“What Now, Little Man?” by Mark Clifton (1959);
“Me” by Hilbert Schenck, Jr. (1959);
“The Year’s S-F: A Summary and Honorable Mentions” by Judith Merril.
