Choose a well-worn homily ("God works in strange ways"); mix in a headline from the morning's newspaper ("Public Works Kickback Revealed, Four City Councilmen Implicated"); add a twist of the fantastic ("I propose to buy off God"); and blend carefully into a light, tasty dish; alter the ingredients slightly and blend again; repeat eleven more times and serve. The result is a thirteen-course dinner, each course a dessert—Howard Fast's "A Touch Of Infinity: Thirteen New Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction."

More fantasy than hard-core science fiction, Fast's short stories cleverly detail one man's sadly ironic view of the twentieth-century world…. Fast's men and women, each caught in some dilemma of a tragic, misguided world, reach for escape through fantastic means; but the extra-terrestrial dimension usually offers no salvation. The level of ingenuity of each escape determines whether or not the story succeeds. (pp. 239-40)

It is...