“The Night Of The Storm” has four robots trapped by a snowstorm in a cabin being picked off one by one by a mythical creature - a human being! Great story! Highlight of the volume however is the final offering by Dean Koontz. Mutant births and home truths abound in this cautionary tale. In a post-holocaust USA Brother Abraham and his child followers are travelling through on their way to found a New Jerusalem in Edgar Pangborn’s marvellous ��The Children’s Crusade”. Anne McCaffrey gives us an origin story for her famous series in “Prelude To A Crystal Song”, while Thomas Scortia shows us a frightening invasion of mind-controlling insectoids in “The Armageddon Tapes - Tape I”. Killashandra fails her last vocal exam and flees the Music Center in despair but meets up with Carrik, a rich spendthrift who offers to teach her to be a Crystal Singer. Poul Anderson provides an entertaining standalone though, with the tale of settlers on a new world trying to retrieve a crashed ship in “My Own, My Native Land”, and Chad Oliver has a readable piece of space opera where a visiting crew manipulates the locals who developed a warlord similar to “Shaka!” Zulu. Paul Eyre shoots a flying saucer and seems to get super powers. Philip Jose Farmer’s story “Stations Of The Nightmare - Part One” is just that. Roger Elwood had a very spotty record as a book editor in the 1970s and this series promised four volumes of connected stories by the same eight authors (more or less) which stand alone.
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