[GeoffR]

I'm trying to decide whether to buy the "best-of" omnibus: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, or the four collections it draws from: Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home; Warm Worlds and Otherwise; Star Songs of an Old Primate; Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions. (The omnibus is about half the word count and about one quarter the price of the full collections.)

If anyone has read them, is there a clear quality divide between the stories that made the omnibus and the ones that didn't? Any stories in particular that should have made the cut but didn't? This is the full list, stories included in the omnibus are marked in green:

Spoiler:

Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home:
And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side (1972)
The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone (1969)
The Peacefulness of Vivyan (1971)
Mamma Come Home (1968)
Help (1968)
Painwise (1972)
Faithful to Thee, Terra, in Our Fashion (1969)
The Man Doors Said Hello To (1970)
The Man Who Walked Home (1972)
Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket (1972)
I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool Is Empty (1971)
I'm Too Big but I Love to Play (1970)
Birth of a Salesman (1968)
Mother in the Sky with Diamonds (1971)
Beam Us Home (1969)

Warm Worlds and Otherwise:
All the Kinds of Yes (1972)
The Milk of Paradise (1972)
And I Have Come upon This Place by Lost Ways (1972)
The Last Flight of Dr. Ain (1969)
Amberjack (1972)
Through a Lass Darkly (1972)
The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1973)
The Night-Blooming Saurian (1970)
The Women Men Don't See (1973)
Fault (1968)
Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death (1973)
On the Last Afternoon (1972)

Star Songs of an Old Primate:
Your Haploid Heart (1969)
And So On, and So On (1971)
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1974)
A Momentary Taste of Being (1975)
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1976)
The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats (1976)
She Waits for All Men Born (1976)

Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions:
Angel Fix (1974)
Beaver Tears (1976)
Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light! (1976)
The Screwfly Solution (1977)
Time-Sharing Angel (1977)
We Who Stole the Dream (1978)
Slow Music (1980)
A Source of Innocent Merriment (1980)
Out of the Everywhere (1981)
With Delicate Mad Hands (1981)