The nine stories making up this book are acknowledged by their author, an acclaimed master of Science Fiction, as ‘experiments in adapting SF motif to various styles of short story’. The fascinating variety here does much to explain John Wyndham’s success. He writes a satire on racial intolerance in Dumb Martian,  breaks away to savage fantasy in Compassion Circuit,  and to brutal tragedy in Survival. He makes us laugh over the practical jokes that Time and Space may one day play upon human beings; then, in Meteor, gives a new twist to Shakespeare’s pity for ‘the poor beetle that we tread upon’.

Finally in the delicate tail-piece Wild Flower, there is tenderness combined with anger at the mechanization of earth. The most touching figure in the whole collection is his little school-mistress, holding up her wild-flower posy in defiance of the jet-plane blasting across the sky, and crying out — ‘You bullies, with your vast clubs of smoke — this is greater than all of you.’