The editors have put fairly strong stories in the opening and closing positions. The opener, Timothy Zahn's "Old-Boy Network" is set on Mars. The protagonist is a handicapped young man, and we soon learn that he is handicapped for a rather scary reason. Some maximally evil rich folks have learned that the human brain is capable of telepathy, but only at the sacrifice of much of the brain used to control stuff like legs. So they have "bought" the services of some people, forcing them to have the brain surgery necessary to give them telepathy. This telepathy is FTL, which in an interplanetary economy is a great advantage for manipulating stock markets and such-like. The concept is scary, and the story is well-enough executed. The finishing story is Michael A. Stackpole's "Least of My Brethren", in which a priest visits a mining asteroid after a disaster, and must decide whether a dying miner is worthy of Extreme Unction. The trick is, the miner in question is partly human, partly gorilla. Does he have a soul? We know the right answer from the start, but Stackpole does make us care about his priest and his problem.

Two novelettes were also decent reading. John Helfers' "Ghost of Neptune" tells of the second expedition to Neptune. They come expecting to relieve the first expedition, but instead they find a gruesome scene: all the expedition members seem to have been murdered. Then they stumble across something even stranger ... It's a fairly interesting SF mystery. And Stephen D. Sullivan's "Martian Knights" is an action story about a pair of mechanics on Mars, following a disastrous war which led to the outlawing of cybernetic enhancements to humans (cybotek). They come to the rescue of an old friend who has stumbled across a cache of cybotek -- but unfortunately it harbors something more dangerous than they had expected. Nothing spectacular, but fun, fast-moving, adventure.

Of the remaining stories, a few were OK, a few mediocre but not awful, and as I said, a couple were simply bad. On the whole, I don't really think this book delivers its money's worth of good SF. I'd recommend you look for any issue of one of the major magazines, or for Mars Probes, or for a small press anthology like Leviathan Three. There will be more good stories in any of those books.