TIME MACHINES

Only 3 of the 22 selections here would appear on almost anyone's ``best of'' list: Connie Willis's Nebula and Hugo Novelette Awardwinner, ``Fire Watch,'' has time travelers helping to save St. Paul's cathedral from the London Blitz; Harry Turtledove's intriguing ``The Last Article'' wonders what-if Gandhi's nonviolent struggle had confronted not the British but the Nazis (it doesn't involve time travel, however); and Geoffrey A. Landis's Nebula-winning ``Ripples in the Dirac Sea,'' whose time traveler is simultaneously dead and alive. Elsewhere, there are venerable but quite dull selections from Mack Reynolds, Jack Finney, Mark Clifton, Edgar Allan Poe, John W. Campbell Jr., Isaac Asimov, Rod Serling, and Rudyard Kipling, and more recent, so-so variations by Jack McDevitt, Molly Brown, Robert Sawyer, and Ray Bradbury. The less said about the rest the better. Conspicuous by their absence: J.G. Ballard, Poul Anderson, Henry Kuttner/C.L. Moore, Robert A. Heinlein, and Brian W. Aldiss. Far from sustaining the absurdly hyperbolic subtitle: a selection that's no better than one chosen completely at random with editorial whim and nostalgia no substitute for scholarship and judgment.