Transcendental tales from Isaac Asimov's science fiction magazine Book

I picked this book up because I wanted an introduction to Isaac Asimov styled writings. After reading the collection of twelve short stories, all of which come directly from Isaac Asimov Science Fiction Magazine, I reluctantly say I am hardly impressed.

There is an inordinate fascination with Native American, Egyptian, and Eastern traditions. This would not be an issue in itself, except each author uses the traditions as a crutch for their stories, relying heavily on their purportedly inherent mysteriousness to convey a sense of wonder rather than attempting to do the same through writing. Egypt is linked with aliens, Native Americans are linked with spirit medicines and rain dancing, eastern cultures are linked with acupuncture and reincarnation. None of these phenomena are explained, and no attempt is made to do so, rather the reader must take it as a given.

I guess I was hoping for something more science fiction, where the relative absurdities or oddities are explained and there are reasons for the advancement of the plot which derive from these or other reasons. It seemed like most if the stories in this book looked up a bit of historical facts (a name, a place, an era... ) and built an unrelated story atop it.

Apart from the stories, I was perturbed by the gross excesses of grammatical errors. So many hanging quotations, names spelled two different ways, missing commas or periods. Nobody edited this book, they couldn't have otherwise there wouldn't be so many mistakes! These weren't just minor inconveniences either, I became genuinely confused whether a person had begun or stopped talking; there were just so many hanging quotations.

Overall the story quality was poor, cliché, trite, and overused. I can't say much more for the narrative. I hate to give such a poor review to what I expected to be a great read, but I was hardly interested in most of the stories. Deus ex machina, this is what I came to expect of all these stories.