From Publishers Weekly
This small but varied assortment of ten stories will be welcomed by SF fans who haven't already read nine of them in Omni magazine. Joyce Carol Oates contributes the collection's first-run tale about a woman who is disturbed by nightmares of sexual attacks until she realizes that she is not entirely helpless. Octavia E. Butler portrays two people, both afflicted with a terrifying disease that makes its victims self-destructive, who just might find in each other and in their unique gifts "reasons for staying alive." In Harvey Jacobs's quirky love story, artist Herman Horman, whose passion is painting skyscapes, thinks he has found the woman of his dreams--lovely, lonely, wealthy and the owner of a fabulous observatory--until he discovers that her unusual eating plan threatens his favored pastime. J. R. Dunn follows a reporter who, in the near future, views a deserted Air Force base and tries to assimilate his tour guide's outrageous claim that people on earth once launched satellites and missiles. Howard Waldrop skips back to 1929 to imagine what things would have been like if J. Edgar Hoover's turf had been a Federal Radio Agency instead of the FBI. Datlow is Omni 's fiction editor.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Supplementing its annual Best Science Fiction anthology series that features previously unpublished stories,
Omni begins a new series that collects choice reprints from past issues of the magazine. In keeping with
Omni tradition, editor Datlow provides a balanced selection of imaginative pieces from writers both inside and outside the genre. Several are past nominees for major awards, such as James P. Blaylock's O. Henry Award contender, "Unidentified Objects," a beautifully written nostalgia trip through one small-town resident's past that is mainly concerned with a reclusive UFO enthusiast whose basement workshop shelters a surprising secret. Among the notable mainstream contributions are Joyce Carol Oates' fictional venture into quantum physics that cleverly redefines nightmares as alternate realities and a typically surreal historical fantasy by William S. Burroughs about the hallucinatory relationship a pirate ship's captain has with the endangered lemurs of eighteenth-century Madagascar. Although a few of the 10 pieces fall short of the superlative, all bear the
Omni trademark for extending the boundaries of science fiction into high art.
Carl Hays
