Immortals

I have over 1000 anthologies. All anthologies have good stories and stinkers. "Immortals" has only two crummy overly verbose stories not worth reading - Worm That Flies by Aldiss and Mortimer Gray's History of Death by Stableford. Clearly the authors are paid by the word and detract from stories that potentially could have been acceptable had 80% of the garbage been edited out. Diarrhea of the mouth is accurate. However, the remaining stories in the anthology are pretty good. If you wish to be maximally time efficient and read the truly remarkable stories first; Child of All Ages by PJ Plauger is a fantastic story of a 2400 year old child immortal and the amazing features she retains as both child and adult. Unfortunately this appears to be the only story written by this brilliant author. Grotto of the Dancing Deer by Simak is also wonderful, telling of the "discovery" by a mortal that his friend is immortal. Learning to Be Me by Greg Egan is yet another fantastic story, somewhat more science based with a novel approach to immortality. Silverberg's "Death Do Us Part" is a haunting immortality tale of a mortal amongst a world of immortals. If you are interested in immortality short stories, also check out Dann's Immortals book of collected short novels. Stableford also collected a fantastic anthology of immortality stories entitled "Wandering Jew." It's worth the higher cost. You may also wish to purchase Greenberg's "Mutant Files" as Tanya Huff wrote a chilling and outstanding (still not as great as Plauger's Child of All Ages in this book) story of childhood immortality with telepathy in her included story. At the end of this book Dann and Dozois list additional stories of immortality as well as novels. Hopefully these editors, Greenberg, or others will collect them all to a supersized anthology as the recurring theme of immortality in sci fi is a delight to all!