Science fiction short stories written by Malzberg & Pronzini, in collaboration, between 1975 and 1982.
What's most striking about the collection is how much smarter SF has gotten in the last quarter-century. Most of these stories are built around ideas that would seem laughably simple in the pages of today's SF magazines. They're nicely written, but it's hard to get terribly caught up in any of them, because by contemporary standards, they're rather predictable.
As is often the case with anthologies, the authors' preoccupations and favorite themes become overly repetitive in a way they wouldn't if we were reading one story every few months. M&P are especially fond of the apparent paranoid whose "delusions" turn out in the end to be the truth.
The best known of Malzberg & Pronzini's collaborations is "Prose Bowl," which imagines a sporting event built around the writing of hack genre prose, and it still holds up reasonably well. The book is filled out with some solo stories by each writer, the best of which is Pronzini's "The Hungarian Cinch." Again, the story's not especially surprising or original -- a pool shark finds himself facing aliens who may be even better hustlers than he is -- but Pronzini tells the story nicely, in a sort of pastiche of Damon Runyon.
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