"Aldiss, Brian W - Afterward - This Year in SF 1966" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldiss Brian W)written in the English language and are a landmark of some
kind in SF which has, for the most part, been long on idea but very short on literary quality. The author has combined both qualities in a number of masterful short stories that can be unconditionally recommended. (Harcourt, Brace and World) John W. Campbell: Collected Editorials from Analog', Se- lected by Harry Harrison. One of the must-buys of the year. From the shower of sermons rattling from the Astounding- Analog pulpit ever since most of us were lads, Harrison has selected a representative thirty-and-three, some dating back to the forties, all stamped with Campbell's individual brand of coat-trailing sagacity. They stand up surprisingly well as a book. (Doubleday) John Christopher: The Ragged Edge. Great opening chapters. Cotter, like author Christopher, lives on the island of Guernsey. After a bad night, he goes out to find the shattered island is an island no longer; he can now walk to Englandwhich he eventually does. . . . Christopher is an old hand at the convulsed landscape, social as well as geographic, of catastrophe; but here he gets involved in sentimental loose ends. Result: too ragged, too little edge. Damnably readable, for all that! (Simon & Schuster) William Dexter: World in Eclipse and Children of the Void. One story in two volumes. The old themes again, threats from aliens, flying saucers, Earth torn out of orbit . . . Dexter writes as if he genuinely enjoyed writing and telling this far-out tale of odd races and odd illusions. He has just the style for it, a rather ponderous, unamazed style, which recalls Fowler Wright. Great fun, if you aren't too blase. (Paperback Library) Philip K. Dick: Now Wait for Last Year. Not the best Dick, but brilliant by the standards of lesser SF writers. Dick's great theme of the questionable nature of reality, many realities, is one he has examined over and over since he first entered the field; with each novel he comes closer to it, draws forth more insights. This time, it is unhappy Dr. Sweetscent, whose wife Cathy drifts in and out of drugged states, involved with his millionaire boss Ackerman and, through Ackerman, planetary politics. Earth is allied to one repulsive interstellar race against another. Time-travel is involved; so is the suffer- ing world leader, Molinari. Dick is as subtle as ever with complex plots and ramified detail of future worlds. One reason why this is not quite so prime an example of his art may be that in structure it rather closely resembles Dick's masterwork Martian Timeslip. (Doubleday) Gordon R. Dickson: No Room for Man. "Who Am I? What Am I?" asks the blurb, on this retitled reprint of Necromancer. In fact, metaphysics goes out the window in preference for a menace-to-men theme, in this fast-moving |
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