STAR LIGHT, STAR BRIGHT

Volume II of a Bester retrospective (see The Light Fantastic, p. 424). Nine stories plus two bonuses: a short Holiday interview with Asimov and a long autobiographical piece recycled almost verbatim from Aldiss and Harrison's Hell's Cartographers (p. 160). The stories--generally a little less sassy and brassy than the Fantastic bunch--rework familiar conventions with dazzling assurance. Among the finest: a man helplessly and homicidally linked into an outworld pattern of rhythms and tempos; a harmless last-man-and-woman variant suddenly sharpened into something else; a jaunty Miniver Cheevy demonstration of the futility of time-travel, miraculously lifted to another plane of complexity by a simple interpolated motif.