A collection of tales from the imagination of Poul Anderson takes us on a tour of is non-Polesotechnic stories, from 'Earthman Beware', where a lost alien child is growing up on the almost similar earthers, frustrated by his intellectual superiority but will his real people be equally pleased to see him? In an age of plenty and automation, a couple of men with nothing more to do than get drunk find a robot walking about and find that they might be better off than they thought 'Gypsy' finds a lost colony of earth people finding the fact that the end of their voyages isn't the end of their wanderlust and I think this story is my favourite tale of the collection. 'For the Duration' is a scary look at what happens after the revolution ends - not all things bring back the ideals of freedom that the revolutionaries fought for in the first place. 'Duel on Syrtis' is another story that twists the usual science fiction tropes of humans good. alien (well, native in this case) bad as a Martian uses his not inconsiderable wits to outwit the hunter from Earth who's out for his (literal) skin.. In 'The Star Beast', life on Earth is good and those living there had long life and all they needed at a word, including the ability to be reborn into animal form but when the forgotten colonists from the Outer Worlds returned, they declared war on a planet unable to defend itself. In 'The Disintegrating Sky' a group of men are having a chin wag about the nature of reality and decide that God is merely an amateur author who's grown bored of his creation - this is the shortest story in the collection but quite effective for all that. The final tale is another looking at a rather degenerate Erath protected by a barbarian world from those who would see the end of humanity.

If science fiction is meant to be hopeful, there is quite a mixture of hope and despair to be found in this collection ( )

As I would expect, these stories by Anderson are competently written, but they tend to have a sad, sometimes tragic flavor i do not enjoy as much as many of his others. One of them, "For the Duration" is similar to his story "Marius" in that both involve leaders of revolts against tyranny who are becoming tyrants themselves, but in this one the tyrant seems to be successful, whereas in "Marius" he is (reluctantly) removed by some of his former followers, ( )