THE WINDS OF CHANGE AND OTHER STORIES

Lightweight Asimovia: 21 yarns, two from the 1950s, the rest 1976-81. The two vintage-quality offerings here both involve time travel twists: a man obsessed with the lost Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Thespis sends his mind back to the 1871 premiere, and returns rejoicing over the music—only to find a shocking change in himself; and, in the title piece, a jealous professor changes the past to bring about a Moral Majority religious dictatorship, to which he denounces his undeservedly successful, liberal-minded colleagues. Among the rest: the well-known 1953 "Belief," with a levitating scientist branded a fraud; a simulated moon flight that drives its astronauts mad; a space colony whose inhabitants have had their taste-buds perverted by bland chemicals; a drug that improves memory, but not intelligence; alien traders who, arriving in the Pleistocene, delightedly exchange the bow-and-arrow principle for cave paintings. And also on the agenda are some wispy non-sf items, from horrible puns to computerized speechwriting and a chat with God, A few standouts, then, with much that is YA-ishly stereotypical and mediocre: a representative assortment from a great but notoriously unselective talent.