The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: 60th Anniversary Anthology

Good reading despite rather uneven quality

This anthology, created to commemmorate the 60th Anniversary of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, contains 13 stories published from 1951 to 1978, and another 10 pulled from the 1999 to 2007 issues. Granted, the editor had literally thousands of stories from which to choose, and I'm sure that was supremely difficult -- but I found the 21-year-gap rather curious; I can't imagine that no worthy stories were published during that time span.

I found the quality of the selection to be a bit uneven. Of the older stories, there were some definite greats, including two classic heart-wrenchers. "Flowers for Algernon", by Daniel Keyes, details the intellectual rise and fall of a man with a low IQ, who -- having gained a superior mind through medical experimentation -- in the end loses everything but the recognition of what he has lost. "All Summer in a Day", by Ray Bradbury, is a story of a young girl whose parents move from Earth to a planet of perpetual rain, and of the childishly cruel classmates who deprive her of the pleasure of the once-in-seven-years appearance of the sun...

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