A collection of 25 stories, one of which (by Fritz Leiber) I had read before, two of which I gave up on, and only one of which (by Christopher Priest) inspired me to look for the author's other works. There were also a couple of authors whose work I was already familiar with. The rest were so-so merging on meh but not actually bad. ( )

This is a well curated anthology of time travel stories. My most liked were The Wind over the World by Steven Utley, The Truth about Weena by David J. Lake, Needle in a Timestack by Robert Silverberg, Dear Tomorrow by Simon Clark, Time Gypsy by Ellen Klages, The Catch by Kage Baker and Red Letter Day by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

At least two of the stories, The Wind over the World and The Catch have spurred me to continue reading more from these authors.

Red Letter Day is, in my opinion, the best story in the anthology. There is a lot to unpack in this story including religious vs. secular education, guns in schools, the role of school counselors and the choices we make as we grow older and how they affect our lives. A lovely, brilliant short story. ( )

Delighted how much fun this has been (give it an extra half star).
Good ones:
Gregory Benford - Caveat Time Traveller
Liz Williams - Century to Starboard
Sean McMullen - Walk to the Full Moon
Fritz Leiber - Try and Change the Past
Robert Silverberg - Needle in a Haystack
Simon Clark - Dear Tomorrow
Ellen Klages - Time Gypsy
Kage Baker - The Catch
Molly Brown - Women on the Brink of a Cataclysm
Michael Swanwick - Legions in Time
David I. Masson - Traveller's Rest
Steve Rasnic Tem - Twember
John Varley - The Pusher
Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Red Letter Day ( )

Time travel must be the most speculative area of the science fiction genre. With space travel, robotics, genetics, artificial intelligence and other areas, we have scientific and technological achievements to build on. Mars may not be Barsoom, but we have sent robots there and we have seen and explored the land. Time travel is as much a scientific and technological fantasy today as it has ever been. We are not even clear on what time is or how it 'works'. This means there is much more scope for science fiction to push boundaries and to explore the outer reaches of our philosophical relationship with time.

This collection reveals something interesting. With few exceptions, this is the most downbeat perspective on time travel imaginable. Protagonists out to make things better invariably make them worse; no one is happy; everyone regrets getting involved; other times are always worse than the here and now; there is no purpose behind time travel. Space travel generally invokes big themes with noble purpose (even if the specifics are grubby and human). Here, time travel is serving no noble objective; the experimenters are often petty and self-serving, using time travel to win the girl or get a promotion or, worst of all, to do nothing of value to anyone at all. Are we writing pessimistic time travel fiction in order to mask our disappointment that we are not able to do it?

The authors are varied, the stories generally well-written and the selection is from the more obscure and curious end of the genre. ( )

You come into a collection like this expecting that it will be a bit of a mixed bag but hoping that a heretofore unfamiliar author might capture your fancy. In that light editor Mike Ashley deserves credit for going beyond the obvious--fifteen of these authors were new to me as were twenty-two of the twenty-five stories in this far ranging collection.

I thought the first section of the collection was fairly underwhelming (with "Walk to the Full Moon" being my favorite story from the first part of the book), but things definitely improved in the second half of the book. I absolutely loved Ellen Klages not-for-Sad-Puppies-feminist-lesbian-time-traveler-in-1950's-Berkeley story "Time Gypsy", and found the contributions of David Masson, Mike Strahan, Molly Brown, Paul Levinson, Michael Swanwick, and Ian Watson to all be outstanding. ( )