THE MANY WORLDS OF POUL ANDERSON
By
An attractive grab bag of stories edited by Roger Elwood by an author whose talents range from slapstick comedy with a tribe of alien teddy bears who take up playing cowboys and Indians with wild abandon, to elegiac sobriety with human and other beings attempting to stave off radioactive doom. Here are often-reprinted tales like ""The Queen of Air and Darkness,"" a classic fusion of SF and myth, and ""Epilogue,"" which accomplishes the tour de force of simultaneously revealing both faces of the robot as threatening monster and sympathetic sentient; and also less well known works. Plus two intelligent critical essays on Anderson and one new story that's a text book exercise in describing an alien ecology. Worthwhile.