After 2001: A Space Odyssey this book is probably Clarke's most influential work. It was published in 1973 and won just about every science fiction major award. And rightly so, this book is a triumph of imagination. In fact, after reading it I am surprised that nobody has made this into a movie yet, it could be visually stunning if done right. I understand a project is under way to remedy that. It is scheduled for release in 2009. About time.

In the 22nd century parts of the solar system has been settled by humanity. After a large meteor impact that devastated northern Italy a project has been started to keep track of objects on a collision course. Most of the larger objects in the solar system are reliably mapped but somehow one object escaped notice. It is discovered when travels past the gas giants at incredible speeds and is headed for the inner planets. A course that will that it inside the orbit of Mercury. Astronomers have long since exhausted the Greek/Roman pantheon so the object is christened Rama after the Hindu god. When finally some time of one of the large space telescopes becomes available a closer look reveals the object cannot be natural. Mankind is about to be visited by an alien spaceship.

At the current course and speed of Rama there is only a very limited window of opportunity to visit Rama before it gets to close to the sun. One of the few ships close enough to intercept the object, the Endeavour under commander Norton, is sent to investigate the object. With only a few weeks to investigate and under close scrutiny of the United Planets, the crew sets to work. Hopelessly ill equipped for the mission they face many challenges. Commander Norton is further frustrated by the fact that Rama appears to be dead. But as the object nears the sun Rama stirs.

The strength of Rendezvous with Rama is the suspense Clarke manages to built throughout the novel. He slowly reveals what Rama looks like and what the function of all those mysterious features in the object are. Soon the crew of the Endeavour come to think of Rama as a miniature world designed to travel between the stars. The descriptions of Rama's interior are fascinating. Clarke manages to convey the dangers of such a mission very well. As in his other works he also pays a lot of attention to conditions in space and the effect of Rama's artificial gravity generated by it's spin. One scene I was especially impressed with is the description of Norton trying to work out which way he should think of as up in order to safely descend to Rama's surface. It very much reminded me of Ender's Game. This trick that is one of Ender's first lessons when he starts participating in the war games.

Another thing I really liked is the dry humour with which he describes the scientific debate on Rama as well as the politics surrounding it. The debate features a number of politicians and scientists on the Rama council. They are a rather dogmatic, slightly naive and somewhat paranoid bunch. The Endeavour is mostly shielded from the debate going on elsewhere in the solar system but they don't escape it entirely. These scenes provide a release from the Rama environment and prevent the novel from focussing too much on descriptions of it's interior.

Clarke's writings do not excel in brilliant characterization or stunning prose, he is mostly busy with the mysteries of space. His characters are professionals of whom we know very little outside their job. If you do not like hard science fiction there is a good chance that the novel will bore you to tears. If you do however, Rendezvous with Rama is one of the most intriguing works in the genre. My copy of this novel is the Gollancz SF Masterworks edition. As far as I am concerned it definitely belongs in that category.

Virgil sings of arms and of a man; over two thousand years later, Le Guin offers the princess of that song her own words. Lavinia, the prize of battle in Virgil’s Aeneid, speaks under the guidance of this award-winning author, revealing details of the struggle between cultures from a perspective unseen in the national epic of the Roman Empire. In this first person account of a woman caught by fate and held by love, Le Guin imagines this minor historical figure as a princess with a mind of her own as well as respect for traditions that may not always serve her best interests.


Lavinia shares her story as a storyteller tells tales around a campfire; the conversational tone is inclusive, welcoming readers to stop and listen. She explains her circumstance as a valued daughter of King Latinus and of his queen, Amata, who is twisted with rage and grief over the death of her young sons, taken by a fever that left Lavinia alive to suffer her mother’s wrath.


Lavinia is genuinely loved by the people of Latinium as she grows into adolescence among a vibrant countryside, where she roams without fear or restraint. Her fifteenth birthday brings her self-absorbed cousin Turnus to light as a suitor for her hand in marriage, a suit he presses for the next three years, but she does not trust him: “Turnus flattered my mother and laughed with my father and looked at me as the butcher looks at the cow.”
To avoid social events that honor Turnus, she finds solace in a sacred place where spirit communications have been revealed to her and her father, which further alienates her mother because she is not similarly blessed. Lavinia waits in the dusky woods alone until the figure of a man appears. Virgil is dying, his body somewhere in the future, consumed with a fever that will take away his chance to finish his great poem. This poem, he explains to her, reveres her husband, Aeneas, but speaks little of her. He is ashamed by this slight and offers a glimpse of her future so that she might be prepared for the best and the worst.


It is easy to forget that Lavinia herself has not written this story; Le Guin adopts a believable and intimate tone with which Lavinia weaves back and forth from the distant past to her present, from her adolescence to marriage and motherhood, and back again, carried between times by common feelings brought about during pivotal events in her life. Lavinia may be a princess, but she does not put on airs. She questions her ability to write at all, for if the great spirit poet of the future did not find her worthy of note, perhaps she is, after all, not. How will she choose to act during the remainder of her life to justify remembrance?


Le Guin’s preparation for Lavinia involved reading the Aeneid in Latin, a time and effort consuming task for any scholar. The incomplete epic, which Virgil hoped would burn at his death, was a ten year project ending with the battle for the princess between Aeneas and Turnus. Le Guin succeeds where no author has before, in an imagining of Lavinia’s perspective on the events of the Aeneid as well as what she calls an “unfolding of a hint,” as close and rich as if she herself had experienced it. It comes as no surprise that this tale of magical realism is a work of art in Le Guin’s hands.

To be fair and honest right from the outset I was pre-disposed to like this collection for at least two reasons.

1) I have been a fan of The Library of America for a number of years now. The books that they put out are of the highest quality and are a great value for the content. Also in recent years they have been a good friend to genre fiction. That may seem like a small thing but I assure you it's not.

2) For years now I have, unabashedly, been a Dick-Head. Can't help it. I have been for years and probably always will be.

This brings me around to another Dick-Head, Jonathan Lethem. Lethem’s task was a difficult one because of Dick’s productivity. He published 19 novels in the 1960's. In terms of selection only one of those books was a gimmie. You could also knock some of the more hastily written books out of contention but that still leaves one with some hard choices to make. There could easily be a second collection of novels from the 1960's. All in all though Lethem made some good and interesting choices.

Philip Dick's novels have become increasingly popular and influential since his death in 1982. Periodically discussions start up on the predictive power of science fiction. One such discussion even popped up recently. To be truthful, yes it is easy to look at something like the communicators from Star Trek and easily see that they resemble the cell phones that we use today but more often then not science fiction fails in its predictive power on a specific level. But one of Dick’s greatest attributes is that he was really able to nail a certain atmosphere, one that seems increasingly to hew closer to reality.

One of the great services that this collection provides is that it offers not only a great primer of Dicks work but also provides a great introduction to those readers looking to try some of his work.

The four novels included in this collection are:

The Man in the High Castle published in 1962 - An early Hugo award winner that describes an alternate history in which Japan and Germany won World War II and America is an occupied country.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch published in 1965 - Competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Published in 1968 - A bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a post apocalyptic future, was the basis for the movie Blade Runner.

Ubik published in 1969 - Illustrates a future world of psychic espionage agents and cryogenically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory "half-life,"

I find the subtitle of this collection to be open to speculation. It immediately makes one wonder, if not down right hope, that there will be a future collection of Dick's late period masterpieces from the 70's. I for one hope that there will be one. Based on the quality of the selections here it would be a great companion volume.

On a side note the Philip K Dick android is still missing.

--Brian Lindenmuth

American Gods by Neil Gaiman could be said to possibly be the most definitive example of urban fantasy, showcasing an America in all its pity and strangeness, a land where the dead don't necessarily die and gods live amongst the people, immortal yet elusive. It's a country where everyone has a story to tell, a past to hide, and a place to be. Interwoven into the common and simplistic aspects of daily life and a road trip are Gaiman's quirky scenes and characters, invoking a mixed blessing of both the horrific and the fantastical.

Shadow, a man with a hidden past, has been in prison for three years now, awaiting his release patiently. A few days before his freedom is to be granted, Shadow learns that his wife has just died in a car crash. On his flight home for the funeral, Shadow meets a mysterious man that goes by the name of Mr. Wednesday who offers him a job. Having nowhere else to turn in life, Shadow accepts the job, not knowing just how his future days will drastically change from that moment on.

American Gods is filled with profound observations that aim to do more than just present themselves as general quips of life, as evident when Shadow is in prison:

If you didn't have a death sentence, he [Shadow] decided, then prison was, at best, only a temporary reprieve from life, for two reasons. First, life creeps back into prison. There are always places to go further down. Life goes on. And second, if you just hang in there, someday they're going to have to let you out.

And later when Shadow's journey takes him to the House on the Rock, a carnival shrouded in mystery and magic:

"What's it for?" asked Shadow. "I mean, okay, world's biggest, hundreds of animals, thousands of lightbulbs, and it goes around all the time, and no one rides it."

"It's not there to be ridden, not by people," said Wednesday. "It's there to be admired. It's there to be."

But Gaiman's vivid and lush prose does not warrant American Gods the praise it has received. The novel is laden with apathetic characters, the worse of them being Shadow, our protagonist, our "hero" who we should be caring about even if it's in some small way. At first I let my weak connection with Shadow drift to the back of my mind, waiting for the single moment when Gaiman would show us why he makes a great view-point character. But the pages kept turning and I began to care less and less. Some minor characters (Wednesday, Chad Mulligan, and even Laura) had more depth than Shadow, which just isn't right in a book about society discovering their spirits in America. I'm still not even certain if he ever found himself; he found answers to his past, but in terms of where his future lay I'm as nonchalant about it as the man himself.

Gaiman attempts to take readers on a relentless ride through the gritty, god-infested best-of-the-best country, one led by a man we're obviously supposed to feel sympathetic to, but in the end, we don't. I was impressed with the novel's beginning, bored by the middle of it, and nowhere near awestricken enough by its end. Shame, American Gods could have been a wonderful read if only it was populated by characters that were relatable, compassionate, and ungodly real.

Science fiction changed forever when the Viking probe landed on Mars in 1976 and sent back color pictures of the rugged, ochre-colored landscape. No longer could SF writers set their stories among the "canals" of Mars, or have colonists romping across the surface of the planet without spacesuits. Much previous SF had also contained elements of fantasy, including epic family sagas or unrealistically fantastic depictions of other planets. At the same time as the Viking landing, fantasy began to emerge as a separate genre, led by the best-selling sword and sorcery epics of Terry Brooks and Stephen R. Donaldson.

The Viking probe's real science and the rise of fantasy drove SF into the new level of scientific depth that permeates the genre today, as written by authors like Allen Steele. However, old-school SF, like Jack Vance, still offers the mix of science and the fantastic that dominated science fiction before the mid 1970s. _The Dragon Masters_ features genetically engineered dragons and the galactic remnants of the human race fighting for survival on a barren planet. This 1962 Hugo Award-winning SF classic has been reissued in a "Definitive Edition" single volume, along with _The Last Castle_, a novella that was the other half of the 1966 Ace Double of _The Dragon Masters_.

This novel has all the hallmarks of great classic SF: a fascinating world with a strange semi-human race, intricate backstory detailing the settlement of this world, a technologically superior alien antagonist in the Basics, human application of science in the breeding of battle dragons, and a climax that forces the human characters to ponder their role in the universe. All of these elements are presented briefly for the reader within the context of a small war between factions of colonists. Vance has clearly worked out the intricate details of the colonists, the semi-human sacerdotes, and the countless types of bred dragons. These elements seem scattered as he works through the immediate conflict between two settlements of colonists, but they all converge in the climactic final battle.

_The Dragon Masters_ also has many of the shortcomings of classic SF. Only a half-dozen characters are ever given individual names. The characterization of even the most detailed of these, Joaz Bambeck and Ervis Corcolo, is paper-thin. Huge sections of the novel, including all of Chapter 2, are devoted to explaining the political backstory. Yet the workings of the society, including the economy, are never detailed. The various battles, which take up three-quarters of the novel, are depicted from a distant, unit-level perspective. The narrative lists how many dragons of each different type went where, but it never shows the combat up-front through the eyes of a character.

Over forty years after it was written, _The Dragon Masters_ stands as a well-developed and solidly written example of the classic SF style that mixed elements of science and fantasy. It isn't as scientifically rigorous as modern SF, and it isn't as detailed as modern fantasy, but its middle ground between those extremes offers an accessible read for modern fans of either genre.