These are stories about character--about beings--in unusual circumstances, facing difficult choices, pushed to the point where they must bend or break.

Introduction (essay)

Breaking Point (novelette)

A Monster Named Smith

Cinderella Story

Teddy Bear

The Man Who Owned Tomorrow

Green Thumb

The Power and the Glory

The Listeners (novelette)

Translations (essay)

_James Gunn has the credentials: author of ten books [now over 40 and a SFWA Grandmaster] and some seventy-five stories, with a television series and a movie adapted from a novel--and a former president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. BREAKING POINT is a kind of retrospective--eight stories through which "interested readers may note the evolution of a writer."_

_Gunn notes that the latest generation of science fiction writers "had grown up reading science fiction, but they also knew literature and the humanities and they wanted to write stories and novels which met the critical standards of the mainstream."_

_A case in point being, of course, James Gunn._

--St. Louis Post-Dispatch