I'm continuing my Golden Age reads with this collection of stories set in space. Many of the authors were either new to me, or I'd only read one or two stories recently in other collections. Oddly, I met John Brunner once in ~1994 and kept meaning to read his work, but this was the first time I'd had the chance. (Procrastinator? Me?)

The stories were originally published in the forties to sixties. In many, the attitudes to women and smoking stuck out for me.

The collection included mysteries/problems to solve, such as "Umbrella in the Sky" by E. C. Tubb and "The Longest Voyage" by Richard C. Meredith. Others were more an imagining of how someone might deal with a situation, such as "O'Mara's Orphan" by James White and "Ultima Thule" by Eric Frank Russell. I liked the idea of a solar sail as visualised by Jack Vance in "Sail 25," even if I didn't find the story particularly gripping.

A few stories explore different implications of generation ships: where space voyages last longer than a lifetime, and so travellers need to keep the population up. Don Wilcox's "The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years" had a tone of social commentary, although I kept being distracted by the complete improbability of the setup. Brunner's "Lungfish" examined psychological and other implications of being shipborn as opposed to earthborn. Although an interesting thought experiment, I found myself impatient with the older folks for not spotting the bleeding obvious. "Survival Ship" by Judith Merril had a more straightforward and, dare I say it, humorous take.

As with other collections of this sort, the biographical details were more interesting than some of the stories. It was certainly educational to see what technology was being speculated about at the time.