New and Notable Books
Christopher Anvil, Pandora's Legions (Baen 2/02) Editor Eric Flint takes the rousing adventure story that was once expanded into Pandora's Planet and works four related stories into a single novel, as originally intended by Anvil, who provided a final polishing to the text.
Steven Barnes, Lion's Blood (Warner Aspect 2/02) Barnes explores questions of race and culture and their impact on individual lives in this intense alternate history set in a strange New World where Africans rule and backward Europeans are the slaves.
Greg Bear, Vitals (Del Rey 1/02) A dark, near-future SF thriller of conspiracy and secret history, revolving around efforts to control a new breakthrough in the search for immortality.
Damien Broderick, Transcension (Tor 2/02) Broderick explores in fiction the ideas of humans transformed by technology he presented in the non-fiction book, The Spike. In a utopian society controlled by an AI, three humans have radically different relationships to the technology that threatens humanity.
Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair (Viking 2/02) A critically acclaimed and highly entertaining fantasy set in a 1985 Great Britain where time and reality are flexible and literature literally comes alive. Special Operative Thursday Next must track down the criminal who has kidnapped Jane Eyre from Charlotte Brontë's novel.
David Ho, Shadow Maker: The Digital Art of David Ho (Abaya Studios 1/02) Surreal and horrific computer-created images, reminiscent of both J.K. Potter and H.R. Giger, fill this art book, with comments by Ho discussing his inspirations, including Dante's Inferno.
Graham Joyce, Smoking Poppy (Pocket 1/02) A man searching for his daughter ends up in the jungles of Thailand where drug lords rule and the mystical seems real. A haunting fantasy thriller and a dark journey both inward and outward, reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Paul Kearney, Hawkwood's Voyage (Ace 1/02) Finally available in the US, this is the first volume in the highly acclaimed alternate-history fantasy series, "The Monarchies of God", in which magic-users are sent to the New World to escape the Inquisition.
Patricia A. McKillip, Ombria in Shadow (Ace 1/02) McKillip's distinctive prose weaves a rich tapestry of fairy tale, folklore, and a sense of history in this fantasy of a fabulous city, its boy Prince, his ruthless regent, and the denizens of its strange underworld.
Syne Mitchell, Technogenesis (Roc 1/02) A suspenseful tale of a near-future in which everyone is continually connected to the Net, and privacy is non-existent. One woman, a Web prodigy temporarily disconnected by a hardware breakdown, starts to suspect that something on the Net is controlling its users.
Robert Silverberg & Martin H. Greenberg, eds., The Great SF Stories (1964) (NESFA 12/01) In an effort to keep the classics of short science fiction available to new generations of readers, this anthology of 15 stories from 1964 picks up where the DAW series edited by Isaac Asimov and Greenberg left off. Authors include Cordwainer Smith, Norman Spinrad, Gordon R. Dickson, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
Dan Simmons, A Winter Haunting (Morrow 2/02) Master of horror Simmons returns to the setting and characters of Summer of Night forty-one years later, as Dale Stewart returns to his hometown, already uncertain of his sanity, finding old friends and new nightmares.
Harry Turtledove, Counting Up, Counting Down (Del Rey 2/02) A collection of 17 recent stories of SF, fantasy, and Turtledove's trademark alternate history. This includes the noted time-travel stories "Forty, Counting Up" and "Twenty, Counting Down".
Ellen Weil & Gary K. Wolfe, Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (Ohio State University Press 1/02) Locus's own Gary K. Wolfe and the late Ellen (Dede) Weil teamed up for this in-depth critical examination of Ellison's work.
Sean Williams & Shane Dix, Echoes of Earth (Ace 1/02) Hard SF and high adventure mix in this marvel-filled novel of a starship run by engrams – computer-based copies of 60 real minds – the alien devices they encounter, and the transformed Earth to which they return.
Austin Tappan Wright, Islandia (Tusk 5/02) This classic utopian fantasy returns after being out-of-print for many years, with a new introduction by John Silbersack.
Roger Zelazny, The Last Defender of Camelot (ibooks 3/02) This collection of 11 great stories by one of SF's masters shares only four with the earlier (Pocket 1980) collection by the same name, and adds more recent notable stories including the previously uncollected "Come Back to the Killing Ground, Alice, My Love".
