But first, the tales themselves.

"Kaddish for the Last Survivor" envisions a day in the near future when the last Holocaust sufferer will inevitably pass away, and what the world will owe to his memory—and the memory of 6 million others. Burstein's first appearance in print came with "TeleAbsence," a look at the inequalities inherent in the VR schooling of the future. Almost 10 years later, he delivered a sequel, "TelePresence," in which the now-adult protagonist, Tony Louis, has to deal with murder in cyberspace.

The next story begins a quartet revolving around the historically unbuilt super particle accelerator in Texas, a device that Burstein gives actual existence for fictional purposes. "Broken Symmetry" has that device opening up a Gate between parallel universes; "Absent Friends" finds a human subject making the jump between dimensions on a strictly personal mission; "Reality Check" looks at a conflict between religion and science; and "Empty Spaces," previously unpublished, concludes the quartet with a meditation on the personal cost of duty.

So far we've seen Burstein stay close to the present. But in "Spaceships" he ventures to the far future, when humanity is nigh unto the gods. "Decisions" starts out as a time-travel story and mutates into one of First Contact. But the Jack-Finney-like "Time Ablaze" is solidly anchored in journey-to-the-past mode.

A short think piece about clones and copyrights is what we find in "Seventy-Five Years." Aliens and the Catholic Church intersect in "Sanctuary." And finally, a trio of SF pieces about SF itself closes the book: the heretofore unseen title story; "Cosmic Corkscrew"; and "Paying It Forward."

Solid but stolid old-school tales

How best to categorize both the appeal and the limitations of Burstein's fiction? Maybe with paired virtues and drawbacks.

They are all written in a good solid prose that's easy on the mind's ear and eye. But they are essentially style-free, indistinguishable from each other and from the work of similar authors.

They each embody a good core idea whose implications are thoughtfully extracted. But they do not spin off multifarious ideational riffs, or delve into the truly unpredictable or surprising.

The settings are all conveyed with the requisite props needed to summon up a mental movie. But that movie is sparsely furnished, with no eyekicks or distinctions.

The characters are nice, believable people with decent and comprehensible emotions. But there are no standout fictional personages with wild passions, no Nicholas van Rijn or Paul Atreides in sight.

Burstein's authorial tone is earnest and sincere, but, like the characters themselves, lacking in powerful emotional currents.

In short, these pairings of pluses and minuses go a long way toward explaining his peculiar situation of being "always a bridesmaid, never a bride." His stories possess a hefty measure of what readers love about the genre at its most basic. But get them on the ballot next to superior works that exhibit exactly what he lacks—style, passion, wild-eyed concepts—and they fail to shine enough to take the prize.

In my eyes, the story here that goes the longest toward upsetting this perfect Pushmi-Pullyu balance is "Time Ablaze." Nicely portrayed Edwardian New York. Characters who have stronger feelings than their counterparts in other Burstein tales. Life-or-death issues. Some fairly novel speculative notions about time-travel paradoxes. Authorial excitement. It all comes together here, and points up the way the other stories achieve an easy liftoff—but never quite manage to attain orbit.