A crackling great collection of golden age sci-fi that reads like a long lost season of the Twilight Zone. With a deft sense of dark humor and unexpected twists, Kuttner delivers tasty short stories flavored with the unexpected. It's a great read. I loved it.

If you have never read a Kuttner/Lewis Padgett (same guy) story, and you like golden age SF/F, you are in for a treat with this one.

He writes with warmth, humor, and most of all with fun for the reader in mind. His ideas, there were many and original, influenced those in the genre that wrote after him.

He was a mentor to Bradbury, and he put emphasis on telling a story for fun, without ever being preachy or the kind of writer that says my pen is bigger than yours. He wrote because he loved it.

We are lucky enough that he did.

This anthology includes 17 short stories, all in the 10-30 page range with most averaging around 15 pages in length. None of his early Lovecraft Mythos work is here, but a lot of his great stuff afterwards is.

Some of my favorites are

Mimsy Were the Borogoves

The Twonky

What You Need (Twilight Zone episode of same name was based on this story)

A Gnome There Was

The Voice of the Lobster

Enjoy!

I am a long time fan of Kuttner...like 40 years long time. But that was coming late for me, I started reading scifi in the 2nd grade. In the 5th grade after reading The Martian Chronicles, I wanted to grow up to be Ray Bradbury. Strange for a girl in the late 50' s, early 60's. We weren't exactly 'encouraged' to read scifi, let alone want to write it. I was lucky enough to be an Air Force brat who inheritated scifi and fantasy books when my dad's friends were through with them.

If you liked this, read Robots Have No Tails. Its's wonderful.

As for the Mimsy..don't bother watching that ridiculously bad excuse for a movie, it sucked. I think I watched maybe 20 minutes of it.. Read the story, it is absolutely chilling.

Not as good as I remembered. A little dated, but a few classic stories.

This book contains the classic "Mimsy were the Borogoves" from which the movie "The Last Mimsy" was adapted. It was adapted badly, as usual, since printed science fiction seldom translates well to the visual mediums of television and movies. "Mimsy" is one of the greatest stories Henry Kuttner ever wrote, and should be reread with every new generation. I've even used it as a basis for a lecture on how Kuttner's vision of educational toys from the future changing the thinking of two children came true less than 40 years after he wrote his story -- not millions of years as he predicted. The other stories in this volume range from light-hearted to serious and are all good reading.

The other reviews capture the message...buy this book if you want to step back into a bygone era of a golden age of American sci-fantasy. Kuttner really is a neglected master & the book a great collection. Why I've qualified it as almost the best is its lack of the heroic fantasy tales that he wrote. However the editor was right to keep these seperate - the style of his heroic fantasy Elak of Atlantis stories is much different...conclusion?

Condition of my copy...well cared for original

Content - great stuff!

I haven't read science fiction in years but I watched a movie "Mimsy..."(something with that word in it) and missed the ending so I went to IMDB to see what happened and in the "comment" section someone said the movie was based on a short story by Henry Kuttner called "Mimsy Were The Borogoves". I had never heard of Henry Kuttner so I came to Amazon and looked him up and found this book with the story in it along with an introduction by one of my all time favorite SiFi authors Ray Bradbury who raved about Kuttner. Ray was right about Kuttner. What a gifted writer! What a delightful read!

I love this book so much. I have a couple of copies, including a first edition. I kept waiting for it to hit Kindle. I find the plot of the book predictable, simply because I've read the darned thing a hundred times. For me the mood is Nostalgic because this is a book of my early teen years and so it makes me feel nostalgic.

If you like old school sci fi, filled with humor and pathos and brilliance, get this book. If only for The Proud Robot and Nothing But Gingerbread Left, it's totally worth the price.

An excellent collection of imaginative stories from one of the best authors in the genre who sadly left us far too soon. A few of the stories I'd read elsewhere and one or two I'm sure were on the old tv series of the 1960's.

Overall, I can't think of one story I was disappointed by. Great stuff!