From Publishers Weekly
The dozen stories in Reed's second Golden Gryphon collection (after 1999's
The Dragons of Springplace) showcase this prolific author's ability to put a fresh spin on traditional SF themes. A dazzling variant on Harry Bates's classic
Farewell to the Master is the spell-binding "Night of Time," in which the apparent servant is actually the master. Whereas the discovery of a message from an alien world would once have been story enough, in the ironically titled "On the Brink of That Bright New World" that revelation allows a man to get away with murdering his unfaithful wife and her lover. Sometimes, though, Reed's soaring imagination drops too easily into cloying preciosity and self-conscious wordplay, as in "River of the Queen" (a sequel of sorts to "Night of Time") or into didacticism, as in "Coelacanths." Still, Reed at his best ranks high in the SF firmament.
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From Booklist
The subjects of the stories in Reed's new collection range from an unexpected side effect of first contact in "On the Brink of That Bright New World," in which a man describes a crime of passion he got away with because everyone was distracted by the news, to a virtual projection of the president visiting every household in the nation on "First Tuesday." In between are more stories of first contact, including "The Children's Crusade," the titular subject of which is, depending on point of view, either much more hopeful or vastly more terrible than its namesake, for in it the income and enthusiasm of children are used to fund space missions. Reed turns to alien civilizations living together on an unimaginably vast ship in "River of the Queen" and "Night of Time" (the latter, Reed says in the afterword, may be the seed of a novel). Reed's stories afford mysterious and occasionally creepy glimpses of futures that are sometimes strange, sometimes totally familiar.
Regina SchroederCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
