The Norton book of science fiction Book

850 pages, 67 stories and a lengthy introduction - I don't feel like I read this so much as I engaged in combat with it and finally won.

There are some wonderful stories here, but also a surprising large number of stories that I don't much like. The majority of the stories are good, I think. However, for a book that is described on the dust jacket as "The very best...North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990," this falls far short.

Goodreads reviewer Jeff, far more ambitious than I, has reviewed and rated each individual story. I found referring to this helpful, and other readers might as well.

Some of the stories in the book do not seem to me to be science fiction. Perhaps reading them again might change my mind. They are:

"The Winter Flies" - Fritz Leiber
"Night-Rise" - Katherine MacLean
"Schwarzchild Radius" - Connie Willis (I am uncertain about whether this is science fiction or not)
"Half-Life" - Paul Preuss
"Aunt Parnetta's Electric Blisters" - Diane Glancy

Ms. Le Guin's "Introduction" is somewhat overlong. I wish that her comments about individual stories were used as introductions or afterwords to the stories themselves rather than just heaped together. Also, she makes some odd choices about proper names. On page 25 alone, she refers to three science fiction authors by versions of their names that I do not believe the authors themselves customarily used: "S. R. Delany" for Samuel R. Delany; "Robert Shaw" for Bob Shaw; and "Algirdas Jonas Budrys" for Algis Budrys. I was amused by the repeated quoting from Karl Kroeber, whom Le Guin did not identify as her brother.


The stories that I particularly like are:

"Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" - Cordwainer Smith*
"Tandy's Story" - Theodore Sturgeon
"The House the Blakeneys Built" - Avram Davidson
"Over the River and Through the Woods" - Clifford D. Simak
"Comes Now the Power" - Roger Zelazny
"The Winter Flies" - Fritz Leiber
"High Weir" - Samuel R. Delaney*
"Kyrie" - Poul Anderson
"For the Sake of Grace" - Suzette Haden Elgin
"Gather Blue Roses" - Pamela Sargent
"The Women Men Don't See" - James Tiptree, Jr.*
"The Mountains of Sunset, the Mountains of Dawn" - Vonda N. McIntyre
"Tauf Aleph" - Phyllis Gotlieb
"...the World, as we Know 't" - Howard Waldrop
"Speech Sounds" - Octavia Butler
"The Lucky Strike" - Kim Stanley Robinson*
"Interlocking Pieces" - Molly Gloss
"The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things" - Karen Joy Fowler
"We See Things Differently" - Bruce Sterling
"And the Angels Sing" - Kate Wilhelm

The starred stories are the ones that I especially like.


I have had a problem deciding about what to rate this book. The best parts are superb; the worst are quite poor. I have never previously noted that I would like to assign a book a rating with a number of stars that included half a star. I would assign this three and a half stars, but since that is not possible, I am giving three stars.