Decent, but highly variable. Some of the stories were excellent. All too many, though, seemed like they were trying too hard to be clever or different. (If you like truly creative stories, maybe you will like them. But personally, I prefer to just be entertained by a good story, and don't care so much about whether they are clever from a literary perspective or creative and unique.) Overall, not as strong as his excellent League of Worlds series. ( )

Mixed, like any collection. Specific story breakdown later. ( )

I enjoyed this collection of short stories as they made me think at times and laugh at times. I especially liked the stories "The Last Day of the War, with Parrots" in which knowing someone's thoughts isn't always a good thing; "A Changeable Market in Slaves," or, in other words, how many different ways can a story's opening go and "A Young Person's Guide to the Organism," as different people see the same creature in many different ways. ( )

This is Gardner's first collection of stories, and the stories inside are largely reprinted from previous publications. I haven't read much of Gardner before, and I picked this book up at the library based on the awesomeness of the title of the first story ("Muffin Explains Teleology to the World at Large") and the fact that story won an award.

And "Muffin" was good, but the two stories that I really loved were: "The Last Day of the War, with Parrots" and "The Young Person's Guide to the Organism."

"The Last Day" begins with a rock star and his entourage descending upon a deserted planet to film a new music video, and ends with race to find an effective way to use the living biological weapons left hopping innocently around.

"The Young Person's" was a set of vignettes that kept building and building into a gorgeous story. An alien spacecraft is drawing towards Earth's sun, and a variety of individuals encounter it as it travels, reacting with fear, wonder, worship, joy, hate, and acceptance, not that the craft does much in response. Each vignette is separate, but each blends so well as it leads up to the next. This story was particularly interesting as it laid the basic scifi elements for the world Gardner's novels are set in.

Gardner takes this neat, rather choppy approach to quite a few of his stories. Like, for "Later Figures of the Greater Trumps," the story as a whole was compiled by a dozen individual tarot descriptions; and for "Shadow Album," the story was flashback reveiled in increasing detail as the protagonist examined his photographs. I tend to think of this writing as circular, and I've always found it fascinating.

As an added bonus, Gardner wrote an introduction to the collection that contains a little paragraph or so about the background of each story. I love learning things like that from writers. ( )

This collection of previous published short stories makes clear the structural similarities, not obvious if the stories have been read as they appeared. Still even that is addressed in the reflexive structure of the title story, and any similarity of structure is still a million times better than the larger genric structure that traps most by the yard military SF, or elven nonesense.
These tales are a real pleasure, the final story "Sense of Wonder" saying more within four pages and a mere two speaking parts, than all the mountains of Star Wars, military SF and the hell of PC game spin off novel combined.