A very good collection of early SF short stories with a theme of SF here on Earth. To quote from the editor's introduction, "Earth was the first planet discovered by homo sapiens. It still holds magic and excitement for us." I have learned to trust Aldiss as one of the best editors of SF collections. He picks good material and he writes great introductions. He is also a very good writer.

Some of the stories are very short. One is a Novella. The newest one was published in 1970. The earliest was from 1935. I liked almost all 14 stories. The Novella is an early work by Henry Kuttner. This, of course, means it was likely written by Kuttner and his author wife C.L. Moore. If you like Indiana Jones with time travel it's an above average adventure from the 1930s. ( )

This book, like Perilous Planets, and the Galactic Empires set is a theme based anthology edited by Brian Aldiss. Oddly, although Aldiss is regarded as one of the "new wave" science fiction authors who rejected the Campbellian motifs that had come to dominate the field, in this series, Aldiss shows great love for tales of that style.

The stories are organized into sections, each with its own overarching theme, and each has an introduction by Aldiss. Although the title of this compilation is Evil Earths, only a few of the stories in here (notably, Aldiss' own Heresies of the Huge God) actually depict an Earth that one would consider to be "evil". Some, like Dick's The Golden Man merely depict a situation in which man will likely become an endangered species, others, would best be described as simply being "stories set on Earth".

The stories are all average to excellent with no real clunkers in the line-up, but I found this to be weaker than Perilous Planets and Galactic Empires. Whether that is because the scope of the stories was limited to Earth, or the fact that the stories defied my expectations because they weren't really all that "evil" is an open question. ( )