"What you are about to read deals with the stars, the wide galactic future that lies at our fingertips today... both factual articles and fictional stories. In a world where robots are causing human unemployment, spaceflight is so commonplace the news media regard it as dull, and science fiction has become a mainstay of the bestseller lists... nonfiction has become just as exciting as the fiction.

"So here are a dozen and a half views of the world, past present and future, as seen through the Astral Mirror...."

—Ben Bova,
from his Introduction