Cynthia Manson is a literary agent, formerly Director of Marketing at Davis Publications, publishers of Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazines. She has also edited several anthologies.
Every six months one of our local Chicago Public Library branches holds a booksale of which I am informed by a friend who frequents the place. This year there was an unusually large selection of science fiction, a genre not so much seen in bookstores nowadays, presumably because of the demise of the manned space program, of which I purchased two books. One was a novel. This, a collection of short stories, caught my attention in that its title promised fiction about the UFO phenomenon.
Although the stories, most of them, were fine, my expectations were disappointed. Although aliens figure throughout, none of the stories dealt with any major aspects of the UFO mythos as it has existed in the USA in the postwar years: no flying disks, no abductions, no hybridisation experiments, no government coverup, no cattle mutilations, no crop circles, no greys, not even the odd Nordic.