Collection of early 80s tales. Holds up pretty well. ( )

16 short stories by the author written in the early 1980's. There is a common theme to all of them, sometimes not so obvious. There is an aura of displacement, a feeling of "should not be there". In "The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve" lust and romance against a back-drop of tourist time-travel makes for the usual time paradoxes. In "The Pope of the Chimps" a colony of laboratory chimpanzees develope the idea of religion with the creation of a priest caste, perhaps Silverbergian tongue-in-cheek about human religiosity. The "Changeling" sends an art collector to a slightly altered parallel universe while in Mexico. "The Man Who Floated in Time" is a very short story with just a central idea of a man unable to control his wanderings through space and time. The concept seems to have been taken up by Audrey Niffenegger's "The Time Traveller's Wife" many years later. "The Palace at Midnight" is a post-apocalyptic story which may amuse most readers with its partition of the USA into tiny city-states, empires, kingdoms, republics but to me living in just such a small country is wry humour at best. "A Thousand Paces along the Via Dolorosa" deals with hallucinogenic drugs in the Middle-East. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that so many divine revelations happen in this corner of the world where there are various mind-bending berries and mushrooms. "The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party" which is used metonymously as the book title is the most outlandish of the collection. Style and fashion are taken into DNA "sculpting" of the human genome. "Our Lady of Sauropods" is about a Jurassic Park on an asteroid. Perhaps this is what got Michael Crichton going. "Gianni" - after Gian Battista Pergolesi - another time-travel story does not present paradoxes but rather presents a universe which does not take well to change and somehow or other protects itself from too much alterations. "The Trouble with Sempoanga" was written at the early emergence of AIDS and was probably not inspired by it. The story, a rather light-hearted approach to venereal disease could not have been written in days such as ours. "How They Pass the Time in Pelpel" and "Not Our Brother" again deal with a psychedelic South American town in the middle of nowhere, hardly SF. "Waiting for the Earthquake", sees humans getting their come uppance to the benefit of the natives. A literary cliche but wonderful topography.
"The Regulars" are thinly veiled dead people in a bar that never closes.The last two stories are again about time travel. "Jennifer's Lover" is her descendant and "Needle in a Time Stack" sees willful manipulation of the past but the good guy still gets the girl"
As with most anthologies of short stories by the same author there is an overall pervading flavour but this volume is still quite enjoyable.