Reviews and Articles in General Publications

§ New York Times Book Review October 1, 2000
Gerald Jonas's SF column covers Ursula K. Le Guin's The Telling (Harcourt), Ken MacLeod's The Sky Road (Tor), Janine Ellen Young's The Bridge (Warner Aspect), and Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's Dune: House Harkonnen (Bantam Spectra). On Le Guin, Jonas echoes the reservations other reviewers have expressed:

The title of The Telling ... may reveal more about the book's virtues and flaws than she realizes. ... We are told about, but we never feel, Sutty's personal stake in her task on Aka. For all her eagerness to share her vision, Le Guin has forgotten that even in didactic fiction, showing is always preferable to telling.

§ San Francisco Chronicle October 1, 2000
Another review by Sarah Coleman of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay --

[M]ore ambitious than anything Chabon has yet attempted, and every risk he takes pays off. If there are one or two places where he integrates his historical research a little awkwardly, it's a small price to pay for an otherwise seamless performance. Richly imagined and unexpectedly moving, ''Kavalier and Clay'' shows a thoroughbred author writing at the peak of his talents.

And a review by Daniel Akst of the new novel by Nobel Prize-winner [Blindness] José Saramago, All the Names (Harcourt), a ''tender and mysterious'' novel about the Central Registry,

a wondrous place, a punctilious bureaucracy that records the births, marriages and deaths of all its city's citizens under the nearly godlike direction of the great Registrar himself, whose every twitch sets his dominions quaking...

Publishers Weekly September 25, 2000 [not online]
PW Forecasts include reviews of Caleb Carr's Killing Time (Random, November), Iain Banks's The Business (Simon & Schuster; 1st US edition); and in the SF/Fantasy/Horror section, new books by Ramsey Campbell (starred review of Ghosts and Grisley Things, Tor), Gregory Benford, Paula Vosky (starred review of The Grand Ellipse, Bantam Spectra), Mark Parker, Jack Ketchum, F. Paul Wilson (starred review of All the Rage, Forge); and notes on books by Robert Bloch (presented by David J. Schow), Michael Collings' Peter Straub Bibliography, and a collection of Tim White's art.

And in the Children's section, a review of R.L. Stine's new series, and a [non-starred] review of Philip Pullman's highly-anticipated The Amber Spyglass (Knopf), with an accompanying interview. The review advises that the book

may well be the most controversial children's book of recent years. The witch Serafina Pekkala, quoting an angel, sums up the central theme: "All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.... The rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed." Early on, this "Authority" is explicity identified as the Judeo-Christian God, and he is far from omnipotent: his Kingdom is ruled by a regent. ... Stirring and highly provocative.