I loved the cover of my vintage paperback edition, but no, none of the depicted women are actually in the stories. I love 1950s sci-fi for its depiction of contemporary fears symbolized in aliens and dystopian futures. And these stories focus on the anxiety of the feminine, of the maternal, of the sexual, and of matriarchies. They're excellent and hold up well for their psychological studies. My favorite: The Lady Was a Tramp. ( )

The quality of the stories in this anthology is more consistent than in most other anthologies I have read. I found them all absorbing. (The only one I didn't exactly enjoy was the last one, which is actually a poem, and a fairly modernist poem at that, which requires actual effort to follow, and I didn't care to make that effort at 11 pm on a weeknight. But the words in the poem reminded me of James Joyce, which I thought was affirmatively cool. So I suspect that I could enjoy even that poem, but I just didn't bother. And the penultimate "story" is also a poem, of much plainer language even if not of the rhyming variety, that I did enjoy immensely.) The character of the stories is mostly of the 1950s and '60s, which is the kind of sci-fi I like best, and in some respects they are more thoughtful than most of that era. The plots range from going to the moon, to initial interstellar travels by humans, and much of the conflict is driven by competing interests among humans. The blurb on the back cover used the adjective "feminist" to describe Merril and her stories, which was totally a male-chauvinist-pig thing to do: the stories are just good plain stories, and if women happen to be at the center of most of them, it doesn't change that fact in the least. And if that's why they are more thoughtful than many of their contemporaries, then so much the better. ( )