Publisher's Weekly
Although not all Jones's visions are unexpected (Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce are not exactly unfamiliar to genre readers), other writers in this collection of 20 stories are more surprising, like Dostoevsky, Melville, Muriel Spark and Hilaire Belloc. Here we find ``I Am Waiting,'' a story of a man's brief trips into the future, by Christopher Isherwood; John Updike's amusing ``The Chaste Planet,'' in which sexless aliens nevertheless discover the frustration of impotence; and Guillaume Apollinaire's odd tale of a phantasmagorical encounter in an Alpine cavern, ``The Moon King.'' More than a few of these stories are thinly-veiled social commentaries; in best Swiftian tradition, Poe's ``Mellonta Tauta,'' Stephen Leacock's ``The Man in Asbestos,'' Dostoevsky's ``The Dream of a Ridiculous Man'' and several others use trips to other worlds or the future to excoriate contemporary life. Several others look with horror on the invention of robots, including Melville's ``The Bell-Tower,'' ``Robert'' by Evan Hunter (``Ed McBain'') and ``Moxon's Master'' by Bierce. Most of the pieces are far cruder and more clumsily done even than the genre fiction of their day, and far less accomplished than the genre's better work today. Jones might have done better to include stories by Graham Greene, John Cheever, Jorge Luis Borges or Anthony Burgess, all of whom have written more successful science fiction pieces. All in all, this volume makes a good argument for writers sticking to what they know best.