A dusk of idols Book

A short collection of science fiction stories with a few later diversions towards fantasy, representing some of the author's work from the late forties through the early sixties largely uncollected elsewhere. In content the collection primarily echos themes of the cold war; paranoia, free will, humanity-as-predator, fatalism, WMDs and man-made apocalypse and whether it can be avoided, all largely filtered through a lens of what was the vogue for 'respectable' i.e post-pulp science fiction in the era which Blish himself championed as an editor. As such for my taste the characterization, depth of setting and plot have a tendency to suffer in places in favour of brevity and the central idea/premise, but there still some strong stories here and some interesting ideas, if time and tide has left some of the scientific predictions and cultural/gender representation rather quaint to a modern reader, particularly in the earlier works.

As i don't see a list of the publication dates of the stories the collection contains in the Goodreads description, I thought I'd add one here:

"To Pay the Piper" (1955)
"Beep" (1954)
"The Box" (1949)
"The Writing of the Rat" (1956)
"A Matter of Energy" (1956)
"King of the Hill" (1955)
"Mistake Inside" (1948)
"A Dusk of Idols" (1961)