Publisher's Weekly
This second collection of work by some of the great SF pulp masters contains some stories well worth saving, as well as explanatory material on how they came to be written. In the best of the tales, ''Lorelei of the Red Mist'' (begun by Leigh Brackett, who turned it over to Ray Bradbury to finish), a thief fleeing police on Venus crashes his aircraft and wakes to find himself in a new body and involved in a war between humans and people of amphibious origin. ''Quest of the Starstone'' and three other stories by C. L. Moore feature her outlaw of the spaceways, Northwest Smith. In ''Quest,'' Smith and Moore's other great protagonist, Jirel of Joiry, are brought together across the centuries by a vengeance-seeking magician. In ''Werewoman'' Smith lifts a curse from a blighted land. Manly Wade Wellman's contribution, ''Hok Visits the Land of Legends,'' follows the Cro-Magnon hero in his hunt for the largest of the mammoths and his encounter with a tribe of Piltdown Men, which he frees from bondage to an evil tyrant. Two versions of one story by Robert E. Howard, which finally saw light as ''The Frost-Giant's Daughter'' are really an academic exercise.