Jack Finney has never shown in his writing the fascination with the future as a setting which is so often central to science fiction. Instead he develops a mystique of the past, its lost opportunities and its lost values. He shares with science-fiction writers a sense of the dullness and mundaneness of the present, but deals with this quality in a manner which puts him at the margins of the genre. His stories were published in Collier's the Saturday Evening Post, and Good Housekeeping rather than in Astounding Science-Fiction or Galaxy (though occasionally one of his stories would be reprinted in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction). Reviews of his work in the science-fiction magazines frequently refer to him as an outsider, sometimes with hostility. Even as critics describe Finney's writing as ingenious, bright, and deft, they also call it slick, glib, and facile. However, what may...