Here is, in effect, the last issue of the original Amazing Stories, including work by Howard Waldrop, Nancy Springer, Gregory Benford, Ursula K. Le Guin, Don Webb, Eleanor Arnason, and Robert Silverberg. Now, with the resurrection of the magazine in 1999, there is a new audience of Amazing readers sure to seek out its previous glory.
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The world's oldest science fiction magazine has died and been resurrected more times than most Dungeons & Dragons characters. So it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that although this trade paperback was touted as "the very last issue of Amazing Stories!"--well, it wasn't. After the initial hardcover of this collection was released in 1998, Amazing Stories was bought by Pokémon makers Wizards of the Coast, which revived Hugo Gernsback's venerated SF periodical and kept it alive until the summer of 2000.
But even though this collection of just over 20 short pieces wasn't the magazine's last gasp, some of them prove superior to the Star Wars, Star Trek, and Babylon 5 fiction that followed in the Wizards years. Editor Kim Mohan (who stayed on for the revival) collected then-new works from the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Benford, and Howard Waldrop, as well as other shorts from less-established writers. Of particular note is a Robert Silverberg-Philip K. Dick tandem: a 1953 Amazing reprint of Dick's Noah's Ark-inspired "The Builder," followed by Silverberg's praise and ruminations in "Quality and Quantity: The Short Fiction of Philip K. Dick."
Aside from Noah's Ark, quite a few other ideas get tossed around--everything from divine androgyny to time travel to the parameters of dream flight (the last being the title of a piece by Arlan Andrews Sr.), all at an easily digestible length and most matching the quality of previous Mohan-edited collections. --Paul Hughes
From Kirkus Reviews
The magazine founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1926 finally expired last year; this collection features the 15 new stories that would have formed the next issue of Amazing, together with five reprints from 195394 and an essay from Robert Silverberg about Philip K. Dick's many and impressive tales, one of which (``The Builder'') is featured here. Also reappearing: Ursula K. Le Guin examines the complicated sexual arrangements of Planet O; Gregory Benford contributes a rather overblown time-travel yarn; James Alan Gardner looks at virtual reality; and Howard Waldrop revisits A Christmas Carol. The original entries offer reasonable variety, from a witty, punning rumination on time (Nancy Springer) to reincarnation, floods, oral traditions, invented myth, Vietnam, Genesis, intelligent houses, anthropology, and more. Worth a browse, especially for readers who lament the slow demise of the old f/sf mainstay publications. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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