A very good idea, executed in a less good way. Most of the stories are okay to quite okay, some are brilliant, only a very few are worse than that. Nonetheless, there is no real concept to the collection: many explore the same basic ideas, or use the same mechanisms, and there is no feeling of change during the course of the book – everything is just randomly mixed so that any story might get back to the beginnings of a world in which the Machine of Death exists, or explain how society is changed by it. The best stories, of course, are those that are both original and dependent on the basic premise, but the few that manage to do that are scattered throughout the book and might pop up at any place, embedded between lesser specimens. In a very unsatisfying way, the book only works because it collects a pleasing number of great ideas, not because of its structure.