The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and Other Fantastic Stories

This is a collection of short stories from 2000 to 250 years ago, containing some elements of outer world, time travel, fantastic mechanical devices. The purpose of these stories is quite interesting: two of the stories are really about philosophy - how petty do our affairs look when seen from other stars, that's what one of the Roman Empire's mightiest men and one of the French philosophers ask themselves. Another story is a satire on the then well known travels related by Homer - where Homer tells about travels to distant countries and wars between heroes and Gods, the present story tells about travels to the stars and heroic star warfare. The two Japanese stories use the fantastic as a parabole for unattainable love - to the woman of the Moon, and to a sea creature living on another time scale. The two stories from the Arabian nights replace the usual magic by cunning mechanical devices, a flying horse steered by levers, a city steered by robots. That's maybe closest to what we think of science fiction.These stories serve the reader as a time travel into the past, but what does one find? People with exactly the same desire for wisdom, knowledge, romance, entertainment as the people of today, just with less knowledge about mechanics and physical laws.There could have been a few more annotations, about the sources, and whether the stories are abridged. Apart from this the collection can be recommended.

Misleading title for a motley collection.

Lovely first story. Can see comparisons with English fairytales eg Thumbelina, interesting how classic stories can be universal - who did it first?

None of the tales in this book is a full story... they made it short to just few pages..

Some good stories - but main story a bit curtailed. Shame was looking forward to a good tale from Japan.