Farewell to Yesterday’s Tomorrow by Alexei Panshin

Sci Fi short stories by Alexei Panshin range from off color humor to self-indulged what-if stories. I really liked the book. Several of the short stories deal with a selection of colonized planets and their generation ship custodians.

Oddly enough, the book contains a note, in which Panshin declares this his last single author book. The rest (after 1974) would be written with his wife, Cory. The title essay, Farewell to Yesterday’s Tomorrow, deals with SciFi post cold war before the cold war ended but after people began to realize nuclear war wasn’t inevitable.

The stories were smart and entertaining.

High Sorcery by Andre Norton

Andre Norton has impressed me as a writer of large imagination, refined through teamwork and driven to experimentation. High Sorcery was a small collection of her short stories. These stories vary greatly in premise and local.

The first story, Wizard’s World, reminded me of her sci fi westerns. I found the story gripping but the magic lacked focus. I found the other stories much more enjoyable. The idea of stitching worlds. dreaming them or even changing them were wide in scope if not in word. The entire theme of world changing was interesting.

Norton can be vague or detailed. You can see the range in all of these stories.