There are many ways of recapturing the sheer fun that science fiction could be back when it was not even a bit respectable, and the idea that Arthur C. Clarke would one day be Sir Arthur was more or less inconceivable. One of the best ways is to go back to a classic short story collection like this, with its bitterly ironic title story of archaeology and its misunderstandings, the classic "Breaking Strain" with its two spacemen struggling over supplies that will do for one, and "The Sentinel", the story that acted as the seed for the late Stanley Kubrick's collaboration with Clarke, 2001. Clarke always had a more delicate and poetic side, and this collection includes one of his finest stories in this vein "Second Dawn" in which telepathically gifted aliens without hands deal with the moral dilemmas of science. Many of the stories deal with a Space Age that never was--Clarke was assuming that things would happen later than they did, but that more would follow quicker; this in itself gives the book charm as an add on to its considerable conceptual wit. Few short story collections are SF classics, but this is a major exception. --Roz Kaveney