Established as a major SF author in the 1970s with Ender's Game and other work, Orson Scott Card followed the SF field closely in the 1980s and wrote reviews of short fiction for Richard E. Geis' popular fanzine Science Fiction Review and in his own magazine Short Form (columns under the heading "You Got No Friends In This World"). The first book here states that it is the first in a series of anthologies collecting representative stories by the major writers of that decade.

By the time the second volume appeared seven years later, Card's involvement with the science fiction community had diminished; he had stopped following new work and had stopped reviewing. The book opens with a long introduction about science fiction, Star Wars, religion, and moral philosophy.

His final anthology, in 2001 for a different publisher, expands his scope to the entire 20th century but states the selection criteria as being simply "stories that I loved when I first read them and that, upon rereading, I still love and admire". The Table of Contents divides stories into three parts: The Golden Age, The New Wave, and The Media Generation. That nine of the total 27 stories are from the 1980s (and only two from the '90s) reflects Card's fondness for writers of that decade. (Still, Card used different authors for this book than he had for the earlier two.)

Most frequent sources: Asimov's (14), Omni (6), F&SF (5).