Step inside a mind…

Sample the sights and sounds, the smells and the feelings of someone else’s experience. Travel through time and space and share the worlds that lie in wait for you—

The Future I

19 Visionary Stories

Learn the sting from a con man like you’ve never seen before—he’ll sell you the ground out from under your feet…and a whole lot more. They call him BERNIE THE FAUST.

Prophets and madmen have been proclaiming The End, promising heaven and hellfire for a very long time. A very long time. But what comes after our END AS A WORLD?

Laugh at the folly of a poor, love-smitten beast? I think not. Not when it’s ISHMAEL IN LOVE.

Many people have written about the future. But few have done it with such wit, such foresight, and such hope…

This is a very good anthology centered, as are the two Space Mail volumes, on a literary device—here we have a bunch of stories written in the first person. This is an instance where the net is cast rather wide, but in this case the result is very positive indeed.

Asimov is represented by “The Red Queen’s Race,” which is one of his stories which I’ve always enjoyed and doesn’t get, perhaps, as much attention as it deserves. The number of excellent stories here, however, is so vast that it’s impossible to list them without practically just listing the contents. Particularly deserving of mention, however, is Alexei Panshin’s “How Can We Sink When We Can Fly?”— I say this because most of the other really, really terrific stories anthologized here get anthologized in a lot of other places, too, and this is one which really deserves a much wider exposure than it gets.

Contents

“The Red Queen’s Race”