This was honestly a pleasant surprise in my continual quest to work through the classic SF/F collections in my possession. I think this is in large part attributable to the fact it’s from 1965, so is pre-New Wave. This era clicks with me, as does contemporary sci-fi/fantasy. It’s really only the 1970s and a chunk of the 1980s where I run aground.
Man Against Tomorrow is a reprint collection which I enjoyed almost every story in, a real achievement in my opinion. The one con I will state is that there is not one story by a woman here (unless someone was writing under a male pseudonym like Tiptree), so it is a very homogenous collection and one with a very specific class and time worldview. The main shared theme here is terror over imminent nuclear war, as well as fear of ads and freeways (really a fear of technology and government in general) There’s a lot of fear here, in contrast to earlier more uplifting SF that was focused on all the positives rocket travel and computers might bring. Even the Bradbury story here, “Payment in Full,” is a very cynical and dark look at human-Martian contact after nuclear war destroys Earth. A lot of his Mars stories are dark, but this one seems to me to have an especially harsh edge.
Other stories I enjoyed here included “After the Sirens” by Hugh Hood, a realistic look at surviving a nuclear attack, and “Nobody Starves” by Ron Goulart, about the tyranny of government. I also liked “The Freeway” by Robert Sheckley, about a car breakdown on a futuristic freeway system, which I feel like I’ve read somewhere before. I didn’t love the first novella that started this book (“Special Delivery” by Kris Neville) which was a slog, but after I powered through that it was smooth sailing the rest of the way. Pleasant surprises like this is why I keep returning to my SF/F shelf and picking these up.