Here are three anthologies, issued in mass-market-sized paperbacks from 1966 to 1975, that offered various expert takes on science fiction or science fantasy, as major publishers were dipping their toes into the market for serious anthologies.

Christopher Cerf, son of Random House (publisher of Vintage Books) co-founder Bennett Cerf, offers a half-apologetic, half-defensive introduction: "This is not to claim that science fiction today has reached the status of great literature -- certainly, the majority of good science fantasy stories are written primarily to entertain. The point of this anthology is to illustrate that at least some of the body of work broadly classified as fantasy is literate, provocative, and absorbing." The subtitle of the book is "Twenty Stories in the Modern Manner." The William Styron story is original to the book.

Norman Spinrad, a decade into a career as a provocative author, assembled a book for the trade paperback imprint of Doubleday, which though mass market paperback sized has heavier-than-usual cover stock and a higher-than-usual cover price ($3.50, at a time most mass market paperbacks ran $1.50), giving it the flavor of a basic textbook, though Spinrad doesn't use that term. He does provide an introduction to modern sf, and three intermediate essays for the book's three sections: "The Golden Age", "The Postwar Awakening", "The Full Flowering". And he provides an appendix of "additional significant works," novels especially by authors who couldn't be included in this book.

A literary critic whose interests included science fiction, Leslie A. Fiedler subtitled his book, from Dell's Laurel imprint, "A Historical-Critical Anthology of Science Fiction." HIs introduction is a 13-page history of the field. Stories are grouped into "The Beginnings," "The Golden Age," and "New Directions," with brief introductions to each section.

Three stories, by Del Rey, Godwin, and Le Guin, are used twice among these three books. And all three use stories by Ballard and Clarke, but different stories in each book.