This was originally a hardback collection, of which - due to the limitations of bookbinding at the time - it was possible to fit only half the stories in the paperback version, which is what I have here. So I'm missing material from H.G. Wells, Lord Dunsany, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury amongst others, although mostly stuff I've read elsewhere from what I can tell. Those selections which made the cut seem to have been less established names at the time of publication, but Derleth knew what he was doing and there's no particularly weak link in the resulting chain.
That said, this is golden age science-fiction as distinct from any modern variant, so there's not much point getting pissy over the absence of lengthy discussions about the properties of photons. The genre was still evolving, John W. Campbell was just beginning to make a name for himself, and even if everyone was familiar with Wells, Gernsback, and the rest, a lot of what we have here is more or less weird fiction with a few sciencey touches stirred in for flavour, and Donald Wandrei's Something from Above typifies the form as a marginally less purple Lovecraft-style yarn about flying saucers; and where contributions may not quite tick all the recognised weird fiction boxes, they're fucking weird nonetheless.
A.E. van Vogt's Resurrection, for example, teaches us that human beings brought back to life by aliens following the extinction of the human race will have superpowers for no adequately explained reason. The lad was firing on all four cylinders with that one. Elsewhere we find Original Sin in which S. Fowler Wright predicts that philosophy will eventually advance to such a degree as to inspire the entire human race to commit to a surprisingly cheery form of mass suicide, because the purpose of life is the evolution of its own destruction or summink; and Eric Frank Russell's Spiro recruits a shape-shifting alien refugee to the London music hall of the day thus allowing us to imagine what a Tommy Trinder version of Campbell's Who Goes There? might look like.
The rest are mostly cut from the same strange cloth; which you might call dated, but I'd prefer to regard as simply consistent with a particular style and mood associated with the forties, blending deco stylings with post-bomb paranoia and all of our ideas about supermen beginning to look a bit shaky; and, as ever, Derleth brought us the cream of the crop.
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