Hartwell seventeen selections tend to novella length rather than short story. One of them, “The Rose” (1953) by Charles Harness, is sometimes considered a novel. All editors have special reasons for the selections they make, but choosing novellas means that if readers do not like one particular work they have lost a larger proportion of the whole. And, of course, novellas are not typical of SF publication.

Of the English language authors here there was only one I did not know - Michael Shaara - but I realised that I had read only one of the stories in this collection (“The Rose”). On the other hand I felt a sense of shock in reading Philip Jose Farmer’s “Mother” (1953) and realising that I had not read it before - it is one of those stories in which Farmer controversially applied perverse Freudianism in alien surroundings that got a lot of coverage in the first full SF encyclopaedias of the late 1970s - the memory of encyclopaedic coverage was a false memory of the work itself. I had to adjust myself to what Farmer had actually written rather than somebody else’s interpretation. In “Enchanted Village” (1952) A. E. Van Vogt manages to show how the same thing can happen anywhere, though it was in the dry deserts of Mars that Van Vogt chose to set his story. There Bill Jenner, sole survivor of a crash, finds an automated Martian village still serving food and drink. Unfortunately it serves it for the palate of the long-gone Martians, things completely inedible to Jenner as he struggles to exist. Gradually the exuded supplies become more tolerable - the machine seems to be trying to satisfy Jenner, but only seems. As the story finishes we realise that Jenner is going more than native, he likes Martian food because he is metamorphosing without realising it. Whether the living machine could have produced more tolerable food or not, it changes Jenner instead.

In just the suggestion of food becoming more tolerable you can start to see tropes that run all the way through SF - it is a self-reflective genre. Douglas Adams’ spaceship that makes something almost but not quite tea continues the idea. Adams may not have known this story, but he knew others like it. Farmer’s “Mother”, in which his protagonist is swallowed by an entity and ends by choosing to live as a symbiote within it, calls up memories of many other stories about the horror of being consumed while consciousness continues.

Now to the contrary literary argument: both Hartwell and LeGuin and Atterbury argue for the role of SF as the defining literature of the twentieth century. Hartwell, at least, includes stories which provoke arguments against that; arguments that suggest SF was one response to the twentieth century but not the only one. For instance, the first story here is James Blish’s “A Work of Art” (1956) in which the composer Richard Strauss is re-created in 2161. Strauss can live and compose again. The story ends with the revelation that Strauss has been not created from DNA, but that his character has been imposed on a living person - he is someone who has been made to think he is someone else; made to live a lie while everyone about him knows the truth. That is the SF treatment of the idea - there is a comparable non-SF story: Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the QUIXOTE” about a twentieth century figure who recreates the mind-set of Cervantes. And a similar comparison can be made between Frank Herbert’s “Greenslaves” (1965) and Daphne Du Maurier’s “The Birds”, one is written from an SF-conscious perspective and the other is not, but they arrive at the same position about group brains. There must be more works to compare and contrast.

A final word of warning - do not trust the copyright and acknowledgement page for bibliographic information. On the other hand, there is so much in this Mammoth volume that you may never look at it.