Thirteen SF novellas published between the early 60s and the early 90s. I don't know how many of these I would necessarily consider "classics," but the authors' names will, for the most part, be very familiar to anyone conversant with the genre, and they're all good, well-written stories. I think the only one I'm not sure I actually liked was Cordwainer Smith's "On the Storm Planet," which -- and there is no better way to put it -- I found a bit too WTF-ish in some of the wrong ways for my personal taste. And even that one had some wonderfully imaginative details and a writing style with a certain elusive something that left me interested in reading more Cordwainer Smith stories, just as I was when I started.

Editor Dozois insists in his preface that there is no particular theme to the stories and that he simply picked ones he happened to like and which had not been anthologized too often or too recently. But his tastes, I think, are pretty clear. There's a definite lack of nuts 'n' bolts hard SF, in favor of stories with a more social or psychological focus. Many of them have a touch of strangeness about them, occasionally bordering on surreality. And they often give the reader a strong sense of having glimpsed only one small corner of a world or a galaxy that is much larger, more complicated, and more alien than any one story can convey. Fortunately that last, in particular, is a characteristic I happen to quite enjoy, myself.

I think my favorite of the bunch was Samuel R. Delany's "The Star Pit," which starts with the image of a terrarium, then extends the metaphor out to encompass the entire galaxy, and then beyond. And if a few of the details don't rate terribly highly for plausibility, well, that's entirely beside the point. ( )