These stories delight in ideas, holding machine kaleidoscopes up to the sun to see the many shapes of time, man, and destiny. This book is insidious. It is secretly subversive of all that you have believed in the past. It is revolutionary in that it may well make you want to go out and invent better empathy-machines, which repeat truths and amiably shape dreams, such as those strange robots, the motion-picture projector or the record player.