The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction

This is a long book, but it has some really great stories. My favorite of the whole book is "The Marching Morons," by C.M. Kornbluth, from which the movie"Idiocracy" was taken. Only 4 or 5 🌟 stories will be noted:

Angel's Egg, Edgar Pangborn
4 🌟
A retired biology professor, living in the country, gets a visitor in the nest of his old chicken. A little transparent egg hatches some days later and a little angel, very human-like, emerges. This retired human learns much about her Faraway planet, and why she is here.

Rescue Party, Arthur C. Clarke
4 🌟
Sol is going nova, and the supreme race of the universe has just 3 hours to try to rescue any Humans left on the already boiling Earth. Disaster very nearly strikes the rescuers when a small show more pilot ship surveys half of the planet, but just in the nick of time makes it out. They fear there are no survivors of the 3rd planet from the now-novaed sun.

All You Zombies, Robert A. Heinlein
4 🌟
"I'm my own Grandpa" plays on the jukebox in the bar in 1970 New York, where the Time Corps recruit their victims, er, I mean members.

The Human Operators, Harlan Ellison & A.E. Van Vogt
4 🌟
There were 99 ships and each ship had 1370 humans to complement each one. An electrical accident made one of the ships become self-aware. Now the ships rule and the human allowed to remain alive on each one is a slave. But the one human on this certain Starfighter ship remembers his father telling him "You have 98 other chances."

Poor Little Warrior, Brian Aldiss
5 🌟
From 2181, Claude Ford travels back in time to use his big guns to get him a brontosaurus, the peaceful, giant, non-threatening vegetarian. This creature is so big, that it's parasites have parasites, and that's what Claude Ford forgot to take into account.

When it Changed, Joanna Russ
4 🌟
Whileaway, the colonised planet, had a plague six hundred years in its past, which killed half the population. But life went on and the survivors learned to get along without the men. Then, one day, visitors came from Earth, and they wanted to take something, as if it was their right.

The Bicentennial Man, Isaac Asimov
5 🌟
Reading this gem of a story, I couldn't help but have Robin Williams in mind when I pictured the robot Andrew. But the story is actually quite different from the movie. It's the story of a robot whose positronic brain was an anomaly, even an unwanted mistake, as seen through the eyes of the U.S. Robotics Corp. His brain caused him to be more than a servant...he was an artist, author, inventor, and eventually, a man.

Hunting Machine, Carol Emschwiller
4 🌟
The future of hunting. It may be the future, but hunters haven't changed at all. Still vastly cowardly. These hunting packages have everything you need: self-heating food and drink packets, pocket self-inflating camping gear, and a mechanical"hound." I was disappointed with the ending, and if you read it, you might agree.

Light of Other Days, Bob Shaw
4 🌟
Love is a thin line, and can cross easily into hate. But witnessing heartbreaking loss on someone else's part may give you the selfish gift of crossing back over again.

The Marching Morons, C.M. Kornbluth
4 🌟
There is some eugenics going on here: the idea is that people with higher IQs didn't breed as much as those whose IQs were in the double digits. Over time, the population of DD IQs was in the billions while those with smarts were in the millions. Thus, smarter people were worked to the bone running the world so that the "marching morons" could live in oblivious luxury. The rip van Winkle real estate whiz that they dug up was going to solve the world's problems. First, they had to sell the idea of migrating to Venus.

The Women Men Don't See, James Tiptree Jr
5 🌟
"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like - like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."
"What women do is to survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your World -machine. think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City. All the endless wars... all the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we're just part of the battlefields. It'll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of--of going away..."
Poll for women: If you had the chance to go with an alien to their world, would you take it?
Yes: ✓
No: show less

A terrific sample of short stories ranging from the late 40s to the 70s. A well rounded mixture from authors as diverse as Larry Niven to James Triptree Jr,.

Highly recommended.