From Publishers Weekly
The magazine Amazing Stories has been around for nearly seven decades. As editor Mohan points out in his introduction, though, something is either amazing or it's not, and what amazes one person is just as likely to befuddle or bore the next. While it would be hard to describe any of these 13 stories as boring, the opener, by Paul di Filippo, could certainly be considered befuddling. A bizarre and convoluted take on an alternate universe (where Philip K. Dick is wedded to Linda Ronstadt), it contains so many "in" references to the life of the author of Blade Runner that the neophyte will soon be lost. The rest of the collection (with the exception of Janet Berliner Gluckman's and George Guthridge's equally confusing alternate Holocaust story) is not as risky, making the stories somewhat less "amazing," perhaps, but infinitely more accessible. There are predictable but eminently enjoyable works by R.A. Lafferty, Robert Bloch, Mark Rich and Kathe Koja and well-done philosophical-treatises-cum-stories by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski. Heavy hitter Ursula K. LeGuin adds weight to the collection with a strange and lovely piece about how perception affects our place in the universe, and Alan Dean Foster does a surprising star turn with his amusing take on virtual reality and low-class thievery, while Thomas Disch takes on a very different sort of afterlife in "The Burial Society." In the nostalgic afterword, Robert Bloch reminisces about the magazine's early history and reminds us just how amazing it is that anything of quality ever manages to get published.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
While scores of trendier and less tritely named science fiction magazines have come and gone,
Amazing Stories, 69-year-old granddaddy of them all, has endured largely by staying true to its original intention of featuring only high-quality sf.
Amazing editor Mohan stays true to the magazine's quality even while selecting for this anthology mostly newer stories that have not been published in the magazine. Noteworthy among the previously published exceptions are two pieces--one, the classic story, "The Pin," recounting the fate of an artist when he stumbles across the real Grim Reaper; the other, a memoir, "Fantastic Adventures with
Amazing" --by and in homage to recently deceased horrormeister Robert Bloch. Other notable contributors are Ursula LeGuin, Gregory Benford, Thomas Disch, and Paul di Filippo, whose wry "Linda and Phil" makes ill-matched spouses of Linda Ronstadt and Philip K. Dick in a twisted alternative U.S. in which Rush Limbaugh is president. An outstanding collection of top-notch sf.
Carl Hays
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
