Robert Silverberg is one of the grand masters of science-fiction, with a distinguished career as an author and editor behind him. But in the early 1950s, he was an ambitious student at Columbia, teaching himself the craft with a stack of pump magazines in one hand, and books of structural criticism and classic rhetoric in the others. This is grand master Silverberg's letter in a bottle to uncertain fledgling writer Bob, thirteen stories with brief appreciative/critical essays.

What you have are writer's stories, mostly published around 1953. You may recognize the names (Dick, Pohl, Blish, Vance, Cordwainer Smith), but I had read only a few of these stories prior, (and I love classic scifi). Every story is solid, some of them amazing, and the essays provide pointers for how each author used his or her personal style to advance some fictive technique in pursuit of telling a wonderful story. And yes, her, as Sivlerberg elevates forgotten female scifi pioneer C.L. Moore.

Every scifi fan owes it to themselves to read this book. And someone should do an update for stories published since 1980 and 2000. We just need to find our enfante terrible.