I am pretty sure this was the first Tiptree anthology to see print (1973), and it collects stories from the first four years of Tiptree's writing career (1968 - 1972). Alas, none of these early stories are much good, with only two or three exceptions. Should you want to buy a used copy of this paperback, here's what you'll get for your money.
"And I Awoke..." is one of the two best-known stories in the volume, detailing the sad consequences if humans were to find aliens sexually attractive.
"The Snows are Melted..." is an "after the war" tale in which mutants are trying to collect fertile semihumans for breeding purposes.
"The peacefulness of Vivyan" involves a man who is instantly attractive to women and animals, and who is also in most ways the most dangerous and treacherous man alive.
"Mama Come Home" is a really bad story of alien visitation that uses some of Tiptree's photo recon and CIA background. "Help" is an equally bad sequel in which the same dull characters encounter not one but two groups of alien missionaries.
"Painwise" is another bad story concerning an interstellar explorer who has been modified so as to feel no pain, literally.
"Faithful to thee, Terra..." is the kind of story James White became famous for circa 1950 - 60, particularly in his "Hospital Station" series. This imitation, involving a planet given over entirely to races, is feeble.
"The Man Doors Said Hello To" is a delightful fantasy that could easily have appeared in the early 1940s in UNKNOWN magazine.
"The Man Who Walked Home" is a bad tale in which a man traveling backward in time from the distant future becomes an annual tourist attraction. Time travel tends to bring out the worst faults in Tiptree as a writer, for some reason.
"Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket" is another bad time travel story, the central concept of which Tiptree reused in another tale written toward the end of her life.
"I'll Be Waiting..." is a supposedly humorous but actually pretty unfunny account of a "Goodman Beaver"-type earthman distorting an alien civilization beyond recognition.
"I'm Too Big..." also involves a concept Tiptree reused in later and equally bad stories. A gigantic gaseous interstellar being decides to try to become human for a while.
"Birth of a Salesman" is another very unsuccessful attempt to write in the James White mode.
"Mother in the Sky..." is a space opera in which asteroid mining (a staple of space opera since the early 1930s) is entirely in the hands of evil Companies. Tiptree notes in an afterword that Hart Crane (circa 1920s) was the first poet of space travel. Actually, I think Thomas Lake Harris was doing (bad) space travel poems more than half a century earlier.
"Beam Us Home" is by far the best (and best-known) tale in the collection, depending on that unique "nostalgia for the future" that so many of us kids of the 20 Century have felt.
All in all, this collection features early, primitive Tiptree. She hasn't found her "voice" yet, or many of the themes she later explored. If you think you need and want it, it is fairly easy to obtain. At 374 pages, it was a bargain in 1973 and still is.
