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By the time this present group of stories was written I had passed through the cultural turbulence that engulfed nearly everyone’s life in the wild, stormy period we know as “the Sixties,” which for me had actually lasted from 1968 to 1974 or 1975. I had come through my own angry four-year-long retirement from writing in the middle 1970s, and was working again at a steady pace, though not with the frenetic prolificacy of the pre-retirement years. At the beginning of this period my personal life was still pretty chaotic, a carryover from all that Sixties madness, and plenty of new chaos was going to descend on me while some of these stories were written, but I was tiptoeing toward an escape from the various messes that were complicating my life, and by the time the last five stories of this volume were being written I was heading into the stability of my second marriage.
—Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

Table of Contents

Introduction
Tourist Trade
Multiples
Against Babylon
Symbiont
Sailing to Byzantium
Sunrise on Pluto
Hardware
Hannibal’s Elephants
Blindsight
Gilgamesh in the Outback
The Pardoner’s Tale
The Iron Star
The Secret Sharer
House of Bones

From Publishers Weekly:
“…this volume gives fans and scholars a closer look at some of Silverberg’s best work, as he explores classic science fiction themes of alienation, exploration, and humanity.”

From SFCrowsnest:
“Many of the stories herein were much praised and included in 'Best Of-’ anthologies for the year they appeared, deservedly so. I think Silverberg is probably the greatest SF writer ever, perhaps slightly too sophisticated to achieve the popular appeal of some others. This is a brilliant collection from a gifted writer and deserves a place on the bookshelf or the electronic reading device.”

From SFSite:
“Virtually all of the stories included in this volume were amongst the best science fiction written in the mid-1980s, and many were indeed nominated and/or won various awards. Robert Silverberg has created here tales of emotional impact and intellectual depth that should be avidly perused by every serious science fiction reader. I look forward to future volumes in the series.”