A review by joeure
Omnibus of Science Fiction by William Tenn, Jack Vance, Will H. Gray, Ralph Williams, Alan E. Nourse, John D. MacDonald, Robert Abernathy, Murray Leinster, Lewis Padgett, Jack London, B.F. Ruby, H.B. Fyfe, Anthony Boucher, Lester del Rey, Katherine MacLean, Groff Conklin, Raymond F. Jones, A.J. Deutsch, W. Hilton-Young, Theodore Sturgeon, Ann Griffith, Fredric Brown, Richard Matheson, James Blish, L. Sprague de Camp, Paul Ernst, Russ Winterbotham, Fletcher Pratt, Isaac Asimov, Wyman Guin, Chester S. Geier, Eric Frank Russell, A.E. van Vogt, Donald A. Wollheim, Damon Knight, Arthur C. Clarke, H.P. Lovecraft, John Leimert, André Maurois, Mark Clifton, David H. Keller, Ross Rocklynne, Ralph Robin, Ray Bradbury

3.0

I chipped away at this book for almost a year and then finished it as my flight to Chicago was taking off. Luckily, there are a few really good stories in here that I enjoyed enough to read again during the flight. These are: "Kaleidoscope" (Ray Bradbury), "The Color Out of Space" (H. P. Lovecraft), "What You Need" (Lewis Padgett), and "Manners of the Age" (H. B. Fyfe).

This book was compiled in 1953. If you ask me, science fiction still had a long ways to go in 1953. While a few of the short stories were very fun reads, the majority of them were just plain not very good. Despite some weird premises and a shocking number of lackluster plot twist-punchline hybrids, it was still really cool to see how these 43 authors thought about the future in 1953 [and as early as 1913 in Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague" (which is about a plague that ended civilization in 2013! Cool!)] There were also a few instances of scientific thinking that fairly accurately predicted later discoveries, which was exciting to come across.

You can probably find the best stories from this book published elsewhere. That's how you should read them.