"No Truce with Kings": A story about a civil war set on a future, semi-primitive Earth. The protagonists discover that aliens have been introducing advanced technology to one side in order to manipulate the course of human events.
"The Critique of Impure Reason": A robot will not work because it is infatuated with modern literature and literary criticism. (Not to be confused with the Critique of Impure Reason, a book in philosophy by Steven James Bartlett.)
"Epilogue": A crew of humans return to Earth after a long absence, finding it has been taken over by a kind of transistor-based ecology of machines; a lack of understanding between the robots and the humans leads to tragedy
Algis Budrys in the February 1965 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction said that "what Anderson needed in Time and Stars was an editor". He disliked "Eve Times Four" and "No Truce With Kings" but liked the others, calling "Escape From Orbit" "a beautifully done piece of work like nothing I have seen in the field before". In February 1966 Budrys named the book the best collection of his first year as reviewer for the magazine, and "Escape from Orbit" the best short story.