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Rating: 
Summary: Readable, entertaining, vintage sci-fi and fantasy
Review: Well, I bought it for "The Shadow and the Flash." I read this story years ago and loved it. It's not well known and not frequently anthologized. I see that it was written in 1902 and that H. G. Well's "The Invisible Man" was written in 1897, and possibly Jack London sort of borrowed the theme as he was wont to do--the editor of this volume thinks so--but "The Shadow and the Flash" is nevertheless brilliantly original. It is about two competitive brothers, both serious amateur scientists of the kind you run across in Victorian fiction--who decide to tackle the problem of becoming invisible, in two different ways. You can almost make out a case for its' being "harder" SF than Wells, because he explains the physics of how they do it. The explanation is sort of cockamamie, but the story carries you along. (The title comes from the fact that each method has a flaw. Neither produces total invisibility. One brother casts a shadow, the other produces prismatic rainbow flashes when he catches the light at the right angle). The other fourteen stories are equally entertaining, and some are more than that. "A Thousand Deaths" was written very early in his career and is a haunting piece of fantasy. "The Unparalleled Invasion" has been anthologized frequently because of the prophetic way it anticipates bacteriological warfare. Jack London was indelibly impressed with what he saw in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and some of this may have found its way into a number of stories about the breakdown of civilization after a disaster. "The Scarlet Plague" calls to mind the after-the-atom-bomb-has-fallen stories of a later day. "The Red One," with which the book closes, possibly deserves the adjectives "great" and "classic." And if one suspects that Jack London had been reading H. G. Wells, after reading "The Red One" I certainly suspect that Stephen King has been reading Jack London. The collection is well chosen. The editor's commentary is good. This is a very readable book. And it looks like it's put out by a brave little tiny publisher, and I always like to support brave little tiny publishers. Oh, none of the stories are about dogs or snow.
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