Technically this is a reread but it has been as long as 35 or more years since I read most of the stories. Even the really famous ones like 'Nightfall' and 'Flowers for Algernon' were extremely fuzzy in my memory so that they read very much like new stories. The stories were originally published between 1934 and 1963 but most have held up fairly well with the best ones being very readable still. A good sampling of the best short stories in SF from the decades before the SFWA began giving the Nebulas.

Every story a classic -- some favorites:

"Mimsy were the Borogoves" and "Little Black Bag" - objects transported through time machines change the lives of those who find them;

"Twilight" - also about time travel - a man of the future leaps forward to the twilight of human kind and finds that "The men knew how to die, and be dead, but the machines didn't." Is the universe a machine God set in motion before He died?;

"Microcosmic God" - a man does set a universe in motion -- a microcosmic one. He is a modern alchemist who creates an elixir and a race of homunculi;

"Surface Tension" - another microscopic world of humans, seeded in water and left to develop on their own -- will they leap beyond the surface tension of the bubble in which they think the entire universe exists?;

"Nightfall" - in a world where multiple suns always light the sky, a total eclipse every 2000 years reveals the stars which drive people mad -- their version of Revelations;

"The Cold Equations" - beneath the veneer of civilization and its comforts there lie the impersonal truths of life and death;

"Nine Billion Names of God" - Do we really want to know them all?;

"Arena" - gladiator events of the future;

"A Rose for Ecclesiastes" - one's life can fulfill a prophecy, but the consequences will be much larger than one can imagine, and one's own part in it much smaller.

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1122211.ht...

This is one of those classic collections, assembling the top sf stories published before 1965 as voted for by the membership of SFWA in the late 1960s. (I wonder how different the results would be, if a similar poll were taken now?) Most of these stories were very familiar to me, but it filled in a couple of gaps - I don't think I had read either Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" or Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit" before. Anyway it's good to have such a selection of classics within a single set of covers.
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One of, if not the, best collections of science fiction short stories out there. ( )

After the mediocrity of Galactic Empires and the boringness of The Early Pohl, I was a little apprehensive about reading another collection of "classic" sf. I needn't've worried. Though the first couple stories in this book were shaky, they soon picked up, and the book carried a consistent quality all the rest of the way through. A few obvious ones, such as "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov, I'd read before, but there were plenty stories (and even some authors) that were entirely new to me. I did consider doing a review of all the individual stories, but I realized it would just be me saying "This story was great" again and again. Highlights included "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett, "First Contact" by Murray Leinster, "Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith, "Mars is Heaven!" by Ray Bradbury (a.k.a. "The Third Expedition" of The Martian Chronicles), and too many more for this list to have much of a point. My favorite was "Surface Tension" by James Blish, the tale of some microscopic aquatic lifeforms' attempt to travel into "space", which entirely captures the triumph and exultation of exploration that typically feels mundane after a century of sf. Everyone gives me funny looks when I try to explain why I like this story so much, but it really is excellent. This is a great, great book for any fan of sf, a collection of unbeatable stories.