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Rating: 
Summary: A Generous View of SF
Review: In this anthology, the wide-ranging editors dared to choose the stories they personally thought were important, rather than accepting consensus reality of everyone else's favorites. I like what they chose. Every story is worth reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Dreadful. Just really awful.
Review: The problem with this book is that it's a "Norton Book" and will be used as a teaching tool. Due to the prominence of Norton's stuff on college campuses, it's easy to imagine students who don't have much experience with written science fiction taking classes from professors who don't have much experience with written science fiction, using this book as a resource. They're going end up being very confused about the subject of science fiction.
There's an element of political correctness to the story selection, an element of pure feminism, and as element of weirdness and mystery. What can she possibly have been thinking? How can anyone be said to know anything about science fiction without going back a little further, to the so-called "golden age" of science fiction which a lot of these stories are reactions against? How can a study of science fiction not include Asimov, Heinlein, or Clarke? The most likely audience of this book is not well served by the story selection.
If none of the above bothers you, you'll find a mixed collection of stories, of which you're bound to enjoy a few. Do not pass judgement on any of the authors whose work seems crappy after a first reading from this book: some of the selections are not fair representations of the author's work in any way. All, or almost all, of the authors represented in the book have written very good stories, but the stories in this volume were chosen because of a mission of the author's which is articulated in the introduction. A simple, perhaps chronological collection of really good stories isn't on the menu, unfortunately.
Rating:
Summary: A fantastic collection of Science Fiction short stories.
Review: This anthology is a great collection of short stories from some of the greatest Science Fiction writers of from 1960-1990. This collection was gathered by one of the premier Science Fiction writers of our lifetime, Ursula K. Le Guin. Each story takes you places you have never dreamed of, and truly makes you think about the world around you.
Rating: 
Summary: I love LeGuin, but....
Review: This anthology is certainly that: an "anthology", a collection of stories. What it is NOT, however, is a "representative anthology". As an introduction to SF it is terrible. As an intro to "mature" SF it is also terrible. By excluding everything written before 1960-in other words before LeGuin and her associates became active-an enormous number of the genres masterpieces were disqualified. By limiting the collection to American stories-and LeGuin is certainly American- the entire, and seminal, British and Continental contribution to SF goes unrepresented. This is historical revisionism of the worst, most destructive sort. And deeply manipulative.There is also something fishy going on in the word count. Avowedly feminist -and female- authors put far more words into this volume than the male authors. This, in spite of the fact that most of the SF written today and yesterday is and was written by men. The feminists' (and I have always considered myself one) strongest and longest stories have been included while the shorter, less substantial stories of men are offered. This is suspiciously ideological. I realize that LeGuin has a vast reputation, and it is certainly as deserved as anybody's. Her fiction and her non-fiction both have an important place in my heart and on my bookshelf. But... the publishers and co-editors have let that reputation blind them to the ideological distortions of this book. And I am here to tell you that the emperor has no clothes.
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