Three novella-length stories, each better than average although none of them - for me - of real star quality. "The March of the Morons" deals with a future society dominated by an ignorant underclass where a small intellectual elite struggles in secret to keep the world going. A man reawakened from the past might provide them with a solution... An interesting idea with a neat twist at the end.

"...And Then There Were None" grew on me. A military/dipIomatic mission lands on an outpost of humanity to carry out a routine task they've done many times: to reassert the primacy of earth's empire over its worlds after an interregnum caused many of them to forget about it. But this planet appears to present particular difficulties in locating the appropriate authorities to persuade them to surrender. I expected a thinly disguised libertarian polemic about the people vs the gummint' but I was pleasantly surprised. The underlying philosophy is quite different and no less powerful, and the ideas sneak up on you - as they do to many of the story's characters. It's flawed in that it has some dated attitudes to gender roles, but apart from that it's quite a charmer.

"Baby Is Three" is quite different, though. A good read, but a more disturbing one. I can't recall another story dealing with quite the same theme of a gestalt trans-human: one that requires many apparently separate beings to function as a whole. Not a Borg-like collective consciousness, nor even a symbiosis. ( )