BETTY'S BOOK REVIEWS

Isaac Asimov's Caliban by Roger MacBride Allen. Normally, I tend to be very leery of books with phrases like "So-and-So's Such-and-Such" emblazoned on the front, because the phrase tends to be rather misleading. After all, Asimov did not write this book. I don't even know if he even had much to do with it. However, the use of Asimov's name is far more justified here than a lot of places it has appeared. This particular novel is set in the universe of Asimov's robot stories, and it is done very much after his writing style and according to his conception of that universe. In fact, if it weren't for Allen's name on the cover, I probably would have had no trouble believing Asimov had written it. The plot has rather a police-story feel to it (much along the lines of Asimov's The Caves of Steel and sequels), and concerns a violent assault apparently perpetrated by a robot. This, of course, is supposed to be impossible under Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics, but the deeper the investigation goes the more likely it seems... and the bigger the potential consequences appear. Meanwhile, the robotic suspect is out wandering the streets of the city and avoiding every attempt at capture... In addition to this fairly engaging plot, the book also presents an interesting look at a society that has become overdependent on robots, and at some of the social implications of the Three Laws. I didn't expect much of the book going in, but it turned out to be a pleasant surprise on several levels. A real treat for fans of Asimov's robots. A

Andersen's Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen. I was pretty amazed by some of these, just because so many of them completely lacked the usual happily-ever-after fairy tale ending. Many of the stories here are sad, and quite a few of them focus on death. Others are downright gruesome, like the story about the man who kills his sister's lover by cutting off his head. The sister discovers the body and buries the head in a flower pot. When she too dies, the brother moves the flower pot into his room, where the flower-fairies come out and kill him in his sleep. Suitable for children?  You be the judge... Other stories, by contrast, are very moralistic, and many of them are overtly Catholic ("Now, be good little boys and girls," many of them seem to say, "and you shall all go to heaven!"). All in all, a real mixed bag of stuff, but it does have a certain indefinable charm. It was interesting, as well, to revisit some of the classic stories of childhood ("The Ugly Duckling", "The Emperor's New Clothes")... although I can see why some of these tales have remained more obscure. B-

The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson. Anderson's premise in this novel is that on a few, rare occasions throughout history, human beings have been born who do not age past adulthood, are immune to disease, and have potentially indefinite lifespans. The book tells the story of these few immortals as they learn to make their way in a world of mortals and gradually come to seek others of their kind. Anderson paints a very realistic and vivid picture of life in different historical periods and gives a pretty good sense of what it might be like to live an immortal life when all those around you are doomed to grow old and die. The structure of the book was occasionally just a little frustrating, though (at least in the beginning), as it seemed that every time I became truly engrossed in a particular place and time the chapter would end and the next one would be somewhere else, sometime later, and often with different people. Still, the various threads all come together at the end in a way that is, ultimately, a little strange (the ending is rather different in tone from the rest of the book), but nevertheless fitting. A-

Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fiction Firsts edited by Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh & Martin H. Greenberg is an anthology of twelve stories (dating from 1839 to 1966), each of which is purported to be the first to feature one of various science-fictional concepts such as antimatter, cloning, invisibility and so on. The first story ("Minus Planet," the antimatter story) didn't bode very well for the rest of the collection, as it was terribly dated both in content and style, and was not, despite the assurances of the editors, still "entirely readable." Fortunately, though, the book got much better from there on, and the rest of the stories were all quite interesting and certainly "entirely readable." B+

Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn by Isaac Asimov. One of a series of kids' novels about interplanetary agent David "Lucky" Starr which Asimov wrote under the pen name Paul French in the 1950's. Actually, it's not nearly as campy as it sounds. Well, OK, it's got people exclaiming things like "Great Galaxy!", for example. But, this being Asimov, it's also got wonderfully accurate science, and it doesn't talk down to its readers. Plus, the plot is a little more cerebral than your average 50's juvenile space opera; there's as much politics as there is action. Dated, yes, but kind of fun. B

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is set in a near-future America in which widespread human fertility problems and a takeover by a repressive theocratic government have combined to give rise to a society in which still-fertile women are employed (or perhaps enslaved) to bear children for the rich and powerful. That such a society could have emerged from our own so completely in such a short period of time isn't really all that plausible, but the society itself and the title character are so convincingly drawn that that's easy enough to overlook. The novel does have a distinctly feminist sensibility -- a fact which is no doubt bound to please some and annoy others -- but it never degenerates into anything like a soapbox rant. Instead it remains a quietly disturbing and very human look inside the mind of a woman caught up in intolerable circumstances. Although if, as I suspect, part of the purpose of this book is to make the reader (especially the female reader) to think a little more carefully about the freedoms she enjoys today and the fact that such freedoms have not existed for women in all times and places... well, in my case at least, it was indeed successful. A

Sky Coyote by Kage Baker features an interesting twist on the concept of time travel.  Time travel, it seems, is possible, but extremely expensive.  So is physical immortality (and the fact that it's rather painful and only works on little kids keeps the treatment from having much of a market).  But one company has come up with an idea that requires a considerable cash outlay, but will reap tremendous profits: they send a team back to the dawn of prehistory, where they give lots of little prehistoric kids the immortality treatment and a lot of training, then just let them travel forward through the ages the slow way, acting as agents for the company throughout all of human history.  These guys can't change the past, but that still leaves a lot of unrecorded history for them to play around with, and sending artifacts back to the 24th Century makes for a pretty lucrative enterprise.  Anyway, the plot of this novel involves an agent whose job it is to convince a village of Chumash Indians from California in 1700 (just before the disastrous coming of the white man) to voluntarily relocate to the future.  In order to accomplish this, he impersonates the major local deity, the trickster god Sky Coyote.  The writing is lively, and the portrayal of the Chumash is fresh and amusing.  These people have a pretty sophisticated culture based on trade, complete with a very modern monetary system, and many humorous parallels are drawn between the Chumash tribespeople and modern yuppie Californians.  In fact, IMO this is sometimes taken a bit too far, to the point where it starts to get silly, but for the most part the humor works well, and the story itself is quite interesting.  Note: it seems this is actually the second book in an ongoing series, but it stands perfectly well on its own.  There are a number of allusions to events that presumably occurred in the first book (which I haven't read), but they never present a problem or lead to any difficulty in understanding what's going on in this one.  There are a number of interesting loose ends that are quite clearly intended as sequel hooks.  This might well bother some people, but as the main story here was wrapped up well enough, I didn't have a particular problem with it.  B+

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks is a science fiction novel set during a sweeping galactic war. The protagonist (a human with some interesting physical abilities) has an important war mission to fulfill, but he ends up getting a little sidetracked on the way... Total action-adventure stuff, even a bit pointlessly so in places... but the last few chapters are pure adrenaline and very, very gripping. The whole book could make a great movie, assuming a really high FX budget. B+

Blood Music by Greg Bear.  A reasearcher working on creating cell-sized biological computers ends up creating cells that are actually -- get this! -- intelligent.  And when his research is suddenly shut down, he injects some of these cells into his own body in a desperate attempt to preserve them and soon begins undergoing a strange transformation athat is to have very wide-reaching implications...  Based on what little I know of molecular biology, I guess that this premise is possibly not quite as wacky as it sounds; after all, cells are very complex little things, and they are certianly equipped for information processing (what else is DNA?), so, heck, maybe you could make a computer out of a cell.  Unfortunately, having managed to (mostly) suspend disbelief on that score, I found plenty of other stuff later in the book that I simply couldn't swallow at all (and not just in the field of biology, but also in physics, politics, and -- for lack of a less pretentious-sounding word -- epistemology).  I will say, though, that even if the science-fictional ideas in the novel aren't exactly plausible, they are interesting, and Bear does some moderately exciting things with them in a way that at least held my attention. B

Artifact by Gregory Benford. An ancient artifact unearthed from a tomb in Greece turns out to have some very unusual -- and possibly very dangerous -- physical properties. A pretty neat idea for a novel, but not neat enough to carry 500+ pages of story by itself. Oh, the book does have lots of politics, a touch of romance, and a certain amount of action, but none of it really managed to hold my attention. It all felt like standard stuff I'd seen before. The most interesting part of the book was the artifact itself, and by the time the author got around to revealing its secrets, I'd lost interest. Benford is a competent writer with a good knowledge of physics, and this book wasn't actually bad, but it really failed to involve me. C

The Machineries of Joy by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury at his very best is simply amazing (and if you haven't yet experienced this particular fact for yourself, I strongly suggest that you make your way to your local library or bookstore at your earliest convenience and obtain a copy of The Martian Chronicles). Now, not every story in this particular collection represents Bradbury at his amazing best (the title story, for example, did very little for me for some reason). But it does contain a number of very good, very moving stories about love and death, and other such minor matters. Although, I must admit, my favorite of the bunch was the simply creepy "Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Basement!" -- one of the few actual science fiction stories in the book, despite what it says on the spine of my copy. A

The Postman by David Brin. This book is set sixteen years after World War Three (a limited but still devastating nuclear exchange) in what used to be the United States but is now a collection of scattered communities each more concerned with its own survival than with attempting to restore civilization to its pre-war glory. The main character is Gordon Krantz, a loner who wanders from community to community providing entertainment in exchange for the necessities of life and always hoping to find a place where civilization has been better-preserved. When one day Krantz appropriates the uniform and accouterments of a long-dead postal worker, his only thought is to keep himself warm and replace his own stolen equipment. Soon, however, he finds himself playing the role of post-apocalyptic postman... and becoming a powerful symbol of hope. Less gritty and depressing than most post-apocalyptic stories, and probably better written, too. A
Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold:  I'd been hearing good things about Bujold's "Vorkosigan" series for a long time, so I figured I'd finally pick up this, the first book in the batch, and give it a try.  And, yeah, I think I can see what the hype was about.  The protagonist is one Cordelia Naismith, captain of a peaceful planetary survey mission, whose crew is suddenly and unprovokedly attacked by soldiers belonging to a different galactic power.  Stranded on an uninhabited planet, Cordelia meets up with the captain of the enemy ship, learns that the attack on her people was part of a mutiny against him (well, sort of), and temporarily joins forces with him in the interests of survival.  What follows is a wild ride of a plot, filled with just about everything you could want in a story: treachery and betrayal, star-crossed romance, political intrigue, space battles, and about a zillion plot twists.  Better still, the people and places all feel decidedly real and three-dimensional, as if they have independent existences outside this story...  Which leaves me decidedly disposed towards continuing on with the rest of the series.  (Though I should take care to note that this particular volume is a standalone and definitely doesn't end on a cliffhanger or anything.)  A

War for the Oaks by Emma Bull . I happened to start reading this one when I was trying to adjust myself over from the day shift to the night shift by staying up later than normal. Well, I picked a great book for it, since this turned out to be one of those books I didn't want to put down until 2:00 AM. The story is what's often called "urban fantasy" these days. It concerns a supernatural war between two factions of immortal Faerie Folk (don't call them "fairies," though -- they hate that) for control of the city of Minneapolis. For reasons it would be a bit of a spoiler to reveal, these beings require the presence of a mortal human on the battlefield. Selected for this "honor" is one Eddi McCandry, recently unemployed small-time rock musician. Viewed objectively, I suppose the novel really is a bit thin on plot. The battle itself, for example, occupies far less of the book than you might expect. But the book does have two major things going for it: first, an interesting and original idea, and second, really terrific characterization. Between the two of them, they carry the story along effortlessly. Definitely recommended. A

Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler . Doro is an immortal who has survived nearly four millennia by taking over the bodies of others. His one great obsession is his human captive breeding program, by which he attempts to produce people with psionic talents -- for reasons not completely wholesome and sympathetic. Anyanwu is a healer, a shape-changer -- and an immortal of a very different variety. This book tells the long, strange, and slightly twisted story of the relationship between these two not-quite-human people. The novel is a bit slow, but there's something truly fascinating about these characters. A-

Chanur's Legacy by C.J. Cherryh is the fifth book in the Chanur series, which, like much of Cherryh's work, is so full of intrigue, hidden agendas and dialog that consists more of subtle implication than direct communication that it's almost easy for the reader to become even more confused that the characters. I do like this kind of complex interstellar intrigue, but only in small doses, and one Cherryh book comes close to pushing the limits of what I can handle. Still, I'm always glad that I made the effort and managed to work my way through the intricacies of the plot -- it's almost always interesting enough to be worth it. And I'm helped by the fact that Cherryh's characters are always three-dimensional, and that her aliens are well-drawn and (in most cases) convincingly alien. Definitely worth reading, but only if you're willing to spend a bit of mental energy. By the way, this book stands on its own better than most of the other books in the series, but I'd recommend reading them in order, anyway. The other books are: The Pride of Chanur, Chanur's Venture, The Kif Strike Back , and Chanur's Homecoming. The first book stands on its own, the next three are pretty much one continuing story (a direct sequel to the first book), and Chanur's Legacy is a sort of "Chanur: The Next Generation." B+

No Blade of Grass by John Christopher. A new strain of virus completely devastates the world's grasses and grains, and humanity finds itself facing famine on an unprecedented scale. A pretty standard apocalyptic story, but at least the choice of disaster is creative. I must say, though, that things get a little too brutal a little too quickly for me to find completely believable... but maybe I'm just naive. Anyway, it left me without any liking or sympathy for the characters at all. Other than that, the book's not badly written, though it possibly could have stood to be a bit longer and better-developed. B-

Rama Revealed by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee is the (presumably) final book in the seemingly interminable Rama series. It's been quite a while since I read the previous books in the series, but I vaguely remember liking them to at least a certain extent. This one, however, fell kind of flat with me. Not really bad, not completely unreadable... but definitely flat. For one thing, the characterization irritated me quite a bit. The characters in this book have an unforgivable tendency to lecture each other, or to speak to each other in sentences that read much more like the descriptive narration in which the story itself is written than anything likely to come out of the mouth of a real human being. The ironic things is, this wouldn't be so bad if these were simply the kind of cardboard characters you see a lot in "hard sf": people who are just there to comment on the wonders around them. This series has made some real effort to develop the characters as human beings, though, and this is an entirely laudable thing, but it makes the sheer silliness of so much of the dialog in this book all the more grating. And, frankly, after three books, I was beginning to get a bit tired of these people and their human concerns... and wasn't given much new to care about. There are a few genuinely touching moments, but for the most part, I found it harder and harder to stay interested. The most interesting parts of the book, in fact, had nothing to do with the characters at all, but rather concerned the descriptions of the society of the alien octospiders (a stupid name for them, in my opinion, but that's neither here nor there). Parts of that were very interesting, though again I don't think the characters' reactions were handled very well -- certain aspects of the octospider society would have been certain to be disturbing to a group of people who had just been through what these guys had (a fact which is touched on a bit, but not in a way that seems very realistic to me), and a lot of opportunity for examination of some interesting philosophical questions goes completely wasted. The ending, on the other hand, does try to get philosophical but ends up being rather unsatisfying after a three-book build-up of mystery. I got the feeling that they were trying for the sort of mystical/spiritual type ending that so much of Clarke's work has -- Childhood's End, for example, or 2001 -- but it just doesn't work nearly as well here. So, to sum up: the whole thing is readable, but is ultimately unsatisfying in a number of ways. Maybe I'm comparing it unfairly with Clarke's classic works (since it's extremely doubtful how much of this thing he actually wrote, anyway), but I just can't bring myself to give it more than a C.

Branch Point   by Mona Clee . Three time travelers from a bleak future come back to prevent a nuclear war from breaking out in 1962... and then discover that they have to keep preventing it, over and over. My impression is that this is Clee's first novel, and aspects of it are a little rough. The initial crisis is solved far too easily to be satisfying, for instance, and the characterization of the time travelers is a bit hit-and-miss. But the concept is a powerful one, and the way the book looks back with new perspective on the Cold War and explores what might have been is well done and engrossing. It's also got some truly tense moments. A-

Chromosome 6   by Robin Cook.  A huge biotech company has found a way, using genetic engineering, to
transplant organs from apes into human beings, and it's making loads of money secretly performing these transplants for wealthy clients. But of course, something goes horribly wrong, and the story becomes one of courageous, ethical medical professionals and researchers vs. evil corporate doctors and mafia thugs as the Good Guys try and find out what's going on and stop it. Cook, I understand, is extremely popular for his medical thrillers, but based on this book alone, I'm kind of mystified at that popularity. The premise is implausible, the writing is clunky, the bad guys are incredibly stereotyped, and there's not really all that much suspense. C

Generation X   by Douglas Coupland. I very much enjoyed Coupland's later book Microserfs (see review below), so I was rather looking forward to reading this one. Unfortunately I found it very disappointing compared to Microserfs, and I think I understand why. The characters in Microserfs were people I could relate to, people I understood... even people I liked. (Hey, I went to a tech school; nerds are my peer group.) The characters in Generation X, though, are people I'd probably go out of my way to avoid in real life. They're far too fashion-conscious, too self-consciously hip, too painfully caught up in their own sense of missing out on... well, whatever it is they feel they're missing out on. Coupland does come out with the occasional pithy insight or catchy phrase here... but it takes more than just catchy phrases for a book to grab me and pull me in the way Microserfs did with its sympathetic characters. (Although I do actually see a parallel here between that last sentence and some of the stuff Coupland is trying to do in Generation X, as his characters ruminate that there should be more to life than a series of "cool moments." Generation X itself has some cool moments, but not enough to make me feel any more enthused by the story of these characters' lives than they seem to be themselves.) C

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland . Right after I read this book, I made a point of thanking the person who recommended it to me... and with good reason. This isn't quite the sort of book I normally read (being set, for one thing, in the "real world"), but it's certainly a welcome departure. Microserfs tells the story of a group of computer geeks in search of "a life." And I'll say this for Coupland, he's got the nerd subculture positively nailed. Having graduated from a tech school, I've got some familiarity with "nerds" and their lifestyles (heck, I'll even admit to being one without too much pressure), and Coupland's characters feel very, very much like people I might know. In fact, it's not just his characters that feel real. The book is written in the form of the sort-of-daily journal of one of the characters, and it feels more like a journal and less like a novel than any other book I've read which uses this device. Deep, profound insights are interspersed with trivial comments about the weather, for instance, and this is how real people think. And yet, the book never feels unfocused or dull... which is -- admit it -- how just about anybody's real life undoubtedly would feel if turned into a book. So, somehow, Coupland has managed to write a book which feels very much like real life, but is still interesting as a novel -- not a bad feat, particularly when the audience is someone like me who generally finds "mainstream" fiction boring. Perhaps the book isn't exactly what I'd call a "page-turner", but it did keep me interested in the lives of the characters and wanting to know what happened next. It's also spiced liberally with humor and some real insight about modern life. A

Matilda by Roald Dahl. I adored the movie version of this when I saw it on video a few months ago, and I've liked Dahl ever since I first read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a little kid, so I was pleased to stumble across this book in a recent visit to the kids' section of the local bookstore. The movie, as it turns out, was actually incredibly faithful to the book. They Americanized the dialog (Dahl is British), cut one brief (and unimportant) scene from the beginning, and added in a bunch of stuff around the climax to make it... well, more climactic. (And it worked pretty well, I might add.) So, anyway, if you've seen the movie, you pretty much know what to expect from the book (and vice versa). For those who haven't seen the movie, the book is about a little girl named Matilda who is a pretty serious child prodigy: by the age of five, she's reading Dickens and doing some fairly complicated arithmetic in her head. Matilda's parents, though, are truly vile people who scarcely seem to know she's alive, and her school's headmistress, one Miss Trunchbull, is an evil figure calculated to strike terror into any child's heart. Using her natural mental powers (including some extraordinary ones she didn't even suspect she had), however, Matilda is able to get the better of the horrid grownups around her and win the day for herself and her shy-but-kindly schoolteacher, Miss Honey. Dahl has a sharp, satiric wit, and he doesn't believe in toning it down just because he's supposedly writing a kids' book. The back of my copy suggests it for readers aged 8-12, which sounds about right to me, though I'd be tempted to add "and up" to that, as I enjoyed it myself at the age of 26. But then, I suppose some people never do grow up... A-

Dr. Dimension by John DeChancie and David Bischoff is a very silly story about a physics professor in 1939 who invents a time machine... or possibly a spaceship... or maybe it's an anti-gravity device. But whatever it is, it whisks him and his compatriots off on some kind of intergalactic adventure. The book is by turns amusing and stupid, occasionally both at the same time. It's full of really bad puns, slapstick, adolescent sexual humor, and science-fictional in-jokes. It doesn't remotely approach the comic brilliance of, say, Douglas Adams, but it is better than some of the painfully un-funny attempts at humorous SF novels I've read. Definitely something you've got to be in the right mood for, though. C+

Killing Me Softly: Erotic Tales of Unearthly Love edited by Gardner Dozois. This book is not as lurid as it sounds. Really. What it is, is a collection of short stories (each with some science-fictional or supernatural elements) on the theme of love, relationships, and/or sex. As it happens, most of them are ghost stories of one variety or another. None of them struck me as particularly "erotic," nor do I think most of them were really meant to be, though most of them do contain some form of explicit sex. The anthology features such talented SF writers as Ursula LeGuin and Robert Silverberg, but although it doesn't contain any particularly bad stories, I don't think it really had any memorable standouts, either. All-in-all, a decent (though not exceptional) anthology intended neither for the prudish, nor for those seeking out-and-out pornography. B

Quarantine by Greg Egan starts off with a rather interesting premise: for unknown reasons, by unknown parties, the entire solar system is suddenly enclosed in an impenetrable black "Bubble." The story itself takes place some 30 years after "Bubble Day", and it starts off as a fairly straightforward detective story: A private investigator is hired to find a missing mental patient. Once he finds her, though, the story gets decidedly strange, taking a left turn directly into the weird and incomprehensible world of quantum mechanics. The scientific premise itself (which I'm not going to talk about in detail, since I make it a policy never to slip spoilers into these reviews) may not be the most believable thing I've ever come across in science fiction, but it is fascinating and thought-provoking in a way that far too little SF seems to be nowadays. Egan uses it to raise some subtle and important philosophical questions, as well as telling an interesting story. A

Teranesia by Greg Egan.  Greg Egan's earlier books (Quarantine, Permutation City, Distress, Diaspora, and the short story collection Axiomatic) were all extremely intellectually exciting works that explored the bizarre cutting edges of science, the possible development of future societies, and, most engagingly, the deep philosophical territory one can't help but wander into when considering such subjects as the quantum nature of reality or the possibility of creating computer simulations of the human mind.  I was hoping for more of the same from Teranesia, but I'm afraid I was in for a serious disappointment.  To begin with, Egan, who I think has always had the tendency to get a little preachy, goes way, way overboard here, especially in the earliest chapters, which consist in large part of the author venting his hostilities towards superstition, religion, and the extremes of postmodernism.  Now, as a rationalist and a skeptic, myself, I have a lot of sympathy with that particular view, but even when I largely agree with it, I dislike it intensely when a writer starts up with this kind of soapboxing at the expense of actual storytelling.  That's strike one.  Strike two is the main character, who I found immensely unlikable, probably because he spends pretty much the entire book doing things that are stupid, inconsiderate, and often downright self-destructive.  It's true that he doubtless has good emotional (if not rational) reasons for doing the things he does; Egan gives him a tragic background that would be heartbreaking if I could manage to muster up any sympathy or identification for the guy at all.  But characterization really isn't Egan's strong point, and he never put me into the character's head well enough that I could actually feel for what he was going through...  Not to mention the fact that I found a lot of aspects of his characterization difficult to believe, to say the least.  The scientific mystery, which involves an investigation into the appearance of strange mutations on tropical islands near Indonesia, is at least mildly interesting, even if the ultimate solution also turns out to be highly implausible.  Word of warning, though: while this is the most interesting part of the book, it definitely requires a certain amount of scientific background (especially in biology, though a smattering of physics and computer science couldn't possibly hurt) to make any sense at all.  My one college-level class in molecular biology, together with the amount  of  reading in evolutionary biology I've done since, was just enough to allow me to follow everything, and even to anticipate where one or two things were going before they were completely spelled out, but anybody with less of a scientific grounding than that is going to be totally lost.  This might be worth reading if you're really into the nitty-gritty details of biological science, or if you actually enjoy very-thinly-veiled anti-anti-rationalist screeds, but otherwise the best thing I can say about it is that at least I found it a pretty fast read.  C

I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay by Harlan Ellison (based on the stories by Isaac Asimov) . There's a story behind this, which Ellison tells at some length in the introduction. It seems a large Hollywood studio'd had the rights to I, Robot for years, but hadn't done anything with it. Finally, Ellison was approached to write a screenplay, which he enthusiastically did. He loved it, Asimov loved it, everybody loved it. It looked like it was going to be filmed. Then Ellison, who is known for his, um, "artistic temperament," got into a "heated conversation" with a studio big-wig, ended up telling the guy he had the intellectual capacity of an artichoke, and walked out. Needless to say, Ellison got fired... Nobody liked any of the other scripts offered by other writers, and the movie was never made. And it's a real shame. It would have been terrific -- at least, it would have been terrific if produced by movie people with as much vision and creativity as Harlan Ellison (not to mention a big budget). He has this way of describing scenes with slews of superlatives ("...this shot takes our breath away..."). Still, if they'd even come close to filming it the way it was written, it would have really been something. Even the screenplay's a good read, though. Ellison manages to remain very true to Asimov's original stories, while building a framework all his own around them, and making them part of something larger. A

Bloodlist by P.N. Elrod.  Journalist John Fleming is killed by Chicago gangsters, but, thanks to a legacy left by his vampiric ex-girlfriend, the condition turns out not to be permanent.  Unfortunately, he can't remember why these guys were after him in the first place, and, with the help of a British actor-turned-Private Eye, he finds himself attempting to solve what is essentially his own murder.  What follows is a mixture of standard vampire and gangster elements: somewhat familiar stuff, but it's competently written and ends up being a fast and fairly entertaining (if not especially memorable) read.  If the premise sounds like the sort of thing that appeals to you, you'll probably find it enjoyable, as I did.  B

Codgerspace by Alan Dean Foster is a humorous novel about artificially intelligent household appliances who suddenly take a notion to go looking for aliens, and about what happens when a kitchen robot and five elderly humans actually find some. Mildly amusing, and it does have a plot, even if not a very deep one. May be a good book for younger SF readers, as it's clean, fairly short and relatively straightforward. B-

Death: The Time of Your Life by Neil Gaiman. There is, it seems, a conspiracy afoot amongst certain of my friends to turn me into a comics aficionado; this book was recommended to me by one person and quite independently (I think!) sent to me by another. And I must admit, to some extent it's worked. Between this and Watchmen (reviewed below), I've been forced to acknowledge that my previous attitude toward comics (best summed up, I'm afraid, as "comics are silly") is one of those ill-advised blanket condemnations I so hate when applied to fields such as, say, science fiction (which I have actually heard called "that Buck Rogers stuff" by at least one human being). At any rate, this is certainly not silly. Fun, yes, but not silly. The story involves the character Death (one of those anthropomorphic-personification types) who, once every century, takes on human form for a day in order to experience the human condition. Now this by itself is a fairly interesting idea, even if it's not the world's most original (a fact of which the writer seems completely aware)... but there's a twist. This Death is a cheerful, personable, kind and attractive young woman with a delightfully quirky sense of humor. Heck, she's wearing a happy-face button! OK, so maybe it sounds like it might be a bit silly... And possibly it would be if the whole thing were not so well done -- especially the characterization. This good-deed-doing, witty-remark-making, hot-dog-eating version of Death is impossible not to like. And thanks both to the dialog and the artwork, the characters are so well-presented and well-defined that I found my mind providing voices for them just as if they were people I'd actually met. The story also has a nice theme about the value of life and the importance of enjoying it that's presented in a way which manages to get through clearly without being at all preachy. Besides the main story, there's also a short feature at the end where Death presents a public-awareness lecture on AIDS. I found that a little strange, but it's an important message, delivered with candor and humor. All-in-all, this was quite enjoyable, and I was pleased to read in the afterword that I would see this Death again, since she makes an appearance in Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes (reviewed below), which I was already looking forward to reading. A

The Sandman: Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman.  Gaiman finally returns to the world of The Sandman!  Hooray!  I wouldn't, admittedly, call this his very best work, but that just means that it's only really, really good, as opposed to being a heartbreaking work of genius.  This volume consists of seven stories, each showcasing one of the Endless.  The stories are all pretty much self-contained, and, while one or two things might be a tiny bit confusing to the uninitiated, on the whole I think they should be perfectly accessible even to people who are totally unfamiliar with the Sandman series.  As to the individual stories, themselves...  The first one, "Death and Venice" has an interesting premise, involving an island that has been taken out of time and simply repeats the same day over and over, immune to the ravages of death (although she sits patiently outside the gate and waits).  I did have one small problem with it, though, which was that Death just didn't look like Death.  The thing is, each of these stories is drawn by a different artist, none of whom, I believe, has worked on Sandman before.  They're all very well done (even the ones that aren't entirely to my own personal taste), but the look of the characters simply isn't what I'm used to.  This wouldn't be too much of a problem for me, not being a terribly visually-oriented reader in the first place, but I do have very strong and definite voices in my head for each of these characters, and without the familiar visual forms to cue off of, I found that I had considerable trouble calling up those voices, which was annoying.  This was, in fact, true of all seven stories, but somehow it bothered me the most in the Death one, probably because I wasn't expecting it going in.  Anyway.  Next up is Desire, and a rather twisted love story set in what I think is an ancient Celtic village.  I'm not entirely sure what to make of this one, as I find the love-stricken protagonist's reactions hard to fathom, but there's what feels like a really cool folk-story in there.  Dream's story, "The Heart of a Star," was particularly interesting, because it provides a glimpse of a time so long ago that even the Endless were young, and the brief glimpse we get of their earlier selves really does provide a lot of insight into their characters.  I was especially pleased by the chance to meet Delight, who was, indeed, delightful.  Despair's entry, "Fifteen Portraits of Despair" isn't actually a single story.  It's fifteen very short stories (some no more than a couple of dozen words) illustrated by some rather bizarre but definitely mood-evoking abstract artwork. I love short-short stories, and Gaiman is an absolute master at them.  Many of these were tiny, perfect gems, and the cumulative effect of them was to evoke the emotion of despair so effectively that I was nearly in tears by the time I got to the end.  In Delirium's story, Delirium has retreated deep inside herself, and her brother Dream has to send a bunch of crazy people in to bring her out. There's a confusing, disjointed effect to the artwork and the writing that makes this one a bit difficult to read, but, of course, that's entirely deliberate.  Destruction's story, like Death's, features an interesting premise: Destruction joins an archeological expedition to excavate a ruined city that does not belong where it is.  Destruction's a great character, but I actually found that what this one did with Delirium was more interesting than what it did with him.  But that's fine by me, because I love Delirium, too, and she didn't actually get all that much screen time in her own story (at least, not as a character).  The final piece, Destiny's, isn't really a story at all--I don't think Destiny participates in stories--just a little vignette about who and what Destiny is.  I thought the artwork in this one was particularly good.  To sum up...  On the whole, I wouldn't necessarily regard this as an absolutely essential part of the Sandman saga, but if you're a fan of the series, or if you're looking for an interesting little taste of it to start with, it's well worth picking up.  A

The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman . Well, I was getting a little tired of what seemed like half my friends constantly telling me how I just had to read Sandman. So, at long last, I picked up this collection of the first eight Sandman comics. And, once again I have to swallow my pride and admit that, yes, it has been demonstrated to me that comics books are not just for the kiddies. (In fact, considering the amount of gore and nastiness in this one, I'd probably advocate keeping the kiddies away from it.) The story begins with a power-hungry occultist who tries to conjure up and imprison Death. Well, he doesn't quite get the entity he was trying for; he ends up instead with Death's younger brother Dream (also known as Morpheus and the Lord of Dreams, among quite a few other things). When at last this being manages to get free of his prison, he finds that certain powerful objects of his have been taken from him, and he embarks on a quest to get them back. Let's just say that things get kind of complicated from there... This book didn't grip me as immediately as did Death: The High Cost of Living (reviewed above), probably because Death is a much more narrow, human story set pretty much in the here-and-now; whereas this one is strange and surreal and takes us into places as remote as the depths of Hell and the landscapes of dreams. It also requires careful reading, I think, or it would be pretty easy to get confused. Fortunately, I was more than willing to read it carefully, and as the story went on I found it increasingly fascinating, complex, and very, very disturbing. The thing may not be quite on a par with Watchmen (reviewed below), but it's surprisingly close. (And, you may notice, I gave Watchmen the only A+ in the history of these reviews... so that is high praise.) So... my response to those who recommended this series to me? "Dammit. Now I'm going to have to buy the rest of them! Don't you people realize that it's evil to introduce a bookoholic to a series this good?" A

The Sandman: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman is another collection of Sandman comics, like Preludes and Nocturnes (reviewed above). Once again, I am surprised and impressed by the depth, complexity and intelligence of this series. In this story, the Lord of Dreams pays a little visit to Hell on a personal matter... and discovers that something really strange has happened there. Interesting story, thought-provoking thematic content, and some very well-done (if occasionally disturbing) illustration. What more could you want? A

The Sandman: Worlds' End by Neil Gaiman. I'm still enjoying this series a lot, and still feel I owe a debt of gratitude to those among my friends who urged me to try it. This particular book, though, didn't quite do for me what some of the earlier ones did -- notably Preludes and Nocturnes and Season of Mists. It's hard to explain why, though, as it's quite difficult to put into words exactly what the earlier ones did do for me. I think what I'm talking about here is the way in which they took elements that were strange, surreal and (appropriately enough) dream-like -- including that sort of dream-logic that makes so little sense to the waking mind -- and somehow wove them into a narrative that made sense, that sucked me in, and that left me happily wondering throughout where it was going to lead me. This particular volume certainly had elements of that, but putting it that way, it's not too hard to see why it didn't have quite the same effect. It's really less of a graphic novel than a collection of (graphic) short stories held together by a sort of framework: storm-bound travelers from a variety of worlds and realities find themselves at a strange inn somewhere (perhaps) outside of reality, where they tell a variety of tales to pass away the time. The individual stories themselves are interesting, inventive, and -- if possible -- even more bizarre and surreal than is usual for The Sandman... I just somehow found them slightly less effective than the novel-length tales of the other books. Don't get me wrong, though; it's well worth reading, even if I do happen to prefer the format of earlier works. A-

Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman is a collection of short stories (some of which are in the form of poetry, but are stories nonetheless) ranging from adult fairy tales, to dark humor, to creepy little horror stories... and to many strange combinations of the above.  (I guarantee you, for instance, that this is the only place you will ever find Beowulf rewritten as a futuristic episode of Baywatch featuring a werewolf detective.  I kid you not.  And, bizarrely enough, like everything else in this collection, it works.)  Everything in here is beautifully written, magical stuff that crawls deep down into your brain and does disturbing and wonderful things to you.  What more can I say?  (Oh, except that, even if you're the sort of person who doesn't read introductions, you should read the introduction.  Gaiman sneakily slips a whole  extra story in there, and you definitely wouldn't want to miss it.)  A

Grunts by Mary Gentle is a sweeping send-up of the whole epic fantasy genre, as created by J.R.R. Tolkien and imitated by so many lesser talents since.  The initial setup of the novel is a familiar one: an epic Last Battle between the forces of Light and Dark is in the offing, in a fantasy world populated by the usual elves, dwarves, hobbit-like halflings, and so on.  But there is a difference: this story is told mainly from the point-of-view of those ubiquitous foot-soldiers of the Dark, the orcs.  And these aren't just any orcs.  Thanks to a dead dragon's cache of otherworldly weapons bearing a strange curse, these are orc marines, and they've got the attitude and the weaponry to go with it.  It's a fun concept, and Gentle's camouflage-clad, machine-gun-toting orc characters are surprisingly well-realized and easy to visualize.  (I couldn't help but think from time to time that the novel might adapt very readily to a movie, though it'd surely either have to be an animated one or one with a large special effects budget.)  The story, however, tends to be rather uneven both in pacing -- it drags somewhat in the middle, and might well have been improved by being a bit shorter -- and in tone.  It ranges from extremely silly (though very black) humor to... well, it's hard to know just how seriously it's meant to be taken in places, but the comedy elements are certainly not always in the forefront.  When it works, it works quite well, but a little more consistency might have been nice.  Oh, and a word of warning here, too.  Don't let the author's name mislead you: this story is anything but gentle.  It contains gruesome acts of violence, explicit sex, bad language, and various other kinds of extreme nastiness which, when they're not played up for comic effect (and often even when they are) can be pretty disturbing.  B

Bride of the Rat God by Barbara Hambly. Glamorous 1920's film star unknowingly comes into possession of an ancient Chinese necklace whose curse marks her as the sacrificial bride of the demonic Rat-God. Come on, how can you resist a book with a title like that? Actually, the plot may be pure pulp, but the writing is polished and absorbing; the combination makes for one cool story. I've liked everything of Hambly's I've read to date, and this book is certainly no exception. She has a wonderful ability to create characters so real they might almost be in the room with you. A

The Stainless Steel Rat Goes To Hell by Harry Harrison is the latest in Harrison's series of books about that ever-resourceful rouge Slippery Jim DiGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat: interstellar criminal, special agent, and sometime savior of humankind. DiGriz is a nifty character, and his adventures tend to be action-packed and amusing, so I've enjoyed this series for quite some time. This particular installment features a phony religion, parallel universes, a mad scientist, and a scene in which two hundred marines armed with salamis charge through a garage door into Hell. It's light and fluffy, fun, silly, and fast-reading. And it certainly beats the previous novel (The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues), which was just as silly but somewhat disappointing in the other departments, compared with the earlier books in the series. B+

Bored of the Rings by the Harvard Lampoon follows the adventures of a young hobbit -- uh, excuse me, a young boggie -- named Frito Bugger and his faithful sidekick Spam, as they journey through Lower Middle Earth on a mission no one else will undertake... This is deservedly considered a comedy classic. It's certainly one of the best parodies I've ever read. Heartily recommended to Tolkien fans with a sense of humor -- and, heck, anybody else who's ever read Lord of the Rings. A

The Thread that Binds the Bones by Nina Kiriki Hoffman is a fantasy novel about a woman whose family is gifted with strange magical powers, about a man who talks to ghosts, and about what happens when the two meet. I must admit, the book put me off a little at first... The magical family has its own insular and rather strange society, and we aren't really given an outsider's tour of it, despite the fact that one of the main protagonists is technically an outsider. Instead, a lot of things happen in the beginning of the book that don't really make sense until later. If you can get past that, though (and I did, eventually), the story does get fairly involving. The characters are well-drawn, and the descriptions of how the magic is worked are interesting. Worth reading, although Hoffman has written better things (I've read several of her short stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and many of them are quite excellent). B+

Blood Price by Tanya Huff.  Something is killing people in the city of Toronto, ripping out their throats, and drinking their blood, and it's up to a tough ex-cop and a good-guy vampire to team up and stop it.  You know, I think I've just read one too many vampire stories -- possibly even one too many vampire detective stories -- because almost everything in this book just seemed far too familiar to me to be of any real interest.  The characters (with the exception of the painfully stereotyped antagonist) are decent and likable enough, although not as much was done with them as could have been.  But the detective story itself just wasn't terribly interesting or imaginative (not to mention relying rather heavily on an increasingly hard-to-swallow series of coincidences), and Huff doesn't add anything fresh or novel to the vampire concept, either.  I also had some minor quibbles with the writing, mainly that Huff tends to shift point-of-view around pretty much at random.  Now, I would not describe this as a bad book, really, especially if what you're looking for is a fairly fast turn-your-brain-off kind of read.  Just don't go into it expecting much more that that... B-

Summon the Keeper by Tanya Huff.  Claire Hansen is a Keeper, possessed of magical abilities and tasked with the job of repairing holes in the fabric of the universe (colorfully referred to as "accident sites").  Claire's tough, smart, and powerful, but when she finds herself "Summoned" to a small Bed & Breakfast whose owner immediately disappears and leaves her with the deed, it's possible that she may have ended up with more than she can handle.  There's a hole to Hell in the basement, an evil renegade Keeper in suspended animation in room six, a ghost in the attic, a nosy neighbor next door, and a succession of interesting and highly unusual guests traipsing through the lobby.  Not to mention the fact that her talking cat keeps trying to hook her up with either the hunky caretaker (too young, too innocent, and just too gosh-darned nice) or the ghost (too, well, dead).  It's a nice fantasy concept with some well-realized characters and pretty good writing, but the main thing that this book has going for it is that it's funny: relentlessly, charmingly witty in a way that had me laughing out loud repeatedly.  I not only definitely recommend this one, but I, personally, am planning on rushing out and buying the sequel ASAP. A

The Road to Mars: A Post-Modem Novel by Eric Idle.  (Yes, that is, indeed, the Eric Idle of Monty Python fame.)  This is a science-fiction novel featuring two stand-up comedians traveling around the solar system with their android -- who looks like David Bowie and is writing a dissertation on comedy, despite having no sense of humor, himself -- as told by an embittered researcher who rediscovers the android's work 80 years later.  The plot has, oh, just about everything you might want, I suppose: murders, conspiracies, explosions, romance, a smattering of fart jokes...  But it's the musings on the nature of comedy and of fame that are really interesting here, even though it's sometimes hard to tell which of them might be meant seriously and which aren't.  (But then, perhaps that's part of the fun.)  I might also add that, while this isn't hard science fiction by any stretch of the imagination, I am rather impressed by the fact that Idle seems to have a better grasp of the true scale of the solar system (and, indeed, of the universe in general) than many people who write this SF stuff for a living.  (But then, I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised.  This is, after all, the man who gave us the "Galaxy Song," which not only conveys that huge sense of scale, but also includes a surprisingly accurate batch of astronomical numbers, right down to a figure for the orbital speed of the Earth.) B+

It by Stephen King.  This is a creepy, involving story with well-realized characters and a very real feel to it (quite impressive, really, considering how far-out many of the story's events are).  My one big complaint about it is that it's just too darned long: 1090 pages in the edition I read.  I've nothing against long books in general, but there's little doubt in my mind that this one could have been reduced by several hundred pages without damaging the atmosphere or the plot in the least.  Nevertheless, it did keep me interested for those 1090 pages, and, overlong or not, I'm still inclined to give it an A

The Bad Place by Dean Koontz . Like so many of Koontz' books, this one features bizarre, mysterious and not-at-all-nice events, and a group of decent and believable human beings (to whom you really want nothing bad to happen) have to figure out what is going on and make sure it stops. In this one, we get to meet a family that makes the Addamses look like the most sane and normal people on Earth -- a family which includes one of the spookiest bad guys I think I've ever come across. A very disturbing book (even more so than many of Koontz' other novels), but I'll leave it up to you to decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's also pretty gruesome, and the squeamish are warned -- though not necessarily warned away, since I'm about the most squeamish person I know, and I give it an A- .

Midnight by Dean Koontz was something of a disappointment. I've liked every other Koontz novel I've read so far, but this one just left me cold. I think I know what the problem is, too. One of the main things that's generally kept me involved in Koontz' other books is the sense of mystery about what's actually going on. Usually, his characters (and the reader) get only gradual hints about the nature of the threat they face, and I, for one, am hooked into the story largely because of the suspense Koontz creates in this way. Midnight, though, lacks a lot of that suspense. It's pretty clear from the beginning what's going on -- some sort of experiment is "converting" the inhabitants of a small town into something not quite human -- and it feels very much like something I've seen before, probably on a low-budget late-night movie. Without that feeling of building suspense, of needing to know what was going on and what could be done about it, I just didn't feel as involved as I wanted to. The final 100 or so pages (including the big climax, of course) were pretty exciting, but it's unfortunate that I had to go through so much unexciting stuff to get there. My advice: read Dragon Tears instead. C

Ticktock by Dean Koontz starts out pretty much like most other Koontz novels: a likable young guy encounters some kind of weird, supernatural creature that wants to kill him for some unknown reason. And there's a fair amount of trademarked Koontz suspense in here. But what's surprising about the novel is the way it somehow slowly turns into a comedy . A very, very funny one; by the end, I was trying very hard not to laugh out loud (I was reading it at work) and not always succeeding. Koontz has created some delightfully eccentric characters and some equally eccentric bits of dialog... mix it all in with his standard plot full of supernatural weirdness, and the result is a surprising amount of fun. I read it all in one sitting. A

Many Waters by Madeline L'Engle.  I absolutely adored L'Engle's books when I was a little kid, but I didn't get the chance to read all of them, and Many Waters is one of the ones I missed... possibly because by the time it was published in 1986, I was 15 and no longer obtaining my reading from the children's section of bookstores and libraries.  Rather a pity, too, as this particular book is very obviously aimed at teenagers, rather than at younger children.  The main characters of the story are twins Sandy and Dennys Murry, who those who've read L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time or its sequels will remember as the younger brothers of Meg Murry, considered the "normal" ones of the Murry family.  When Sandy and Dennys accidentally disturb an experiment in their mother's lab, they find themselves somehow transported to a strange world filled with small people and weird creatures.  But they soon realize that they've been displaced not in space, but in time, when they meet a man called Noah and realize they've found themselves caught up in a very familiar story...  The way the novel blends together the Biblical story, the fantasy creatures, and certain aspects of modern science is interesting but kind of strange, and somehow the combination sat a little uneasily with me.  It's not a bad book, by any means, but I must admit to a tiny amount of disappointment that it didn't quite live up to the memories of how much I enjoyed L'Engle's other books as a child... though whether that has more to do with any inferiority of this particular book or with the fact that I've gotten much older in the meantime, I couldn't say.  However, at least in places (especially near the end), it did evoke in my mind glimmerings of the magic her books once had for me, and for that alone I'd call it a worthwhile read. B

Taliesin by Stephen R. Lawhead is Book One of "The Pendragon Cycle," a multi-volume fantasy saga which works together such grand matters as the fall of Atlantis and the reign of King Arthur, putting one or two new twists on the familiar legends along the way. Taliesin itself is not bad... The story moved slowly enough that I didn't have any problems putting it down at the end of a chapter and going off to do something else, but was interesting enough that I was always glad enough to come back to it later. B

Merlin by Stephen R. Lawhead is Book Two in the Pendragon Cycle. If Taliesin was "not bad," Merlin is very good. This one, I was reluctant to put down between chapters. I found both the writing style and the story itself much more engaging than in the first book. Lawhead manages to take a mysterious and legendary character and give him depth and humanity without diminishing either the mystery or the legend one whit. (Merlin, by the way, can probably be read on its own, as most of the important events from Taliesin are re-capped as needed.) A

Arthur by Stephen R. Lawhead. Yep, you guessed it: Pendragon Book Three. Not quite as great as Merlin, I think, but still a truly absorbing read. (Of course, I've always thought Merlin a more interesting character than Arthur, but then again I always preferred Spock to Kirk, too.) Quite a bit different than all the other Arthurian stories I've read (mostly by way of T.H. White, I admit), but Lawhead manages to achieve a clever balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar in such a way as to preserve the historic and legendary feel of things, and yet still tell an original story with its own surprises to reveal. A

The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age by Stanislaw Lem. This book, like much of Lem's writing, is hard to describe, though the subtitle does a reasonably good job. The book is really a series of stories with a very fairy tale flavor concerning the exploits of two "constructors" (makers of machines) in a distant, completely robotic future. We are treated to tales of such wonders as a machine which could create anything beginning with the letter "N" (but was fortunately stopped before it could completely carry out its order to create Nothing), the "dragons of probability" with their strange quantum behavior, and a computer programmed to simulate the entire history of civilization in order to write decent poetry. There's more than a touch here of the absurd, but it's also whimsical and extremely inventive. And I'm almost as impressed by Lem's translators as by Lem himself. This book is chock-full of puns and clever wordplay (I'd compare it favorably with Lewis Carroll, in fact), all so smoothly done that I find it almost impossible to credit the fact that the whole thing was originally written in Polish! A

The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis. The Chronicles of Narnia set I bought recently puts this book first, instead of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe -- presumably because it's a prequel to the rest of the Narnia books and deals with the creation of Narnia. I would have read them in the order they were originally written, but as I couldn't remember quite where this one went originally, I finally gave up and read it first. I must admit, I was a little trepidatious about re-reading the Narnia books. I first read them at a very young age, and while I didn't recall many details, I did remember liking them very much. Would they hold up on adult re-reading, or would my childhood memories be tarnished by the discovery that the series just didn't live up to them? Well, after reading this volume, I realized that I needn't have worried. This was a charming and entertaining story completely suitable for adults and children alike. I was a bit worried, too, about all the Christian allegory I had been told was in these books, and which I completely missed the first time. Would the whole thing turn out to have really been thinly veiled preachiness? But I needn't have worried on that score, either. The Christian elements are obvious to me now, but not heavy-handed, and certainly not anything that seemed to be forced inappropriately into the story. All in all, I'm glad I chose to revisit Narnia. A

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. The Narnia series continues not to disappoint. My one criticism would be that, from reading the two back-to-back, it's pretty apparent that The Magician's Nephew was written afterward as a sort of backstory, because there are a few elements that, while not exactly inconsistent, don't mesh perfectly between the two books. Still, that's a minor quibble about an enjoyable book. A

The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis. Unlike the previous books in this series, which involve children from our world who are magically transported to the world of Narnia, this book takes place entirely in Narnia and the lands to the south, and focuses on a native of Lewis' fantasy world. This volume had more of the feel of a typical modern fantasy novel, as it had all the standard elements: an orphaned peas C-ant boy who turns out to be Somebody Important, a long journey, and, of course, a climactic battle. But although elements of it felt a little over-familiar, the writing is a bit more sophisticated than in the last two books. The two things cancel each other out quite nicely to leave a story perfectly on par with the rest of them. A

Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis . Like The Horse and His Boy, this book also had a time-honored plot, this time concerning a usurper to the throne of Narnia and the battle to restore its rightful king. In fact, the plot here is perhaps slightly more intricate than in the previous books, and despite it being a bit familiar-feeling, I found it interesting to follow. After four books, this series is still head and shoulders above the vast majority of children's fantasy -- not to mention a great many adult works. A

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis. Although, as I mentioned in the review of The Magician's Nephew above, my memories of this series from my childhood reading are very dim, this is the book that I remembered best, or at least most fondly -- possibly because I've always liked such tales of voyages of exploration. And this is a grand one: a sailing voyage all the way to the end of the world -- in a world that really has an "end." There is only one thing that begins to bother me about this series, and that's the continual use of Aslan's intervention as a deus ex machina to get Our Heroes out of whatever scrape they've managed to get into. (Yes, I know that Lewis was doing this deliberately to make an allegorical point -- the end of this book, though wonderful in many ways, hits one over the head rather bluntly on the matter -- but I really do prefer it when characters use their own ingenuity.) That's just a general complaint, though. As for this book, I'd say it's probably one of the best of the series. A

The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis. This story concerns a quest for a missing prince. There's quite a few interesting twists and turns to the story, and a few genuinely suspenseful moments. Still great stuff. A

The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis. The final volume of the Chronicles of Narnia is a much darker tale, a tale of false gods and all-too-real ones, of hopeless battles and the ends of worlds. At least, it's a dark story up until the end. Then it gets very mystical -- almost too much so for me, but it is a fitting end to the series. A

After the Blue by Russel Like.  When the alien Gruumsbaggians first made contact with Earth, they accidentally destroyed human civilization.  Now, a century later, they want to make amends by putting things back the way they were.  Unfortunately, most of the information they have about the way things were comes from old books and TV shows... and the Gruumsbaggians are terribly bad at telling fact from fiction.  This is an absolutely inspired concept, ripe with all kinds of comic possibilities.  Unfortunately (very unfortunately) it falls utterly flat in the execution.  The writing contains all the liveliness and comic sensibility of a Dick and Jane book.  I really wish somebody else had written this one...  C-

The Elementals by Morgan Llywelyn. This "novel" actually consists of four separate stories: survivors of a land drowned by rising seas begin to rebuild elsewhere; a young musician from Crete in the time of the Minoan empire faces the devastation wreaked by the volcanic explosion of the nearby island, Thera; a nineteenth-century New England housewife has a disturbing experience involving a stone sacred to the local Indians; in a near future devastated by a dozen different forms of environmental collapse an Irish/American Indian meteorologist finds himself drawn to an Indian reservation to await the end of the world -- or perhaps to prevent it. What links these stories (besides the common theme of environmental disaster and the fact that the protagonists of each seem to be distantly related) is the thesis that everything which exists -- including the elements of water, fire, earth and air -- is alive and in some sense aware, and that certain people can in some (often vague) way communicate with these elemental forces. This could easily have been just another familiar novel of environmental doom-crying, or an empty piece of trendy New Age mysticism, but fortunately it gracefully avoids both possible fates. Llywelyn's writing is clear and engrossing, her characters are believable, and her fantastic elements are for the most part handled with subtlety and style. Reading this was a great experience. A

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire.  I've seen a number of stories in recent years that take fairy tales or children's stories and recast them for adults, making them darker, more complex, more adult.  And that is precisely what Maguire does with The Wizard of Oz here.  In general I tend to very much enjoy this sort of thing, but I must admit that in the case of this particular piece of source material it hit a little too close to home for me.   The book is certainly much deeper than the children's story it borrows from, more realistic and relevant and mature... but to me there was also something terribly sad about it.  I was a huge fan of the Oz books when I was a small child, and even then I didn't need anyone to tell me that Oz was too hopelessly Utopian to be any part of the real world. That wasn't the point.  The point was that it was beautiful to have someplace that perfectly happy, that full of wonders, to dream of escaping to.  And so seeing Oz portrayed here as every bit as ugly, mundane, and full of strife as the real world made me wince more than a little.  That having been said, I by no means think Wicked is a bad book, and Maguire has certainly not set out to attack the myth of Oz in a mean-spirited way.  He's used it, instead, to tell a complicated story about grand themes of religion, the abuses of power, and the nature of evil.  Sometimes his treatment of these themes worked better for me than others, but it did always manage to hold my attention.  Easily the best thing about the book is the character of the Witch herself, who is interesting, sympathetic and very, very three-dimensional.  The writing is generally good, too, although it seems to me that Maguire does occasionally fall prey to a regrettable temptation to show off the size of his vocabulary.  When I was able to put aside my vague feelings that something awful was being done to something I loved as a child, I found it interesting, and at times even moving.  I'm not sure I could comfortably recommend this to all fellow childhood Oz fans, though...  If preserving in your mind the innocence of the original is important to you, you might well want to give Wicked a miss, and I  wouldn't blame you in the least.  Otherwise, it is worth reading.  Oh, and one word of caution: just in case this wasn't clear enough from the above, this is not a children's book, as it contains adult material in just about every sense of the word "adult."  B+

Aliens & UFO's edited by Cynthia Manson and Charles Ardai is a collection of science fiction stories involving extraterrestrials and/or UFO's, taken from the pages of Asimov's and Analog magazines. I almost avoided this book, simply because of its rather embarrassing title... and that would have been a mistake. There was really only one story in here that I didn't care for... and that one was only three pages, so there wasn't that much not to like. All the others I'd judge to sit somewhere in the "good" range on a "poor, fair, good, excellent" scale. It's quite refreshing, really, to find an anthology (particularly one of this size -- some 460 pages) made up of such consistently decent stories; most of them have at least a few real dogs. There's a nice mix of stories here, too: everything from sober, serious high-concept stories to unabashedly just-for-fun stuff. A

Spindle's End by Robin McKinley is a re-telling (or, perhaps more accurately, a re-interpretation) of the story of "Sleeping Beauty."  McKinley takes all the usual fairy tale elements (including one or two that I don't think you usually find in "Sleeping Beauty"), combines them with some very original ideas (her description of the way magic works in this particular fairy-tale kingdom, for instance, is both creative and charming), and then proceeds to subvert most of them.  For instance, while the princess possesses the golden hair and milk-white skin and etc., etc. that are the usual sorts of gifts that Good Fairies give to baby princesses, she turns out to be a complete tomboy who hates her hair, can't carry a tune in her supernaturally pretty singing voice, and doesn’t really seem to be in all that much danger of pricking her finger because she hates to sew and would rather spend her time working with the village blacksmith.  My kind of princess!  Go you, girl!  The writing style is a little strange, bouncing back and forth with very little transition between different characters, different places and different times, and quite consistently breaking the rule taught in every creative writing class as "show, don't tell."  This does occasionally get a little confusing—there were a few times when I found myself stopping to mutter things like "wait a minute, does this take place before or after the last bit?"—but McKinley is a good enough writer that, for the most part, she does make it work.  Personally, I've always enjoyed reading new takes on familiar stories, and have found that fairy tales can tales provide particularly rich and interesting material for this sort of thing. If you happen to feel the same way, then this one is probably worth taking a look at.  And, trust me, no, you don't already know how it ends.  B+

There and Back Again by Pat Murphy.  OK, now here's an odd concept for a book: it's basically The Hobbit re-written as a science fiction story.  All the elements of Tolkien's novel are here, quite recognizably, from the dwarven treasure to the giant spiders of Mirkood to Gollum and the Ring, and Murphy does a reasonably good job of mimicking the original's style, as well.  The deep-space, far-future setting, however, is totally unfamiliar and surprisingly original, given the derivative nature of the story; there are a lot of really neat science fictional ideas running around Murphy's totally un-Middle-Earth-like galaxy.  This juxtaposition of familiar story and unfamiliar setting is interesting in its own right, but it's also a little unsettling.  For example, Murphy's Bilbo-avatar hero, Bailey Beldon, lives, not in a hole in the ground, but in a hollowed-out asteroid, and attempting to project the cozy English-countryside feel of Tolkien's Shire onto artificial habitats in the asteroid belt requires a cognitive jump of which I’m not sure I'm entirely capable.  There's also the small problem that, to any reader who's familiar with The Hobbit at all, this story becomes rather predictable: there is, after all, no real doubt about how it's going to end.  Although, by the same token, there is a certain amount of suspense to be had simply in waiting to see how Murphy is going to adapt each of the elements from the original.  What will Smaug turn out to be?, that sort of thing…  It's difficult to say, overall, whether the whole thing really works or not, but if this sounds like a combination that is likely to appeal to you, it's probably worth checking out.  B

The Ship Who Searched by Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey . I've been rather critical of McCaffrey's work in the last few years. In particular, I've felt her Pern series has been steadily declining in quality, and I've never thought much of her Gwyn-Raven series to begin with. I'm happy to say, though, that this is the one series of hers that I'm still fairly happy with. I enjoyed PartnerShip (written with Margaret Ball) quite a bit despite a number of plot flaws, and I enjoyed The Ship Who Searched nearly as much. It's certainly not great literature -- it doesn't even really have much of a unified plot -- but the characters are completely likable and the writing is effortless to read. B

Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb is a lightweight murder mystery set at a science fiction/fantasy convention. Now, all the comments I have heard about McCrumb's books (mostly via the 'net) have expressed one of two general opinions. Either people find her depiction of fandom offensive and inaccurate, or they find it accurate and hilarious. I must be some kind of anomaly, though, because I had neither reaction, quite. I found McCrumb's portrayal to be neither particularly offensive nor particularly on-target. McCrumb does say some unkind things about fandom (or, rather, her main characters do, though from the general tone of the book one can't help but get the impression the author agrees), but I really can't feel too offended by them, as I rather suspect they contain at least a grain of truth. Add to that the fact that I don't generally get offended easily -- heck, I liked William Shatner's infamous Saturday Night Live "Get a Life" sketch, and I count myself a Star Trek fan. I liked that sketch, though, precisely because it did seem on-target to me. When Shatner introduced (to wild applause) an actress that had been on the show for five minutes once, I laughed -- because I knew exactly which episode and which actress he was talking about... and suddenly, it did seem just a little absurd. As the saying goes: "It's funny because it's true." Unfortunately, McCrumb's characters don't ring nearly as true for me. It wasn't that they were egregiously wrong... just that they were never quite exactly right. (And, yes, I do know a lot of people of the type McCrumb was trying to lampoon.) As a result, I really didn't find most of the book especially funny. The murder mystery itself is mildly interesting, although the murder doesn't even happen until halfway through the book (and is obviously not as central to McCrumb as her would-be humorous descriptions of the convention itself), and... well, I don't want to introduce any spoilers, but I'll just say that the solution to the mystery wasn't all that enthralling, either... So, to summarize: I didn't find the book offensive, but I didn't find it particularly funny or engaging, either... which is a pity, because I think I'd really like to read a good book set at an SF con. C

Other Worlds, Other Gods edited by Mayo Mohs is an anthology of science fiction stories with religious themes. Now, religion and science fiction might seem like an unlikely combination, but one of the things that's always appealed to me about SF is its ability and willingness to address just about any subject -- and this book is pretty good evidence that religion is no exception. All the stories in here are, at the least, decently readable. And the editor (a Catholic) does an admirable job of representing a variety of different religions and religious viewpoints (although, understandably, Judeo-Christian elements seem to predominate). A

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is a graphic novel whose contents originally appeared as a series of comic books. Now, at the time I first came across this story I had a lot of friends who were into comic books, but I myself was decidedly apathetic towards them. Then I discovered Watchmen... It happened like this: One day I was sitting around at work -- we had literally run out of work to do. It was a very slow day. So, we're sitting around trying to come up with something to do, and my co-worker suddenly pulls out this stack of comics which, for reasons known only to him, he happens to have with him that day. He proudly shows me his copies of Watchmen #1-5, and (oblivious to my indifference) starts telling me about how good they are and insisting I read them. Well, OK, to be polite, I figure I'll skim the first couple; it's not like I've got anything better to do.... Best move I made that day. I read straight through lunch and came up wanting more. I still remember my reaction: thinking, in absolute awe and amazement, "Nobody ever told me comics could be this... mature!" I had to have the rest of it. So I bought the graphic novel. And believe me, I was not disappointed. In fact, I think I'd call it one of the best books I've read in ages. It's a complex, subtle, chilling story, with three-dimensional characters and, not incidentally, good artwork. I have trouble expressing just how much I liked this book. Just read it! A+

Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes is set in a futuristic amusement park in the year 2051. The park is playing host to a holographic fantasy role-playing game (think of it as a cross between Dungeons and Dragons and Star Trek's holodeck), and when it appears that one of the players has committed a murder, the park's security chief is sent in posing as a player in order to investigate. Both Dream Park itself and the holographic Game are really fun ideas, and it's probably the rare reader who won't be wishing for a chance to experience them himself. The mystery, unfortunately, is much less interesting than the game -- in fact, it almost feels as if the authors tacked it on so they couldn't be accused of not having a plot -- but is at least wrapped up in a reasonably satisfying way. The proliferation of rather one-dimensional characters and a completely unnecessary romance subplot annoyed me a bit, but the action-adventure aspects of the Game, as well as its interesting setting and premise, made the book a fun read anyway. B

Logan's Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson . In a future where no one is allowed to live past the age of 21, Logan's job is to hunt down and kill those who refuse to accept their fates. Until Logan himself turns 21... This is the book on which the movie of the same name was based, but there are quite a few differences between the movie and the book. One of the most interesting is that the book (which was published in 1967) is very clearly a response to the whole 1960's youth culture -- a bit of added depth not present in the film version. Still, this is primarily an adventure story, not a piece of social commentary. As such, it succeeds reasonably well, with one or two interesting plot twists. B

Temporary Agency by Rachel Pollack is set in a reality much like our own, except that supernatural forces and beings are very much a part of everyday life. It's a strange world, but very convincingly portrayed. The plot could have been a bit tighter, but the characters are good and the story's climax is memorably disturbing. B+

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett is, as the cover proudly proclaims, "Yet Another Novel of Discworld."  This time the Hogfather, Discworld's equivalent of Santa Claus, has gone missing, and it's up to everyone's favorite anthropomorphic personification, Death, to fill in for him.  This is a wonderfully amusing idea, and I've always been extremely fond of Pratchett's version of Death, but...  Well, for some reason I can't quite put my finger on, I didn't find this one quite as engaging as most of the Discworld novels, certainly not as much as Pratchett's other most recent (at least in the US) offering, Jingo.  Here I have to pause for a moment, though, and explain that that's a negative comment only by comparison because, frankly, I think Terry Pratchett is nothing short of brilliant.  In fact, the Discworld series continues to amaze me because, unlike the vast majority of series books -- and particularly series books turned out as fast as Pratchett does 'em -- it's maintained an incredibly high quality over time.  If anything, one could perhaps argue that the series has, overall,  improved with time, rather than degenerated.  Even more amazing, however, is the way in which Pratchett, seemingly with little effort, manages to incorporate in these books utterly zany (and very funny) humor, believable three-dimensional characters, and thematic statements on the human condition every bit as deep and well-presented as in any Work of Great Literature.  You just shouldn't be able to make all that work together, especially not in a fantasy novel, but somehow Pratchett pulls it off.  Which perhaps leads me back to the question of why Hogfather falls short of being among the best of the Discworld novels...  It has all of those elements, to be sure, but it may be that they're slightly less well-integrated here.  Where Pratchett at his best manages to blend it all seamlessly, perhaps it's simply that in this one you can see the seams.  In any case, although I might say "this is an inferior Discworld novel," all that means is that instead of recommending it with tremendous enthusiasm, I merely recommend it.  I will add, however, that although not strictly necessary, it's by no means a bad idea to read the earlier books in this particular character arc first: Mort, Reaper Man (though this one's less important in terms of backstory),  and Soul Music.  In fact, in my opinion, Mort is possibly the best of the Discworld novels to start with in any case, and is certainly my favorite.  B

Soul Music by Terry Pratchett. I've liked all of Pratchett's Discworld novels, but I think this may have enjoyed this the most of all of them since Mort (my all-time favorite), to which it is a sequel of sorts. For some reason, I've got quite a strong liking of Pratchett's characterization of Death... This (like Mort) is yet another Death-takes-a-holiday story; this time his granddaughter (yeah, it sounds weird -- she thought so, too) gets drafted to take over in his absence. This is actually the secondary (though in my opinion more interesting) plot. The main plot deals with the advent (one could hardly call it the "invention") of a new musical form: Music With Rocks In, a powerful cosmic force if ever there was one... The two plots dovetail nicely, however, and though the rock music plot really seems a little silly if you stop to think about it, it worked well enough for me, anyway. A fun read, with Pratchett's trademark mix of silly humor and inventive fantasy storyline. A

The Truth by Terry Pratchett is the latest book in Pratchett's long-running Discworld series, and IMO, one of the best Discworld books in quite a while.  In this one, the newspaper industry comes to the city of Ankh-Morpork, raising all kinds of thought-provoking issues about the freedom of the press, the responsibility of the press, and the fact that most people would really rather read stories like "TWO-HEADED BABY BORN IN LANCRE!" than about real and relevant news.  It's also hysterically funny, even by Pratchett's standards.  I'm particularly fond of the Tarantino riff, personally.  If you haven't read any of the other Discworld novels (and, good god, what are you waiting for?), you can rest assured that this one stands perfectly well on its own, although it's bound to be more satisfying if you've read some of the earlier books, if only because you're likely to miss some extremely funny in-jokes, otherwise. A

Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future by Mike Resnick is set in a Galactic Frontier rather reminiscent of the Old West (or at least the Hollywood version thereof) and populated with colorful, larger-than-life characters. Largest of all is the legendary outlaw Santiago... and the man who can track him down will be nearly as big a legend, himself. So this is the story of two bounty hunters, a journalist, and an unscrupulous art collector formerly in the great outlaw's employ in their dangerously competitive quest to be the first to find Santiago. Very space opera-ish, but quite entertaining in a violent sort of way. B+

Second Contact by Mike Resnick.  In the year 2065, a starship captain without warning takes it upon himself to shoot two of his crewmen, then turns himself in, claiming that the did it in the interest of planetary security, because the two men were clever alien imposters.  The guy's obviously crazy; even his lawyer thinks so.  So why does a little routine investigation lead to evidence of a massive cover-up, and why does the lawyer's own government suddenly seem to want him killed?  The search for the answers to those questions makes for a fast-reading, entertaining little science fiction/suspense story.  The ending is perhaps a bit too abrupt, and the computer technology is already out of date in 2003, never mind 2066—Gosh, a 38.400-baud modem!  Powerful stuff!—but overall it's an enjoyable read. B+

Soothsayer by Mike Resnick is set in the same universe as Resnick's Santiago (reviewed above): a lawless galactic frontier with an Old-West feel, populated by larger-than-life characters with colorful names, most of which seem to start with the word "the." This story is about a little girl with a strange power to foresee the future, as she is pursued by a number of dangerous people who want to exploit her ability or to eliminate the danger they believe she poses. It's a fairly lightweight tale (though it gets a little dark at the end), but it is rather fun. Also, the workings of the title character's precognitive powers, while not always utterly convincing, are at least fairly well thought out; Resnick intelligently considers the fact that knowing the future raises the possibility of changing it, and he in fact makes this idea an intrinsic part of the plot. B+

Prophet by Mike Resnick is the third book in a trilogy about a young woman named Penelope Bailey who possesses the incredibly dangerous power to predict (and thus to control) the future. The first book, Soothsayer (reviewed above), was quite enjoyable. The second, Oracle, was not bad, but somewhat disappointing by comparison; despite being fairly self-contained, plot-wise, it simply felt like the middle book in a trilogy, and was rather unsatisfying. Prophet, however, may well be the best of the three. It's perhaps a bit more serious in tone than the earlier books, but is still full of colorful characters and Galactic-frontier action. It's also extremely fast-paced: I read the whole thing in very nearly one sitting, and it felt like it took no time to finish it at all. I definitely recommend the whole series; even the weak-by-comparison second book is well worth it to get to this one. A

Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun? by Mike Resnick. This is a collection of Resnick's short stories, and if I had to summarize my reaction to it in one sentence, it would have to be: "Boy, does this guy have range!" The tales in this book run the gamut, from the humorous (I especially like the story of a computer simulation of Sir Francis Bacon being pressed into service as a ghost writer -- after all, he did write Shakespeare's stuff, right?) to touching and sad (the story about the Last Dog on Earth had me all choked up, sentimental sap that I am) to suspenseful ("Watching Marcia" -- the one story in here that doesn't qualify as fantasy or science fiction, by the way -- creeped me out so bad I had to put the book down for a while) to thought-provoking (like the two stories of an orbiting African tribal community, both of which explore difficult questions about the preservation of traditional cultures). Each of these stories may provoke a different reaction, but as a whole, the one thing they are is entertaining, and I'd recommend them to anybody who enjoys short stories. A

The Books of Magic: Summonings by John Ney Rieber is the third collection in graphic novel form of the Books of Magic comics, a series which follows the life of 13-year-old Timothy Hunter, a seemingly ordinary boy who turns out to have the potential to become the greatest magician the world has ever known.  The first collection (written by Neil Gaiman, the creator of the series) is in my opinion by far the best of the three I've read so far.  Rieber's The Books of Magic: Bindings was OK, but rather suffered by comparison.  (Of course, nearly anything tends to suffer in comparison to Gaiman's work, if you ask me...)  Anyway, this volume falls somewhere in between the two.  It may not quite have Gaiman's... well, whatever it is that Gaiman's got... but I liked it quite a bit.  It's very strange and more than a little twisted, but it's cool.  I only really have two complaints about it, and those have much more to do with matters of publishing than anything artistic.  For one thing, it leaves a large number of loose ends, which are presumably addressed in future volumes, but are rather annoying when left here.  The main reason I buy these things in graphic novel format, after all, is to avoid having to stop and wait for the story to continue every month.  The second complaint is that somewhere, somehow, there seems to have been a story or two that was not published in any of these books: many events are alluded to that I certainly don't remember, and Tim meets a number of characters that he clearly recognizes but that I'd never met.  This wasn't really much of a problem, as most of what had happened was made fairly clear, but still...  Anyway, despite those minor frustrations, this is a series that I'm definitely enjoying. A-

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling is the third book in the Harry Potter series, which you pretty much have to have been living in a cave not to have heard about.  A little background on my experience with Harry Potter:  I read the first book a while back, mainly because I was curious to see what all the hype was about.  Well, I must admit, after finishing it, I still wasn't completely sure.  It was a pleasant enough kids' fantasy, something I probably would have very much enjoyed when I was 12, but it hardly seemed the stuff that instant classics are made of .  And it didn't remotely belong in a class with the likes of C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl.  That might have been the end of my Harry Potter experience, except that I'd already bought the second book (since the book club I got it from had a special discount rate if you bought both of them).  The second book was definitely more engaging to me, if still not, IMO, classic children's-fantasy material.  But it at least managed to keep me marginally interested in the series, and all the word-of-mouth I'd heard (and there was a lot of it) said that the books continued to get better, more sophisticated, and darker.  So, what the heck, if figured I'd give the third one a try.  Well, guess what?  It was better, more sophisticated, and darker, and it truly surprised me just how caught up in it I got.  It quite possibly would have had me joining Rowling's cult of hero-worship at age 12; as an adult, it did provide me with several quite pleasantly spent hours.  I am now very much looking forward to reading Book IV.  Call me a convert.  A-

The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen is a re-telling of Bram Stoker's novel, this time with the Count himself relating his own version of events -- with himself cast as the true hero of the story. Saberhagen plays a marvelous game of turnabout, and shows great imagination in his interpretation of events. For the duration of the story, at least, he had me convinced that Dracula was a good guy. It doesn't hurt, either, that Saberhagen's Dracula is (dare I say it!) a much more interesting character than Stoker's. I enjoyed this greatly, but then I admit to being something of a vampire-story nut. A

The Holmes-Dracula File by Fred Saberhagen. While in London, an amnesiac Count Dracula is kidnapped for use in nefarious medical experiments. And when Sherlock Holmes is called upon to investigate first the theft of medical equipment and then a mysteriously bloodless murder, it is of course inevitable that they should meet... This is a follow-on of sorts to Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape (reviewed above), but it's not essential to have read that book first, especially if you've read Bram Stoker's original novel. I didn't get quite as big a kick out of this as out of The Dracula Tape but it was still a neat read. The characterization of both Dracula and Holmes is quite good, the writing grabbed and kept my attention (particularly the Dracula chapters -- Dracula and Watson alternate telling their stories), the plot was interesting and served the purpose of getting the two characters together quite well... and there is a rather bizarre twist revealed toward the end that I won't disclose here, but which constituted an interestingly original idea about both characters. A

Rod Serling's Triple W: Witches, Warlocks and Werewolves edited by Rod Serling. Eleven stories of sorcery, lycanthropy and deals with the devil, edited by Mr. Twilight Zone himself and rounded out with a short article on the history of witchcraft trials (more chilling, in my opinion, than any of the fiction). Most of the stories are pretty unremarkable, but one or two are pretty good and none of them are actively bad. B

Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg . A real SF classic about a modern-day telepath who finds his power slowly receding along with his hairline. Very well-written, with one of the most human and believable characters I've ever seen, in or out of SF. This could be a great book to give to snotty friends who think science fiction isn't "literary" enough. A

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak is a real classic of 1960's science fiction. I first read it 'way back in junior high school, and I'm pleased to report that it stands up beautifully on re-reading. The story concerns a human named Enoch Wallace who, for the past hundred years or so, has been the operator of a sort of relay station for the galaxy's transportation system secretly located here on Earth. I absolutely love this concept, and it manages to carry a fair chunk of the novel all by itself as we see (mostly through flashbacks) how Enoch was recruited by the aliens, what his "customers" are like and how he relates to them, what kind of interesting (and often inexplicable) gifts they leave him with, and so on. By the end, though, the book has most certainly developed a plot, as Enoch finds himself and his station facing threats both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, as the galactic political situation deteriorates, and as Earth itself sits on the brink of war and in desperate need of outside help. It's a neat read, and is definitely recommended. A

Interstellar Pig by William Sleator is about a 16-year-old kid named Barney who discovers that the summer house his family is renting has a strange and tragic history... and that his odd new neighbors have a bizarre obsession with the house, and with a complicated and ruthless board game called Interstellar Pig. Sleator's books are generally categorized as Young Adult reading, and I certainly enjoyed every book of his that I could get my hands on as a kid. Somehow, though, I missed out on this one, so I thought it would be interesting to see what I thought of it on reading it for the first time as an adult. Happily, I found I enjoyed reading this at 25 nearly as much as I enjoyed Sleator books like The Green Futures of Tycho when I was in the fifth grade or thereabouts. Interstellar Pig was involving, creepy and intelligently written, and I honestly didn't want to put it down. Frankly, I'm impressed. Sleator is not just good for kids. A

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson is one seriously cool book.  It blends nanotechnology, cultures ranging from traditional Chinese to neo-Victorian to pure cyberpunk, fairy tales, and a whole bunch of other stuff into a setting that's at once deeply bizarre and oddly believable.  The writing is very good: smooth, literate, and occasionally very witty -- the sort of writing that makes you want to read slowly and pay close attention lest you miss something subtle and wonderful.  Stephenson also deals with some interesting themes -- moral relativism and educational issues particularly -- and he raises them in a way that's well integrated into the story and not at all preachy.  The plot itself, though full of intrigue and a few interesting twists, really seemed secondary to all that fascinating setting, style, and theme stuff.  But while that's usually a negative thing as far as my own personal tastes go, in this case I think it worked very well indeed.  I didn't even much care where the plot was taking me, because I was enjoying the ride so very much.  This is the first of Stephenson's novels I've read, but I'm definitely going to have to seek out some of his other work. A

The Time Wanderers by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is a rather strange Russian SF novel. I wasn't too fond of it at first; the style and presentation don't exactly make for the world's easiest read. It's set up in a sort of pseudo-documentary fashion, sprinkled liberally with "documents" (memos, transcripts of taped conversations, etc.). It's also written as if it were a chronicle of well-known events by someone who was there, intended for an audience of his contemporaries (the inhabitants of our future) -- and the authors don't exactly go overboard with the exposition; the reader has to slowly piece a lot of stuff together for himself. Still, aspects of the book managed to capture my interest. The story itself is about the investigation of Unusual Events (outcrops of strange phobias, weird creatures terrifying a small village -- stuff like that) attributed to mysterious beings known as the Wanderers. Who are the Wanderers, and what do they want with humanity? The answer to this big question at the end of the book felt almost too familiar, but I found some of the material about the investigation itself kind of intriguing. Plus there are some interesting (if rather off-the-wall) science-fictional concepts floating around the book. B

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift is quite readable for a work over 270 years old.  And it's not too difficult to see why it's stood the test of time, as it's got two things going for it.  First of all, the first half of the book is a truly imaginative adventure tale, and Swift's descriptions of the tiny Lilliputions and the giant inhabitants of Brobdingnag are surprisingly realistic and detailed.  The second half of the book, though, is a sharp and sometimes very funny satire on human nature and human society.  Swift attacks anything and everything: government, lawyers, imperialism, the aristocracy, scholars, war, religion, you name it... and most of that stuff is still just as ripe for it today as it was in 1726.  A-

The Destiny Makers by George Turner. In a dangerously overpopulated future Australia, good cop Harry Ostrov finds himself "recruited" as a bodyguard for a mysterious old man who has just undergone an illegal rejuvenation treatment (life prolongation practices being generally frowned on in such a world). He quickly finds himself caught up in politics, scandal and, ultimately, a decision that will affect the fate of all humanity. Not bad, as such things go. The characters are interesting and well-drawn, and the book delves into some interesting moral and ethical questions toward the end. I was, however, left with the feeling that the book could have been a lot more than it was; some of the plot twists, for example, were almost anticlimactic. Still a decent read, though. B+