A collection of short stories. Contains the following:
The Year of the Jackpot
By His Bootstraps
Coumbus Was a Dope
The Menace From Earth
Sky Lift
Goldfish Bowl
Project Nightmare
Water Is for Washing

"The Year of the Jackpot" starts with a woman taking off all her clothes in public, having no idea why. Her experience is just one symptom of general lemminglike insanity. Another is

a bill introduced in the Alabama lower house to repeal the laws of atomic energy--not the present statutes, but the natural laws concerning nuclear physics; the wording makes that plain.

It is disheartening to think that that may have actually been attempted in my state (I'm not sure if it did, but it seems too bizarre to make up), but not especially surprising. That story has the following quote near the end

What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a spot of poetry in them, cluttering and wasting a second-string planet near a third-string star. But sometimes they finish in style.

"By His Bootstraps" is a time travel story that is deeply strange, and full of paradoxes.

The title story is not what you might expect. It's about a girl who lives on the moon, designs spaceships, and works as a guide for the "groundhog" tourists who come from Earth. One of her customers is a beautiful woman, and she becomes jealous of the cloesness between this "menace" and the guy she won't admit to herself she's in love with. The thing I like most about this story is the idea that humans could strap on wings and fly in the moon's lower gravity, and that it would become a popular activity for both loonies and groundhogs.


My first use of pre-numbered labels. I ordered this book from Amazon.com, using the link that gives BookCrossing a commission.


Books by Robert A. Heinlein:
Beyond This Horizon
Friday
Stranger In A Strange Land
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
The Door Into Summer
The Star Beast
To Sail Beyond The Sunset
I Will Fear No Evil
The Man Who Sold The Moon (older edition)
The Man Who Sold The Moon (newer edition)
Farnham's Freehold
Between Planets
Universe
Orphans of the Sky
The Number of the Beast
The Menace From Earth
Worlds To Come edited by Damon Knight, contains "Ordeal In Space"
First Contact edited by Damon Knight, contains "Goldfish Bowl"
New Destinies edited by Jim Baen, contains "This I Believe"

F&SF's Competition 19 (September 1978) asked for limmericks ending with SF titles. My favorite of these was submitted by Margery Golstein of Hudson, MA, who won second prize:

Old broadcasts of dubious worth
Are now far from their planet of birth
     Each Martian receiver
     Caught Leave it to Beaver
They Called it The Menace from Earth

Another favorite was submitted by Phoebe Ellis of Millwood, VA:

Said the read-head, while curling a tress
"There have been (tho' I should not confess),
     Three earls, a brass band;
     Dukes numerous and
Nine Princes in Amber, no less."

F&SF Competitions:

Competition 10: Froomb/Zotz
Competition 19: Limericks Ending With SF Titles
Competition 29: Burma Shave
Competition 31: "Strange Whine"
Competition 33: SF Redefinitions
Competition 35: Capsule Reviews
Competition 43: "Call Him Lard"
Competition 44: Asimov Cocktail
Competition 46: Titles As Acronyms
Competition 47: Alien Personals
Competition 51: Anagrams
Competition 53: Cover Copy
Competition 56: Musical SF

Released on Wednesday, August 20, 2003 at The Book Rack in Auburn, Alabama USA.

I traded this book in at The Book Rack and used the credit to buy the following books:

Demon Seed by Dean Koontz
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Confess, Fletch by Gregory McDonald