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snood's review
2.0
I was overall pretty disappointed with this issue. About half of it was taken up with the beginning of a serialized novel which I skipped since I'm never going to randomly stumble into the proper next issue. The short stories were fairly mediocre as well.
A Dome of Many-Colored Glass had an interesting concept with "slow glass", but the story itself was lackluster. It made me want to seek out the novel that takes place in the same world, but it commands crazy prices unfortunately.
Thus I Refute was a short humorous story that many of these digests have, but executed well.
Up to the Edge of Heaven was really hard to understand, but seemed to have an interesting idea.
The Puiss of Krrlik was bizarre and unpleasant, but very memorable and well written.
The Pill was a fairly standard story with a good twist.
Nice Trees Don't was a very short and not particularly interesting twist on Greek myth written by an author who apparently never wrote anything else.
Oddly, the editorial and fan letters were the most interesting parts. The editorial discussed the original series of Star Trek (only a few years old at the time) in a negative light, which the author received significant backlash for at the time. The fan letters and responses gave an interesting view into the state of sci-fi as of 1972, seeming to be coming down from its golden age and suffering from limited magazine distribution.
As a historical curiosity, the FSF&FS April 1972 is interesting. But as a story anthology, it was sorely lacking in interesting stories.
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