Books like ...Who Needs Enemies?

I recall first reading this book in ninth grade, not long after it came out, possibly re-reading it once or twice in the course of High School. I read it after its companion piece, With Friends Like These..., and apparently I remember more of the stories from that volume than I did of this one. Reading some of these now seemed completely novel. In fact, the only story here that I remembered before I started reading it was the final one, “Village of the Chosen,” and I mis-remembered that based on my own daydreams of what would come after the story closed. This story is about a reporter who discovers a village of green-skinned people in Africa, only to learn that they have been genetically modified to take nourishment through photosynthesis, and he postulates the future I fantasized, in which all people would be the same skin-tone and there would be no hunger. On the whole, most of the stories here are along those lines: one fairly simple idea is explored without much character development or world-building. That is the advantage of the short story format, I suppose, but it probably explains why these stories are so much less memorable than the sci fi novels I was gobbling at the time. Among the better ones here, I would mention “Swamp Planet Christmas,” about colonialism and computer glitches, “Bystander,” about human redemption and truly alien civilizations, and “The Last Run,” which is about speed and hubris. Foster’s fans will probably be most interested in “Snake Eyes,” starring his popular characters Pip and Flinx, but I actually think the story would have worked better without them in it at all; the best character was the grizzled old prospector. Probably the least effective is a paean to violence in media, “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” which was written in the seventies about future television that Foster was ill-equipped to predict. Alan Dean Foster is and was a commercially successful writer who gives his audience what they want, but not much more. This book is ultimately representative of that career, and thus of trends in late-twentieth-century sci fi, but doesn’t have a lot of intrinsic interest, except for me as a nostalgia exercise.