A very solid collection (as you'd expect from a "best of") from a very good author. The stories range across a wide scope of sci fi, and most have a fantastical quality, as well as a tone that sits somewhere between dark humour and wry stoicism. Quirky individuals are a recurring theme. Though the stories are mostly relatively hard science, all touch on the human element and some focus on that above all. Bester also throws in a couple of stories without any science at all, such as the titular "Star Light, Star Bright" and a rather cheery post-apocalyptic story. ( )

Of the two collections Bester published in this year, this is by far the better. Some of the stories have aged badly ("Adam and No Eve", in which a Last Man discovers he needs no Last Woman in order to seed the reemergence of life billennia hence, "Oddy and Id", which assumes Freud was right), but others are humdingers even unto this day. In "Time is the Traitor" we have a love story involving an interstellar serial killer. "Hobson's Choice" might well have been one of the definitive time-travel stories had it not been for Bester's seeming trivialization of the sheer horror of the Hiroshima bombing. "Star Light, Star Bright", the title story, is a deliciously Collieresque fantasy tale -- or Bixbyesque nightmare. "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To" is probably the best future-Adam-and-Eve tale ever written. And "The Pi Man" is, without doubt, among the best sf short stories ever written (if you liked Bester's amazing novel TheDemolished Man, you'll swoon over this).

Of the 11 items in this collection, two are nonfiction pieces that I declined to read again: an interview with Isaac Asimov and an essay called "My Affair with Science Fiction". That left nine stories, of which none was poor and almost all were as fine as you'll ever find between two covers. This is what skiffy collections were meant to be. ( )