I don’t know what the phrase “extreme fantasy” means. To me the word “extreme” was best defined in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle : white water rafting in a convenience store, hang gliding off a cliff, drinking Mountain Dew and lastly listening to Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler. The editor of The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy defines extreme as “stories that took a basic idea, whether simple or complicated, and developed it to some extreme, beyond what the reader might normally expect.” That doesn’t sound too bad, but I like Harold and Kumar’s definition of extreme better.

For this review, I will give a brief synopsis of each story, followed by what I thought about the story and then finally the rating I give it out of 5. There are 24 stories in total making this one meaty, or mammoth if you will collection. Onto the first story:

1) Senator Bilbo by Andy Duncan. First published in 2001.
Story : A descendent of Bilbo Baggins fights for political power and immigration control in the fantasy land of the Shire.
Thoughts : Boring and overlong. Duncan is usually a good writer, but the characters in this are simply unsympathetic caricatures of Tolkien’s. I mean Gandolf-like magicians interacting with turn-of-the-century senators? Come on! Not a great way to start of a short fiction anthology.
Rating : 1/5

2) Sandmagic by Orson Scott Card. First published in 1979.
Story : A young boy watches his parents die of murder and disease and vows to seek vengeance upon the ones that caused his pain.
Thoughts : I liked the way Card expresses the concept of magic and the consequences caused by using something far greater than any one being. This story is very nicely done— heartbreaking and dark all at the same time. Now if only Card could keep his mouth shut and stop spouting his religious views on the evils of American Democracy and the Satanic undercurrents of homo-sexual marriages.
Rating : 3.5/5

3) Dream A Little Dream For Me… by Peter Crowther. First Published in 2000.
Story : A young man dealing with writers block travels to Germany to unwind and finds out he may be the key to saving God’s one true dream.
Thoughts : Crowther may be better known as the publisher of the great small press publishing house, PS Publishing. However, it also turns out that he is one heck of a good short story writer. This is a tale of how dreams can tempt us, rule us, and ultimately destroy us; how hope can turn to sorrow and regret in an instance. This one has a dreamlike melancholy feel to it— like dreaming of bunnies frolicking while your girlfriend breaks up with you.
Rating : 3/5

4) Lost Wax by Leah Bobet. First published in 2006.
Story : A young boy dreams of magic forbidden and learns that not all things wished for are beneficent and wanted.
Thoughts : A simple story with an abrupt ending. This one could’ve been more descriptive and a tad longer, but still was fun. Nothing much more to really say here, although I could never imagine myself collecting discarded wax shavings.
Rating : 2.5/5

5) Save A Place In The Lifeboat For Me by Howard Waldrop. First published in 1976.
Story : A bunch of old-time film comedians search for their destinies/purpose?
Thoughts : This is absurdist to the extreme. I don’t mind absurdist when it’s done well, like with Beckett, but this was not done well at all. Can comedy really save the world? I don’t know, but if it can, this ain’t it. If anything, this type of comedy will set things back by centuries.
Rating : 1.5/5

6) I Am Bonaro by John Niendorff. First published in 1964.
Story : A man who can turn into anything he wishes loses his mind in more ways than one.
Thoughts : An odd and short little story. This one is quite striking and will stay with you for days— or maybe like Bonaro, you’ll forget it. What wonder!
Rating : 2.5/5

7) The Old House Under The Snow by Rhys Hughes. First published in 2004.
Story : Two friends become trapped in a mansion surrounded by ice which slowly sinks, sending them deeper and deeper into a bottomless world.
Thoughts : The editor of this book, Mike Ashley, promotes this story as a nightmarish version of Alice in Wonderland, and I couldn’t agree more. This was quite the surreal one. Rhys has a definite way with words that will leave readers itching for more. I am officially a fan of his.
Rating : 3.5/5

8) Banquet of the Lords of Night by Liz Williams. First published in 2002.
Story : In a world of darkness where any concept of light means death, one man struggles to bring light to his life and save the world.
Thoughts : This is a short yet suspenseful story. Each word read is filled with more and more dread, reaching a crescendo that explodes of the page. Liz Williams always creates interesting worlds and this is no exception. Reminded me a lot of the tall creepy things from Dark Crystal and Mirrormask .
Rating : 3/5

9) Charlie the Purple Giraffe was Acting Strangely by David D. Levine. First published in 2004.
Story : A purple giraffe becomes aware that he is in a comic book and wonders if there is existence if there are no readers.
Thoughts : A story that can be read many ways: of our cultures obsessions with being famous, of peoples need to feel, well, needed— or perhaps it really is just about a purple giraffe. I’d like to live in a world where comic characters have found out the truth and Batman’s pretty pissed off at us. We can all dream.
Rating : 2.5/5

10) Master Lao and the Flying Horror by Lawrence Person. First published in 2005.
Story : In fantastic ancient China, a demonic evil starts taking the heads of villagers to build its floating head army, and it’s up to a lustful temple acolyte and his aging mentor to save the day.
Thoughts : Clearly Mr. Person has seen many Chinese horror/comedy movies, because this story is like reading the movies I grew up watching in the 80’s. He is rather funny with his turn of phrases and uses them for many laughs. It also seems like there’s more stories set in this world— gives me something to look for. This one is very reminiscent of The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox by Barry Hughart, which I entirely love.
Rating : 3/5

11) Using It and Losing It by Jonathan Lethem. First published in 1990.
Story : A man who wishes to be apart from society makes himself forget the language of words, but soon finds out that like all animals, words aren’t the only ways to express.
Thoughts : Admittedly, I am not the biggest Lethem fan, but this was quite interesting. The concept of repetition to forget actually blows my mind and makes me wonder if it can work— another odd-ball tall from Lethem. Maybe I’ll have to re-read Glass Soup . Wait, that’s a different Jonathan. Hmm. Still, both Jonathan’s were enormously boring on NPR the other day, so I stand by not liking either Jonathan.
Rating : 2.5/5

12) The All-At-Once-Man by R. A. Lafferty. First published in 1970.
Story : A man seeks immortality by living all ages at once.
Thoughts : This one reminded me of the Great Gatsby . I can’t really pin-point the why but the main character of this story had a “Gatsby-ness” to him, and that’s brilliant. What bogs the story down is that it try’s to explain the “how” of immortality but doesn’t do it well. I wish the author just left it ambiguous. Still, a nicely thought out and quirky piece— the ability to live all ages at once is an remarkable concept.
Rating : 2.5/5

13) Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani by William Hope Hodgson. First published in 1919.
Story : Translated to mean, “my god, my god, why have you forsaken me.” This is the story of a scientist who while trying to initiate an experiment attempting to recreate the biblical Crucifixion finds more than he bargains for, with Lovecraftian results.
Thoughts : This is by far the oldest of the stories, and it really shows— the dialogue is painfully prolonged, while the explanations are devastatingly lengthy and esoteric. Another problem I had with the story is the many shifting narrative view points. This can get a bit confusing at times and every time one of the characters reads “I said”, I was left wondering who in fact was talking. This is not old-time good like Lovecraft, but rather old-time bad like Edward E. Smith.
Rating : 1.5/5

14) Boatman’s Holiday by Jeffrey Ford. First published in 2005.
Story : Everyone knows that when you die, you put a coin under your tongue to pay the ferryman to take you across the river Styx. But what do we know about the ferryman? Tired of ferrying people across for centuries on end, the ferryman decides to use the holiday granted him once a century to escape hell, if only for a week. But can there truly be escape when hell is just a concept?
Thoughts : I liked this one a lot. It’s like Dante’s Inferno mixed with the “cosmic.” The question has always raged: did man create hell or did it always exist? This story tries to answer that question through one man’s journey into himself. This one reminded me of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as well.
Rating : 3.5/5

15) The Detweiler Boy by Tom Reamy. First published in 1977.
Story : A detective searches for the murderer of an old friend but instead finds a string of murders leading back to something disturbingly cruel.
Thoughts : This one genuinely hit the spot. I question if this belongs in a collection of “fantasy” stories, but I really don’t care. It was a nice break and a damn fine story. More crime-horror than fantasy, but not totally without since all horror contains some sort of fantastical events. Like a side-show coming to town, this one’s a can’t miss. Total Recall anyone?
Rating : 3.5/5

16) The Fence at the End of the World by Melissa Mia Hill. First published in 2002.
Story : Two young girls are told never to leave their yard for fear of falling off the edge of the world.
Thoughts : This is the shortest story in the collection and being so short tells more of a tale than a story. This is about the children we forget that are locked up from the world by parents who are more dictators than family. I feel that there could be more to this tale, but it was in the middle of blossoming before it was cut off.
Rating : 2/5

17) Elric at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock. First published in 1981.
Story : Elric finds himself stranded at the End of the World with his soul sucking sword out of energy and trapped at the mercy of bored immortals.
Thoughts : Besides the previous story by Howard Waldrop, this is the probably the most controversial choice for this collection. Elric has always been a polarizing figure in the fantasy community, and as I get older I tend to come across more people that hate him rather than love him—I for one am a huge fan. The Elric series were the reason I started reading fantasy back when I was 13. Of course I was far too young to understand the underlying themes at play in each Elric tale, but I enjoyed them nonetheless. So the Elric stories always hold a special place in my heart. Kafka may have gotten me to start taking literature seriously, but it was Elric that made reading “fun”— so much so that I own this story in probably a dozen different collections. This is one of Elric’s later, more playful tales, and is in its own way probably the most assessable of his stories— perhaps that’s reason enough to include it. As the editor of this collection, Mike Ashley states, “it was impossible to compile this anthology without something by Michael Moorcock.” I couldn’t agree more.
Rating : 4/5

18) Cup and Table by Tim Pratt. First published in 2006.
Story : A secret society searches for a holy cup that, predating man, will allow them to talk to God and ask him any question, any plea. And only a junkie who can see through time knows the true plea that all of mankind truthfully desires.
Thoughts : I’ve been a fan of Pratt’s since his short story masterpiece, Impossible Dreams — it’s the nearest any story has gotten to a dream after my own heart. This one is another home run. I love the way Pratt shifts through time, layering more and more questions with more and more answers. He does in 18 pages what lesser writers take whole books to do. Love this guy and love his work. Buy everything he does people!!
Rating : 4/5

19) I, Haruspex by Christopher Priest. First published in 1998.
Story : In the early days of the 20th C. a man consumes the flesh and maladies of the dead in order to maintain a balance, keeping demons from overrunning the world.
Thoughts : Most people know Christopher Priest for his novel The Prestige , but he has had a prolific short story career for over 30 years now. This story starts off really slow and builds to a slow finish. Maybe it’s just me, but I felt that this story really slowed the flow of reading the overall collection— like the editor was reloading for something exciting to come so he needed a lull to fill the space. Not one of Priest’s better stories, but it had an interesting, if at times confusing and entirely disturbing, premise.
Rating : 2.5/5

20) Radio Waves by Michael Swanwick. First published in 1995.
Story : The ghost of a man seeking understanding and remembrance is chased by an “entity” in a dead world surrounded by radio waves.
Thoughts : This is an existentialistic story about choices. How even after death, the pain we caused and choices made still ripple against the tide. Can we forgive ourselves even long after the ones we hurt no longer care? This one is a nice, albeit surreal, look at death that reminded me a bit of the Japanese movie After Life .
Rating : 3/5

21) Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang. First published in 1990.
Story : After centuries of building, The Tower of Babylon is finally finished, and a group of miners makes the 4-month trek to the top, attempting to dig upwards into the vault of heaven. But what they find isn’t exactly what they were expecting.
Thoughts : Besides the Elric story, this was the only other story I had read previously. This is the story of the nature of faith— the accepting of truth when there has never been any proof. Much praise has been heaped on Chiang and this story and deservedly so. What’s even more astounding is that this is Chiang’s first published story? What?!! It’s like finally making the majors and your first career at bat is pinch hitting in the bottom of the ninth in a game seven of the World Series and hitting a grand slam. Again, what?!! This has been discussed and dissected for years in the literary circle and I’m always amazed that by each re-reading of it I find out something new— some new layer previously undiscovered. It’s that good!! What I like most about this story is the way Chiang describes the agriculture surrounding the tower as one goes higher. Since whole communities live along the tower, mini-towns have sprout up and the need for food is ever prevalent. The mid-parts of the tower where water is scarce can only grow onions, while higher up where there is rain, they grow beans and fruits. It’s the little details that show how much care Chiang took into creating this world. Utterly brilliant.
Rating : 5/5

22) Jack Neck and the Worry Bird by Paul Di Filippo. First published in 1998.
Story : A day in the life of Jack Neck (at least I think that’s what it’s about).
Thoughts : This story is just odd. The reader is constantly getting smacked around by words and phrases that are made up and make no sense. I’m sure to Di Filippo, the words made sense in his mind, but since I don’t have the fortune to rent real estate there I didn’t get what’s going on. It’s truly like reading a story in a foreign language. You can maybe pick out every 100th word. Di Filippo is usually such a strong and defined writer. I think for this story he was given too much free reign and probably created a story he has been carrying around since childhood. It’s like reading a Dr. Seuss story if Dr. Seuss didn’t rhyme and made less sense. I have to give it to the magazine that first bought and published this story. That took a lot of guts, and good or bad, the future of short stories needs more of that.
Rating :1/5

23) The Dark One by A A Attanasio. First published in 1994.
Story : A young barbarian is gifted with power and immortality from an ancient sorcerer. Through centuries the barbarian walks, searching for his peace known as darkness, which eventually he hopes will lead him to destroying the world.
Thoughts : The one thing that stands out about this story is that it tries way too hard. Its message of spiritual bliss is laid on pretty thick, like syrup on a stack of pancakes or lotion on a fat guy’s belly. The message of this story is that no matter how much time changes, all things remain the same: empires will always rise and fall, man will always be greedy and selfish— and only darkness is the salvation. This story is all about how religion is faith and that is good, while science is truth and truth is death— how the worst invention ever founded by man is science. I was waiting for Keyser Soze to suddenly appear and say, “and another thing: the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world that he didn’t exist.” I mean it’s like reading some “emo” kids poetry. However, what really bothered me about this piece is that towards the end there’s a huge shift in POV which is extremely jarring, I thought I suddenly was reading another story— like I had skipped the ending or something. This is sadly not the worst story in this collection, but it’s brutal to get through nonetheless.
Rating : 1.5/5

24) A Ring of Green Fire by Sean McMullen. First published in 1994.
Story : A peasant with a penchant for the ladies is cursed with his “member” being surrounded by a green ring of fire. After spreading his wanton onto hundreds of unsuspecting women, a group of men newly infected hunt him down to make him pay.
Thoughts : This one is quite interesting. One of the notable aspects of this story is how beautifully it progressed: from the inanely comedic to the tragically possible— like a message surrounded by a lollipop. I’ve always been a fan of stories that say something profound while still being entertaining. This story is about how even to a healer, some wounds can never be healed; how only through pain can many of us find compassion and hope. This is a fantastic way to end a short-story collection. Heartbreaking and completely spot on.
Rating : 3.5/5

So that’s the end of the collection. I hope that at least someone was interested with what I had to say and will pick up this one up. While this was not by any means the best collection I have ever read (that honor goes to Haruki Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman ), it was still quite good. There were more interesting and excellent stories than there were of dreadful ones. Generally what I find from collections that contain numerous authors is that the overall quality dips pretty low—since every reader has different tastes, some editors try to meet all expectations within a single book, which is frankly impossible. Still, surprisingly enough, this collection worked. There were around 6 stories that I found were poor, 10 that were average to good, and 8 that ranged from great to incredible. Those might not seem to be great odds, but generally in short story collections, the poor stories far outweigh the good ones and the average stories in this were still better than most. The one complaint I had with this book is the “extreme” tag the editor chose. I know I have a different definition of extreme, but none of these stories felt particularly excessive. What would have been better would have been to call this collection, The Mammoth Book of Fantastic Stories to Read While Cliff-Diving or Parasailing — or maybe not.

We awaken with Tynan Llywelyn from a hundred year's Sleep. Tynan is no Rip Van Winkle, however, but a powerful vampire who is not eager to return to the vampire community who shunned him. The world that greets him is vastly different than what he left behind. Society has crumbled and humanity is being controlled by a domineering techno-government called the Tyst. A small group of rebels, the Phuree, are fighting back as best they can. The Phuree have taken a radical step in allying themselves with the Predators who feed off them - the vampires. Tynan finds himself embroiled in a power struggle between vampire and human players alike.

I knew I was in for an incredible read when I became captivated by the Acknowledgments page. Ms. Faust's talents as a wordsmith far surpass anything I have read in some time. Her depiction of vampires is a delicious exquisiteness that at times had me running my tongue over my teeth to insure fangs had not appeared! She creates these beings with a deft hand, stitching common myths together with her singularly modern twist, providing a seamless and completely believable existence.

Next to such thoroughly real characters, the Tyst and Phuree pale by comparison. The Tyst are nameless and faceless; although characters are mentioned we never really get to know them. These are the Big Bad Guys, yet they seem completely untouchable and almost nonexistent. The Phuree are also a bit out of reach. Teirnan, their leader, and his sister Khanna are stereotypical and rather predictable. They appear small and ineffective somehow. This book is the first in a series, however, so perhaps the next installment will focus more on the other characters. If Faust can bring them to reality as she has her vampires, this will be a knockdown-dragout favorite!

The overall sensation of the story is very focused on Tynan, his tough and (unusual for the Living Dead) his emotions. In fact, Tynan's emotions are a pivotal point of the entire storyline. Faust captured his moral writhing quite well. He is struggling with a moral crisis, one that led him to abandon his Dark Brethren and sink into Eternal Sleep. But his despair only kept him for one hundred years, not forever. With prose the texture of deep velvet, Faust draws us down to the depths of a story as old as fear, as dark as sin, and as deep as Satan's heart. The lines between friend and foe are re-drawn. She captures desperate obsession and hunger, outlining each with the passion for existence that burns in all beings.

In spite of a lack of character development in some areas, I was very impressed with Gabrielle Faust and Eternal Vigilance. I eagerly devoured the book from cover to cover in one sitting and felt bereft when I was finished. This is not an airy-fairy, "rescue the damsel"-type of story. Gritty and dark, readers will begin to understand the "un"life of a vampire.

Tick, an introverted and intelligent young man suddenly receives a mysterious letter. By opening it, Tick launches himself on an adventure of a lifetime. Each subsequent letter holds a quirky and sometimes humorous clue, promising Tick danger if he continues and harm to others if he quits. Intrigued and compelled, he pursues each clue vigorously in spite of the risk involved. The mysterious clues drag him across the country and introduce him to a spitfire Italian girl and an all-American jock from California. Banding together, the trio commits to seeing the mystery through.

At the root of it all are concepts of time and reality, the forces that bind and drive creation. In The Thirteenth Reality, Tick discovers more than one reality exists. Life as he knows it continues in Reality Prime while as many as thirteen other Earths continue on different planes of existence. If this seems overwhelming, don’t worry. Dashner lays out his concept of parallel realities in a manner young readers can understand. Even the basis of quantum physics, aka kyoopy, becomes approachable!

I enjoy how Dashner portrays Tick’s relationship with his family. Too many times, parents are viewed as either the idiot contingency or the evil overseers. Not here. Tick’s sisters drive him nuts but he still obviously loves them. Tick’s dad is a wonderful character that supports and trusts him even though this means letting go of his little boy. In a world where Tick is often a target, at home he is safe and loved. Maybe that isn’t realistic, but who said fantasy had to be reality? Perhaps a little wishful thinking would do us all some good.

I liked this story. There are a few classic aspects that walk on stage, but these are presented in a fresh and believable manner. The evil witch (dressed in lemon), a giant with a quasi-Cockney accent, a dwarf as round as he is tall, mechanistic magic that blurs the line between technology and fantasy; all delivered in wrapping paper designed by Dashner himself. He writes in bold colors, splashing strong characters across the pages who demand your attention (and sometimes your fear).

This isn’t a sweet little fairy tale, bad things happen and our hero is faced with tough decisions. Dashner quietly leads his readers from an odd mystery into a hair-raising quest complete with flesh-eating monsters. As odd as some of the scenes are, though, the entire thing holds together. This is definitely a book young readers should sample.

Sometimes, it pays to read the forwards to certain books. It can give the reader an idea of the tone of the book and possibly offer insight to the creative process of the author. Other times, it lowers the expectations for the piece, but that might not necessarily be a terrible thing, as in the case of "Elephantment: Wounded Animals." Richard Starkings' forward lists an array of influences which are campy cult classics that are vastly entertaining, but often not entirely substantial. He claims that his intent in the creation of the Elephantmen series was to make a sort of homage to the pulp sci-fi and mystery books and magazines of his youth. In a sense, he's achieved exactly that, but in another, he's failed horribly.

The basic premise of the Elephantmen series is that a mad doctor operating in Africa, which has now become nothing more than a wasteland of battlefields, created a race of supersoldiers by splicing together the DNA of humans and animals. The resultant creatures are known as Elephantmen, despite the fact that some of them are clearly alligators, hippopautomi, rhinoceri, and warthogs. A movement formed that liberated the Elephantmen and complicated their lives immeasurably by forcing them to try to live in mainstream society. All of the Elephantmen are much taller and heavier than their human counterparts and they are treated very poorly by most of the humans in their world.

The graphic novel collects the first few issues of "Elephantmen" and provides the reader with an excellent introduction to the universe created by Starkings and Moritat. The stories contained within the book range from a gritty detective story to a horrifying war memoir to a thoroughly captivating fairy tale about a pirate and a Truth Fairy. I would not venture to call this a "something for everyone" book because it realy isn't, but I'll get into that a bit later. Starkings is the main creator of the series but there are other writers involved in the stories. They are remarkably consistent about details throughout the book and the stories do have a cohesive feel overall, though the stories do carry the marks of their indivdual authors. The stories are all interconnected, some more loosely than others, but the inclusion of each in the volume does make good sense. It offers very good variety without being jarring.

So why isn't it the sort of thing that I'm going to be running out and recommending to everyone? It's violent and very bloody. Most assuredly, were "Elephantmen" a movie it would be slapped immediately with an R rating. This isn't the kind of graphic novel (or comic book series) a person would want to pick up in order to be cheered up by any stretch of the imagination. The tales contained within are gritty and carry the air of both disillusionment and disheartment. There is almost no hope in the modern world where the Elephantmen dwell. Their freedoms are thoroughly restricted, they are all almost constantly monitored, and they're nearly universally reviled.

The color palette is very fitting, offering muted earth and twilight tones, with only the blood and fire in most scenes standing out in bright contrast to the characters themselves and everything around them. It's a mood and setting worthy of the darkest horror movies and carries the reader into the emotional turmoil of the characters far better than some of the dialog.

The artwork itself is detailed and textural, though hardly beautiful. "Elephantmen", above all else, gives the sense that it isn't supposed to be beautiful. The Elephantmen themselves are not a lovely race and their world is dirty and narrowed by circumstances they have almost no control over.

While the science involved in "Elephantmen" is abosultely cult pulp science at its very best, the overall feel of the book gives the impression that going into depth about the science of the Elephantmen's creation would ruin the story, much the way the "scientific" explanation in "Star Wars" ruined the Force for a generation of young fans. The graphic novel falls short of being pure pulpy entertainment by virtue of the fact that it can't help creating pathos for the characters it contains. On the surface, "Elephantmen" is a great adventure/action graphic novel that's fast-paced and very much in the vein of film noir and dystopian science fiction, but one doesn't have to do any scratching at all on that surface to find far deeper content in this book. There is a great deal of socio-political commentary contained in these glossy pages as readers will both understand the mistrust of the general human population and hate that characters as compelling as Hip Flask and Ebony are treated so horrifically because of their outward appearances.

"Wounded Animals" isn't preachy in the slightest and it doesn't feel like the author set out to tell this great tale of alienation to try to foster greater understanding for our own species. Instead, the situations these characters are placed into are, more than anything, the logical outgrowth of their forceful relocation. One can take this series and make any number of parallels within current events and recorded history that apply horrifically to the foibles of the human species. Even if the reader isn't directly thinking of such things, after finishing this graphic novel, it's difficult not to make those comparisons or think about how humans treat each other on a daily basis. It's difficult to contemplate how you, as a person, would act if faced with something as startling as an elephant who walked upright, spoke perfectly good English (maybe even better than you do), and was every bit as intelligent (if not more so) than you. Perhaps that's why "Wounded Animals" is so successful as a book, it doesn't try too hard to be anything other than the stories of these characters, so, it is what it is and leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions.

The biggest fault I have with the book is simply that it does feel slightly choppy at the beginning. The stories seem to start out as a series of "quick cuts" which then start to become much more of a plot as the reader gets further into the book. Personally, I think that the comic book series would lose some of that incredible impact as individual issues because of that. As a graphic novel, however, the reader gets to digest the story as a whole rather than individual bites.

This is a book that I would definitely recommend to someone who didn't mind violence and gore, but loved action and a story that moves quickly. Fans of Tarantino or the X-files or even Halo would probably enjoy this series very much, along with those who enjoy hard-boiled PIs and movies like "Blade Runner" and "Running Man." It inspires thought, without demanding it.

When Manuel Rodrigo de Guzmán González disappears, Wendell Apogee decides to find out where he has gone and why. But in order to figure out what happened to Manuel, Wendell must contend with parties, cockfights, and chases; an underground city whose people live in houses suspended from cavern ceilings; urban weirdos and alien assassins; immigrants, the black market, flight, riots, and religious cults.

As far as I can remember the science-fiction/fantasy genre hasn't ever really had a novel written in this style before. A jazzy, beat-like rush of words that wash over you and result in a total immersion of the environment. This bop prosody style is also very musical. It attains its own rhythmic quality with chord progressions, riffs and multiple layers that may not reveal themselves upon first listening errrrr reading. Every single page is filled with exuberant and intense prose that leaves you breathless.

Mixed up into this Cosmic Slop is a story that manages at times to bring about both the ordinary and the fantastic. Wendell, as our gay Orpheus who must descend into the depths and transform himself to save the man he loves, is indicative of this dichotomy. The transformation of his ordinary being into the superhero Captain Spaceman is total and complete. Its a palpable and very real change but at the same time it really is just a strength training regiment, a make-over & rampant rumors. But to summarize it like this may give off the impression that it is mundane and maybe even boring. That's not the case though and Slattery manages the high-wire act of making us believe that he really is a superhero.

Spaceman Blues is a novel that begs to not only be read out loud but demands to be performed, maybe at a slam if the poets of the Nuyorican Cafe collaborated on a novelization of Parliament songs and the soundtrack was played by Fishbone. If ever a novel left you with the mussed hair, quickie-in-the-elevator-between-floors feeling then this book is it.

--Brian Lindenmuth

A quick side note. While I do love the cover of the book I can't help but think there was a missed opportuinity in not having someone like Pedro Bell do an original piece instead. It would have been an inspired choice that would have fit the tone of the book beautifully. Just an observation and didnt affect how I felt about the book.

**Yes, I realize that the excerpts are longer then the actualy review. Spaceman Blues has a distinct style and I think a review of this book is best served by extended excerpts, which I have tried to be generous in providing. Moreso then what I write they will probably help you decide if this book is for you.

Punktown, on the planet Oasis. In this sprawling metropolis, a Lovecraftian evil is stirring - spreading its shadowy tentacles through the city. When his girlfriend discovers a copy of the Necronomicon - an ancient text reputed to summon the Great Old Ones - Christopher Ruby is thrust into a nightmare as his girlfriend falls prey to the dark forces unleashed. Fleeing into Punktown's underground, he searches frantically for clues to what his girlfriend has brought into the universe...

I have to admit I had trouble rating Monstrocity. On the one hand, the setting of Punktown itself is intriguing. However, the mythos underpinning the story doesn't fare as well. I liked the ideas Thomas came up with, but in the end, it doesn't stray far from its inspiration and the story feels a bit rushed. Additionally, the writing is serviceable if rough at times.

It's unfortunate, because Thomas does have some great material to work with and an evidently fertile imagination. In the end, I'd like to rate it higher but I feel like there's potential here that was a bit wasted on a retread of Lovecraft's work. Perhaps if the book had been longer, allowing more time to build up tension and focus more on the "evil city" feeling, that could have helped.

In the end, it's a nice effort and I'm interested to read Thomas's other Punktown work to see how it compares.

"The Rose in Twelve Petals" begins Theodora Goss's newly-in-paperback collection In the Forest of Forgetting, and the story makes an ideal introduction to the the author's work. A retelling of the classic Sleeping Beauty story, it frames and then re-frames our expectations. The initial recognition of the familiar story pulls us into the the fairy tale mindset: of stories that map the small journeys and decisions that can unexpectedly lead to major life changes; of characters and encounters that we understand to be meant not quite literally, yet not as simple allegory either. As the story progresses, the postmodern telling of the tale, the way that every character and every side are given voice (reminiscient of Pamuk's My Name is Red), the way that the subtext of classic fairy tales -- gender, class, politics in the largest sense of the word -- are literalized, all serve to pull fairy tales into modernity, into history (often but not always our own). This mixture of old and new modes of storytelling recurs in the collection's other fifteen stories: there are times, settings, characters and themes that appear again and again, similar but different, the original fairy tales of a multitude of parallel worlds. Throughout, Goss's storytelling palette is made up of the strange day-to-day patterns of individual wants and desires, the certainties and uncertainties that make up our daily lives.

So it is with "Professor Berkowitz Stands on the Threshold," where the titular professor is given the chance to choose between the certainty of his humdrum, largely failed academic and personal life, and the uncertainty of passing beyond an ambiguous threshold into a new level of existence. And so it is with the World Fantasy Award-nominated "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm," about a man building a glider to reach an airborne city where his art will be appreciated (art and the appropriate audience for art are other recurring themes in the collection). For both Meister Wilhelm and Professor Berkowitz it is uncertainty, a lack of faith, that is the enemy of the artist.

The flip side (Goss again showing multiple sides to many stories) is seen in a pair of tales set in the author's native Hungary. In "Letters from Budapest," an art student rebels against the dull, utilitarian view of painting enforced by the Party's Art Committee. Lured by the thrill of artistic certainty offered by a decadent painter in hiding, he horrifically discovers that there are choices even more creatively sapping than following the Party line. It's a good story, and a brave one. "The Rapid Advance of Sorrow" is very much a parallel tale, of a similar place at a perhaps somewhat later time. A sparsely poetic, coldly beautiful epistolatory story, "Sorrow" is concerned with the certainty of revolutionary movements -- aesthetic, and thus inescapably political -- and the uncertainty that comes from rejecting conformity with them. I was reminded of Spook City's fall to the Nothing in Ende's The Neverending Story, as the silent revolution of entropy advanced across the artist's community of Szent Endre. The sun now shines with only a "vague luminescence," writes the nameless letter-writer who has refused to join the movement, and "I sit...not knowing if I will be alive tomorrow."

Death is life's great certainty; no surprise that the big D enters into many of these tales. Cancer is one of modern life's foremost uncertainties, and it, too, figures prominently here. It figures most prominently in the collection's title story, "In The Forest of Forgetting," where a woman diagnosed with "lumps" casts aside the certainty of past roles -- Patient, Daughter, Wife, Mother (which largely represent the cast of Goss's new fairy tales, replacing Kings and Queens, Knights and Princesses) -- in a mythologized journey toward a new, uncertain role and place. It is as heroic as it is tragic. "Lily, with Clouds" shows a similar journey from an outside observer's viewpoint, as the so-certain worldview of a small town Southern matriarch is fractured when her prodigal sister returns home to die. If there is an unambiguous statement in Goss's collection, it is expressed here:

Mind you, Goss's stories aren't all grim. "Sleeping with Bears" is the delight of the collection, as the sister of a new bride goes from uncertainty ("I don't understand why [my sister] decided to marry a bear") to certainty ("I finally understand why my sister is marrying a bear") in a story that pokes at notions of gentry and family history in the American South, while literalizing some of the earthy sexuality of classic fairy tales. "The Belt" also touches on issues of class, gender and sex, continuing the familiar fairy tale of the male noble who marries a beautiful common woman past the usual ending of and they lived happily ever after. In fact, what "The Belt" does is replace the certainty of that typical fairy tale ending with an equal certainty, grounded in modern notions of psychology and class, that no such unilaterally happy ending could now be possible when both sides are considered. The story is presented with such a feeling of earnest good advice, however, of empowerment for both women and men, that to me it felt optimistic rather than pessimistic -- some new, truer form of happy ending, the story suggests, may now be possible. Your mileage may vary.

The stories mentioned thus far involve characters coming to terms with external certainties and uncertainties. There is another type of story in Goss's collection: the wishing stories, stories where characters drive the outcome through their desires. Emblematic of these wishing stories is the recurring character of Emily Gray, an ephemeral fay spirit of enigmatic motivations. Miss Emily Gray's first, eponymous story is a fairly straightforward tale of being careful of what you wish for, and the danger of childish certainty; her second appearance, in "Conrad," is a straightforward tale of a beneficial wish granted to an uncertain child; her final appearance, in "Lessons with Miss Emily Gray," is a not-at-all straightforward tale of beneficial wishes granted and of being careful what you wish for. Yes, there is a progression here, an inner order to the collection's stories.

It is in the collection's penultimate story, the Nebula Award-nominated "Pip and the Fairies," that all the strands of Goss's storytelling come together most superbly. Philippa Lawson is abandoning her acting career and returning to the home of her childhood, where her mother wrote children's books, fairy tales. Philippa no longer knows whether those stories of Pip and the fairies were based on her own true adventures, told to her mother, or if her mother's stories have colonized her memories of childhood. "How did it begin?" Philippa wonders; the question is as important as how it ends, perhaps more so. The story is Goss at her best, speaking to both the child's love of fairy tale, and the adult's sense of survival and need to ascertain. It combines many of the themes and devices of the collection's previous stories -- the wishes, the threshold, the mother taken by cancer -- while stacking layer upon layer of certainty and uncertainty. It's good; it's very, very good, a heady mix of Pan's Labyrinth, Carroll's The Land of Laughs, and Goss's own unique magic. I'd very much like to tell you that the ending -- devastating, heartbreaking, and yet transcendent -- is uncertain, as I have with so many of these other stories...but I don't think that I can.

The way themes of certainty and uncertainty pervade In the Forest of Forgetting, it is no surprise that on the rare occasion a story does disappoint, it is usually because of issues with these same themes. In some stories the authorial certainty Goss exerts feels at odds with the uncertainty she seeks to evoke. The authorial certainty in dividing up "The Rose in Twelve Petals" into its twelve sections, for example, feels in conflict with the narrative uncertainty Goss uses to end the tale; the end feels a little too obviously a Statement. Similarly, for the section in which Professor Berkowitz must decide whether to pass through the threshold to be titled "Faith, like a Seagull Hanging in Mid-air" presages the nature of the professor's testing, signals too clearly that the author is in control and knows in advance what will happen. These are stories that reveal too soon that only one thing can happen, where Goss has left no room for the story to surprise herself. Or in some cases her readers: several other stories seemed to go on too long, to explain too much, too neatly. "I assumed it was perfectly clear," says Miss Emily Gray in her eponymous story: "I was sent to make come true your heart's desire." Miss Gray is saying this to a child, however; to most adult readers it will be perfectly clear.

The explaining permeates even the book's introduction. Goss here shares not only some of her personal history -- she and her divorced mother traveling from Hungary to Italy, Belgium and then up and down the Northeastern United States -- but also how she feels these experiences have impacted her writing in its concern with place and displacement, with borders and irrevocable crossings. It's useful and interesting information, but often the relentlessly biographical analysis does no favors. For some readers it may deuniversalize the stories, rendering the tales purely commentary on the author's personal experiences. It can also lead to lazy analysis. We can note that in nearly all of Goss's stories, you cannot, or should not, go home again -- but how do we explain the brilliant ambiguity of "Pip and the Fairies" in that regard? Or it is tempting to say that Goss's prose has the elegant, mannered precision of someone to whom English is not a first language, who learned not just (as most schooled from birth in the USA learn) how words are used, but also what and how they mean. This sort of simple reductionism, though, is unfair to the author. How many other non-native writers of English (to say nothing of natives) have Goss's lyricism? How many born abroad have her perceptiveness in identifying the mythologies of the United States: the Northeastern USA's fascination with the post-Civil War South, for example; or the way many of her older foreign characters regard service in Viet Nam as a badge of belonging. How many writers have her Peter Beagle-like ability to instantiate complex modern concepts via the language of story, making a place for the fantastic and fabulous in modern literature? And indeed, how many people have her drive to create and share stories?

For that is also, I think, one of the core themes of In the Forest of Forgetting. The transmission of story, and in particular of fairy stories, occurs throughout the collection: in some cases stories are shared by oral storytelling; in some cases by books, or letters; in some cases they are written on scavenged pieces of driftwood and cast out to sea. In all cases fairy tales serve to create, and to symbolize, a sense of personal history and place. Their value is not that they grant understanding, but that they encourage us to seek understanding, to see and act on the complex truths of the world. Paradoxically, the words of fairy tales tell us not to ignore that which cannot be directly put into words; they acknowledge our sense that there are certainties, even if we cannot always be certain what they are. If the modern world has become a poor place for classic fairy tales, as several of the stories herein suggest, the answer Theodora Goss proposes is not that we forget fairy tales altogether, but rather that we create new fairy tales for our new age. She has certainly created several excellent ones in this collection.

-- Matt Denault

Getting to Know You is only David Marusek's second book, but he is already a veteran of the science fiction wars. Marusek's 2005 novel Counting Heads was the subject of the debut speculative fiction column "Across the Universe" in that bastion of mainstream fiction, The New York Times Book Review; the column both proclaimed Counting Heads to be among the reviewer's "favorite books [of 2005] in any category" and yet wondered, "why does contemporary science fiction have to be so geeky" that it becomes inaccessible to readers of mainstream literature? The question helped renew a battle, waged within the science fiction community since the New Wave movement of the 1960s, over how the "science" and "fiction" components of SF intersect. Some (such as Charles Stross) argued that SF should be more geeky, should focus its efforts on the tech-savvy readers of websites like Slashdot and Boing Boing; others (including John Scalzi) argued that what SF requires are more accessible entry points for readers less familiar with science. Sadly, the first point of the NYT column -- regarding the quality of Marusek's fiction -- was largely forgotten in the discussion. Given all this, I'm happy to say that Getting to Know You, a new collection of the author's short stories, in large part bridges the gaps that its predecessor highlighted: it's equally accessible to SF genrephiles and mainstream readers. The collection's defining characteristic is carefully constructed balance.

The "carefully constructed" qualifier is an important one; the balance Marusek achieves in Getting to Know You is based on variety and focus, not a dull sameness. Of the ten stories in the collection (initially published between 1993 and 2003, largely in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine), five strongly evoke distinct, singular emotions; these stories are quite separate and range from the present day to some unspecified far future. The remaining five stories occur in the same near-future universe as Counting Heads and are deeply multifaceted, ambiguous works. These stories present a future history of North America from 2033 to approximately 2600. Nanotech and biotech, along with cloning, artificial intelligence, wearable ubiquitous computing, human augmentation and environmental terrorism -- all are explored, along with their implications for politics, economics, lifestyles and more. It never gets overwhelming, though, because Marusek doles out progress slowly: each story focuses on just a few advances and implications. Moreover each story is grounded by one or two intensely human characters.

Indeed, the "Counting Heads stories" in Getting to Know You illustrate how Marusek's characterization naturally balances competing literary worldviews. Characterization in genre science fiction is largely predicated on ideas of intention, change and growth; mainstream literary fiction in contrast is often centered around the foolish consistency of people and the borders that constrain their growth. Getting to Know You offers up a third model of what is so often called "the human condition" (and rather vacuously left at that). Marusek uses technology to show that while the outward appearance of people may be consistent and monolithic, inside there is a swirling of ideas and beliefs tightly linked to current circumstances. That swirl is rarely glimpsed because once we are convinced of our beliefs, we rarely reconsider them. If we could examine a person's mind in frozen instants of time, however, we -- and they -- might be surprised at the variance of their thoughts from one moment to the next, and what the logical extensions of those thoughts might be.

So for example Vice President Saul Jaspersen, in "Cabbages and Kale or How We Downsized North America," begins to realize how little he knows himself when confronted by a "proxy" of himself -- a holographic copy of both physical features and inner mental state. When asked his opinion of a Procreation Ban that will limit the right to have children to select licensed citizens,

This theme recurs in the other "Counting Heads universe" stories within Getting to Know You. In the title story, a journalist covering a new type of "belt valet" -- today's hand-held PDA perfected, combined with an "imprinting" mechanism to mold the belt's AI to the personality of its wearer -- finds that imprinting may represent the perfection of high technology itself. And that for we imperfect people, perfection will be different than what we think we want it to be. That sentiment is echoed in the Sturgeon Award-winning novella "The Wedding Album," where newlywed Anne and Benjamin are cast in a "sim" -- a holographic recording akin to "Cabbages and Kale"'s proxies -- at the happiest moment of their lives. The story then juxtaposes that perfect moment with the rest of their lives, and, in a science fictional twist, against a backdrop some 450 years of human history and development.

The perfectibility of technology is another recurring motif in the "Counting Heads" stories: in "The Wedding Album" the memento is perfected; in "Getting to Know You," the PDA. All five stories also involve the perfection of reproductive technology, and the implications of this on gender relations. At a surface level, the more that technology -- in particular but not limited to reproductive technology -- has equalized the genders in these stories, the more women gain not just equal footing but often an upper-hand on the male characters. But what the later stories in the chronology interject is the niggle that what women may have been doing by relying on laws and legislation is not gaining reproductive control for themselves, but rather transferring authority over their choices from men to the state. Reproductive technology, and technology in general, thus become potential levers of control over women by the state. This can be seen in "A Boy in Cathyland," where a woman struggles to maintain her technology-enabled private utopia. It also appears with more subtlety in "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy," which deals with the more general perfectibility of society. Another set of newlyweds, Sam and Eleanor, find themselves on top of an already utopian world when Eleanor is nominated for a high-level government job and the couple is granted a rare permit to "retro-conceive" a child. Of course there's a price for these gifts, and when it comes due the story becomes at once among the most horrific and optimistic in the collection.

The story of Sam and Eleanor will be familiar to readers of Counting Heads, as it became the beginning of that novel. If there was a common criticism of Counting Heads by genre reviewers, it was that the novel felt fragmented: a mosaic whose pieces were too separate, connected mainly by an overabundance of technological paste. Getting to Know You, however, succeeds in part because the connections that felt fragmented in the novel here serve to add depth and resonance to separate short stories. It's also apparent that in the novel Marusek tried to integrate aspects such as politics and economics across the entire narrative that here appear as the focus of only one or two stories. In Counting Heads for example we are told that "[Eleanor's] celebrity futures are trading at 9.7 cents," followed by a paragraph-long infodump on the celebrity economy; the version in Getting to Know You reads simply "the People Channel has recently tagged her as a probable celebrity." This tighter focus, combined with less reliance on neologisms (there are few of Counting Heads's mentars, fabplats, etc. to be found), makes the stories in Getting to Know You more accessible to a mainstream reader. And finally, the short form may simply be better than the novel at highlighting the ambiguity that pervades the "Counting Heads" universe.

If the five "Counting Heads stories" in Getting to Know You are ambiguous and multifaceted, the remaining five stories balance out the collection's content in more elemental, emotionally evocative ways. "Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz," for example, contributes a vital portion of good-natured humor. It's a metafictional tale centered around a wife's desire to immortalize her husband -- in part through some do-it-yourself cryogenics involving the Alaskan permafrost, in part through the literary efforts of a writer named David Marusek. A different sort of humor is on display in the short-short "My Morning Glory," which Marusek introduces as his only story with "an unalloyed happy ending." The story then proceeds to show just how much an unalloyed farce such a thing would be (it reads like a Stuart Smalley "Daily Affirmation" for the iEverything future). In contrast, the similarly short "The Earth is On the Mend" offers up the most genuine hope to be found in the collection: it's a far-future story about the gradual thawing of the Earth -- and its inhabitants -- following an ice age or nuclear winter.

"VTV" is a near-future story where the media rush to stake out an assassination victim before she is assassinated, in the hope of broadcasting the killing. To reveal what emotion it evokes would spoil the ending, but it felt the most flawed of these stories: the foreshadowing is a bit heavy-handed and it suffers from the near-future curse of already feeling out of date. Partly this stems from its concern with live TV at a time when Tivo has become a verb and YouTube among the top 10 most trafficked websites. Partly, though, it's because while Marusek describes his goal with "VTV"'s musings on filmed violence as "to see just how despicable a picture of humanity [he] could paint," humanity has proven a moving target. That said, it is a hard-hitting story, perhaps the more-so for its heavy handedness. The same can be said for "Listen to Me," where Marusek forsakes the Earth to debunk the romance of space travel. Madness is featured here, the madness of cabin fever projected over a seemingly endless journey.

Endlessness, the drive for immortality and the pitfalls of achieving it: what Marusek is grappling with more directly than in most science fiction are life and death, the primal drivers of story. As with much modern literature, life in these stories is represented by humor -- not laugh-out-loud hilarity, but satire, absurdity, farce. In mainstream literary fiction this humor is often directed at the way people act against life's inexorable movement toward death; here, science fiction allows Marusek to show how people act with immortality in reach, when set against technology's inexorable movement toward the future. Both comfortingly and distressingly, people remain very much people, with the same needs and concerns. The book thus feels true. Science fiction fans will experience the quintessential sense of wonder, awe at the sheer scale of it all. Mainstream readers will be happy to find that the "wow" effect is less caused by the technology itself, and more that the science fictional elements allow character-based moments of wonder and discovery. Despite their inner complexity, people find it very difficult to change; what Marusek suggests is that technological developments may only exacerbate this fact, making any degree of self-realization even more rare and precious. "You are an accurate mapping of a human nervous system that was dysfunctional in certain structures," sim-Anne is told in "The Wedding Album." "The digital architecture current at the time you were created compounded this defect." For readers in or out of the SF genre inclined to see technology as a savior -- or who shy away from imagining the future -- Getting to Know You is a warning shot across the conceptual bow.

Is this a perfect collection? No, not quite. For one, while they help to create a better balance of story and emotion here, the non-Counting Heads stories are still more slight and uneven than the material that helped shape Marusek's novel. Readers familiar with Counting Heads may thus feel that there's a dearth of content that feels new and significant in this collection. The other primary weakness stems from the fact that the excellence of these stories is so centrally contained in their balance. There are fewer surprises than you might expect in a ten story collection, and a corresponding lack of immediacy. These stories work best after you've had time to think about them, not while you are reading them.

That said, here at FantasyBookSpot we recently discussed how we know that we've read a great book, and while others championed the desire to immediately re-read a book, I said that wanting time to think about a book after reading it was the surest sign of greatness for me. Note, then, that I finished Getting to Know You three weeks ago, and have spent the intervening time letting the pieces settle and the connections form. To be sure this is not a light book; accessibility aside, it reads best when met halfway. Just, in a sense, as the future is best met halfway. I would recommend this collection to anyone with an interest in the future -- not the future of a millennium from now, but the future of tomorrow, the next time you speak to someone, the next time you think about where you'll be in a year, a decade. Enjoy these stories now, while they still are about the future. Get to know them, because in the future they will be getting to know you.

-- Matt Denault, Matt Denault, Matt Denault

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

Moscow has been hit by a wave of brutal murders. The victims are of both sexes, from different backgrounds, and of all ages, but invariably blond and blue-eyed. They are found with their breastbones smashed in, their hearts crushed. There is no sign of any motive.

Drugs, sex, and violence are the currency of daily life in Moscow. Criminal gangs and unscrupulous financial operators run the show. But in the midst of so much squalor one mysterious group is pursuing a long-meditated plan. Blond and blue-eyed, with a strange shared attraction to a chunk of interstellar ice, they are looking for their brothers and sisters, precisely 23,000 of them. Lost among the common herd of humanity, they must be awakened and set free. How? With a crude hammer fashioned out of the cosmic ice. Humans, meat machines, die under its blows. The hearts of the chosen answer by uttering their true names. For the first time they know the ecstasy of true life.

For the awakened, the future, like the past, is simple. It is ice.

The terse, clipped prose moves the story along at a fast pace. The first part of Ice follows three characters through their lives as they are awakened and after the awakening has taken place. They are plucked from all walks of life and economic backgrounds. Not only do we get to witness first hand the at times brutal awakenings but we also get a nice cross section of Russian life. The second part of the novel threats us to a lengthy first person account of how one member of this group was awakened. The Nazi’s took her from her village as a young teenager. Upon arrival in Germany she was kept aside at a camp because of her physical features then awakened. Her heart proves to be older then her body and she quickly become part of the upper echelon of the secret group. Her personal history will act as a history lesson of the group for not only us but also the three recently awakened characters from the first part. We will learn about its origins and its relationship with the Tunguska event, its methods and its ultimate goals.

From the moment we witness the first awakening in the opening moments, and especially as we learn more about them, we are forced to wonder if they are a menacing group or are they our superiors. Will their success be a benevolent act for a humanity that was never supposed to be? Will the destruction of the world, as we know it be a mercy killing for a patient that has been dead for a long time, even if they just didn’t know it? Will the final act be one of selfless love or ultimate selfishness? These are not easy questions to ask and no clear answers are provided.

It’s also interesting to note that Sorokin basically deconstructs the whole notion of a Utopian existence and the work of a group towards it. He presents their deeds with a stone cold sobriety never shying away from the fact that even IF they are right they are still bashing innocent people in the chest with hammers, most of who don’t survive the process. It doesn’t take much to wonder at the sheer number of bodies that they have left in their wake.

This is a highly original and imaginative story operating on many levels that uses basic Gnostic principles as its foundation. It’s a dense and complex story that deserves to be read by the widest audience possible and especially by those readers who pretend to lay claim to books of the imagination. If you want to not only challenge yourself but also read something that is unlike anything else out there then track down Ice.

Due to the fact that it’s a first time translation for an author there is only a limited amount of information about this book. Which leads to my only real problem with the book. Right in the middle of everything it just ends. Its not a bad ending but it just leaves you hanging. I’ve done a small amount of research and it seems that there is a prequel and sequel to Ice. If so then I hope that they too will be translated.

--Brian Lindenmuth

Marvel has started trying to force me to do a rapid about-face where their offerings are concerned. First, there was "1602", then, "The Eternals", and now, they've released "The Gunslinger Born." I still don't particularly care for superheroes. I'm not saying that there aren't talents out there writing, drawing, pencilling, inking, and coloring that perennial comic staple, just that there's far more available to readers than the "X-men." (Though, I have to concede "X-Men Fairytales" was quite good.)

Robin Furth (who also wrote the Dark Tower Concordance books) and Peter David tackle the daunting task of Roland the Gunslinger's origin story. The Dark Tower series is largely regarded as Stephen King's magnum opus and I'm readily inclined to agree with that particular popular opinion. King had wanted to tell at least part of the Dark Tower saga in a graphic novel format for quite some time, according to the author's notes conveniently included in the comic book. Once Marvel got a team together the author could approve wholeheartedly, they moved ahead with the project. There was a surprising minimum of fanfare. I found out the comic was going to be out because of a lovely glossy card (reminiscent of the lobby cards handed out in the golden age of Hollywood) my local comic dealer had on prominent display. There weren't a lot of trumpets and fanfare, which seems a little sad, as Marvel has produced a top-quality product this time around.

Jae Lee is the artist responsible for creating the look of Roland's world and he pays heavy (and much appreciated, in