A Day in the Life

by Gardner Dozois (Editor), Samuel R. Delany (Contributor), Damon Knight (Contributor)

Contents
On the Storm Planet • [Casher O'Neill] • (1965) • novella by Cordwainer Smith
Slow Tuesday Night • (1965) • shortstory by R. A. Lafferty
This Moment of the Storm • (1966) • novelette by Roger Zelazny
Driftglass • (1967) • shortstory by Samuel R. Delany
Mary • (1964) • novelette by Damon Knight
The Haunted Future • [Change War] • (1959) • novelette by Fritz Leiber
The Lady Margaret • [Pavane] • (1966) • novelette by Keith Roberts (aka The Lady Anne)
A Happy Day in 2381 • [Urban Monad] • (1970) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
Introduction (A Day in the Life) • essay by Gardner Dozois

Genres: Science Fiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1972

About the author

Gardner Raymond Dozois was an American science fiction author and editor. He was editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine from 1984 to 2004. He won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, both as an editor and a writer of short fiction.
Wikipedia entry: Gardner Dozois

http://us.macmillan.com/author/gardne...

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gardner Dozois was an accomplished (and underappreciated) writer of sf, but it is an editor that he will always be best remembered. In addition to his long run at Asimov's magazine, he edited a lot of anthologies, and this was the first of them. It was an excellent beginning to his career. The book includes only eight stories, one of novella length, four novelettes, and three short stories, all originally published between 1959 and 1970. The first story is R.A. Lafferty's Slow Tuesday Night, a zany satire illustrating the speed at which society changes as technology advances. It's followed by The Lady Margaret by Keith Roberts, part of his Pavane sequence, which is a fascinating steampunk railway story. Damon Knight's Mary was my least favorite of the book, a slow clone story that seems to say the future will be boring. Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany is a classic undersea tale that was nominated for the Nebula for best short story of 1967 but lost to a story in Dangerous Visions... by Samuel R. Delany. (He won the best novel award that year, too, for The Einstein Intersection.) Next up is A Happy Day in 2381 by Robert Silverberg, a part of his Urban Monad series. It struck me this time around that it's written just like a Hugo Gernsback travelogue tale from the mid-1920s that shows the wonders of the future. But things were never quite as bleak back when Hugo was doing it. My favorite story in the book was This Moment of the Storm by Roger Zelazny which should won all of the awards for best novelette that year. (IMHO, of course!) It's a wonderful tale of exploring and colonizing a new planet, very lyrically written. For example, the last line: "There is no moon, and the stars are very bright, like broken diamonds, all." The penultimate story is one of Fritz Leiber's Change War novelettes, The Haunted Future. It seems like a zany little story, but it has some sharp edges. The book closes with the longest story, one of Cordwainer Smith's Casher O'Neill novellas, On the Storm Planet. All of his vast and detailed Norstrillia and Instrumentality and under-people infrastructure in on display in it, and it tells a fascinating story. It's only the middle piece of Casher's overall arc, so I've decided to dig out the whole three-worlds story and re-read it soon. I found a lot more religious imagery and subtext than I remembered, as well as some questionable attitudes. For example, on page 249 he states: "Pilots are for piloting; killers are for killing; women are for loving or forgetting. When you mix up the purposes, everything goes wrong." It was a kind of jarring intrusion into what I'd always thought was a remarkably advanced and forward-thinking fiction. Overall, it's a very good anthology with some thought-provoking ideas and lovely prose. The cover on my Perennial Library edition is one of Robert Zimmerman's best: it shows a black-and-white sketch of a hand folding back the edge of the cover to reveal a colorful beach scene, perhaps from Driftglass. (Remember the Pleasantville film?) (On the other hand, they shouldn't call it Perennial when they printed it in such small type on paper that turned brownie/yellow before it left the shelf... grumble grumble said the old guy.)

[Pablo Bueno]

Al final ha resultado una antología bastante irregular, con relatos muy interesantes e incluso incisivos y otros con los que no he conseguido conectar.

[Mark Catalfano]

I liked "The Moment of the Storm" by Roger Zelazny

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short stories by some of big names in science fiction. The Lafferty is, as one would expect from him, peculiar.