The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction

[warshipadmin]

This is a chronologically ordered selection of short (dozen pages or so) stories, designed I suppose to enable lazy professors to teach SF crit without having to choose any stories themselves.

It's got some good stories, and they managed to find a Bruce Sterling one that I enjoyed reading. It also has a dull Asimov, a potboiler Sturgeon, a very lightweight Bradbury and my pet hate, the original BEM catalog, Martian Odyssey. Bonkers standouts were Rogue Farm and Air Raid. How can you have a quasi historical survey and not have any Clarke, Baxter, or Banks? Two astonishingly banal 'feminist' stories did their authors no favors, Heat Death of the Universe, and Abominable.

The blurbs vary in quality, I'm guessing they were each written by one of the editors, although they are unsigned.