This is a collection of stories and essays by Poul Anderson which can very broadly be said to be (or be about) fantasy. He wrote two brilliant early fantasy novels (Three Hearts ad Three Lions, one of the very best modern heroicfantasies in my opinion, and The Broken Sword, equally well written but very grim) but then concentrated on science fiction until the Tolkien revolution made fantasy marketable. By that time, frankly, he was not as consistent good as he was when he was young. Some of the stories in this collection are first class -- e.g. Pact, about a devil who makes the mistake of making a Reverse Faustus pact with a human astronomer, and ends up regretting it fr a very, very long time. Others, like the Cappen Vara stories, are conventional heroic fantasy about a rather unheroic hero. Some are more like science fiction, as in Superstition when a post-apocalypse world is dominated by warlocks who behave like a Counter- Reformation church and are challenged by a rare believer in pre-apocalypse scientific rationalism. The essays "Thud and Blunder "and "Fantasy in the Age of Science"are very intelligent discussions of the state of fantasy writing at the time, the first discussing how little much conventional fantasy makes such of the possibilities of the pre-modern cultures its settings are usually borrowed from, and the other discussing the line between science fiction and fantasy and how fantasy can be dated to the modern world. The short story "the Barbarian" makes many of the same points as "Thud and Blunder" in a humorous fictional form. "House Rule" imagines a tavern outside time where just about anyone (or anything) interesting might drop in, and what happens when Leonardo da Vinci meets Albert Einstein, and Heloise is reunited with Abelard. ( )