CRISIS: Eleven Original Stories of Science Fiction

In style and subject matter these eleven originals are marginally more adventuresome than other juvenile anthologies, but so many revolve around either self-indulgent sentimentality or gratuitous trauma that it's difficult to imagine why they were especially chosen for a young audience. The most problematical of all is Leigh Brackett's vision of an anarchic, drug-dominated future in which bands of wild children take revenge on the older generation that has made them congenital junkies by hunting down and murdering other ""Mommies and Daddies"" in the act of intercourse. Beyond this particularly heavy combination of Freudian implications and drug nightmares (including a few hysterical [mis] conceptions, such as the discovery of ""LSD babies""), other entries are merely soggy -- like Ray Russell's ""Xong of Xuxan"" in which a solitary survivor (of what?) writes a poem to commemorate her own suicide. Meanwhile Robert Silverberg and Gordon Eklund contribute their frictionless proficiency and Howard Goldsmith's ""Proust Syndrome"" posits (but then fails to carry through on) a future in which nostalgia is a political crime. On the whole, this collection is a bit too lurid for children and a bit too gimmicky for adults, though larger collections might find room at the end of either shelf.