I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the stories chosen for this collection. As I work through the SFF paperbacks I’ve inherited from my parents, I often end up slogging through some very boring or irritating stories from this era, which was a rough one for the field in my opinion. The New Wave and I do not mix. It could be that by 1976 it was on its way out and that’s why I liked these stories better. You can actually tell what’s going on in almost all of them and they have clear characters and plot arcs.
This is a very solid collection of stories, with “The Storms of Windhaven” being probably the best well known. It is a collaboration between George R.R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle, and is a sci-fi story tinged with fantasy, which reminds me of LeGuin. It falls into the category of “a spaceship crashed on a planet and now hundreds of years later, their descendants live in a slightly medieval world.” I enjoy that genre or trope a lot, so I’ve read “Windhaven” a few times cheerfully. “The Peddler’s Apprentice” also falls into an adjacent category (“the world is medieval but it’s actually not because history cycles and there’s secretly technology”), and unsurprisingly I enjoyed that story as well. “Child of All Ages” was about an immortal child and had a very bittersweet tone to it, with the last scene being particularly affecting. The hard-eyed look at what it would be like to exist in a child’s body for over 2,000 years and what a rough life children experienced before the modern era was thought-provoking.
Overall, this was a fun read and I was glad I picked it off the shelf randomly when I was in search of a light book to tote around. Very slowly but surely I clear out that shelf! (We will cast a curtain over my plan to buy 2-3 more bookcases soon because of the rate of my manga acquisition.)