(This is an HTML conversion of a plain text file last updated February 19, 2003. I was nearing the end of an intense reading period. It is a record of much of what I had read recently and why, not rising to the level of a set of reviews.)

Weird interdimensional adventure. Creepy people. Supports "all European SF authors are insane" thesis.

Contemporary horror/sex/supernatrual. Gratuitous vulgarity. Traces of Lovecraft. The author has asked that these books be forgotten, or at least not associated with his name, and I can't really blame him.

These books belong to the growing supernatural detective genre. Lighter than the Blake books, with no gratuitous sex and fewer vampires.

Read about a dozen pages. I'll get back to it eventually.

Decent old-fashioned juvenile SF. A child learns to travel into a higher dimension that drives adults insane by presenting their brains with unaccustomed inputs.

Good novel about a stratified alien society meeting a future India with a rejuvenated caste system. Interesting parallels between the cultures. Humans are an alien genetic engineering project. Should we be harvested or culled? Neither is all that appealing.

In the future the earth is freezing over. So are men and women, as far as the opposite sex is concerned. Lessons in how not to raise a child follow.

I don't remember the stories in this collection.

I loved it the first time. This time I see the flaws. A fun read, but I won't recommend it to others any more.

Something strange is happening with the children of a town. Transformation or transendence ensues. I'm not sure if I understood all of the plot.

Technology goes wrong. A mixture of insane researchers with tragic circumstances calls to mind The Doomsday Book, but it's not like that at all. I didn't expect the ending.

The Martians are back and they want our stomach juices!

There is a global nuclear war and almost everybody dies. Then there is a coup by the hard-line faction of the surviving military. Then there is a global nuclear war and everybody dies. A bit of a downer. The star of the book is a cool warship that wouldn't really be built.

I don't remember the stories in this anthology.

I read a few pages. I may return.

This was included in a list of unpleasant books because of a rape scene, but by that point in the book I didn't care at all about the characters and I felt nothing. Otherwise, role playing gamers get transported into the universe of their game. Did I mention it was written in the 1980s?

Garrett parodies, criticizes, and mocks SF authors and styles. The best stories are the Lensman parody and "Despoilers of the Golden Horde".

It is strange. Read this book. The political content could have been annoying, but it is not possible to take offense at this book. Eco-terrorists, genocidal plagues, a portable Ayn Rand, and an imperfect voice recognition algorithm combine for a fun read.

I don't remember the stories in this anthology.

This felt a bit different than the other Rankin farces, but it's still British comic fantasy.

AFutD still holds up. Deepness is good but weaker. Focus is an interesting idea. The ending was a surprise to me that may not have been adequately foreshadowed. Maybe some day I'll reread it to see.

I don't remember this book, which I did not finish reading.

(Note added 2008: This showed up again during my book reading project. I had no recollection of seeing it before.)

Collection of mostly good stories.

A cop is taken from 20th century Las Vegas to the far future. Things happen. Better than the title (or cover) would suggest, but not great.

Soldiers are conscripted and sent to fight an army of aliens who manage to pass as humans. Eventually the obvious explanation turns out to be true.

Didn't finish. Might return, but probably not.

Space miners collect subatomic quanta of goodness emitted by a black hole. Zahn makes it work. But I miss the Zahn of the early 1980s.

The sequel to Dragon Weather moves the plot along but is not a complete book. If I had known I would have waited for the last book in the trilogy.

Our world is linked to a world of 1950s science fiction and a world of genre fantasy. The protagonist spends the trilogy endlessly noting that things either are or are not like they are in fiction about similar circumstances. A heartless story is told. You can win the battle, but you will lose something in the process.

In Angel of Destruction, Matthews manages to tell a story of justice and revenge without on-stage torture. I haven't finished The Devil and Deep Space.

Aliens need humans because we are the only race psychologically capable of fighting the invading alien hordes. There are some fun parts, and some clever ideas (the AI in the combat suits is handled well) but the author commits the sin of explaining too much. A "sufficiently advanced" ray gun I can believe, but you can't shoot relativistic projectiles out of a handheld gun in an atmosphere.

Yuck! Gratuitous S&M drives out the plot for most of the book. At the end there is a rushed wrapup that doesn't connect well with the rest of the book. Shades of genre porn, where the plot is an excuse to set up sex scenes. Anita, of course, emerges more powerful than ever. I don't plan to read any more of these.

This is a time travel story, but not like any you have ever read. I had considered the genre mined out around the time of The Man Who Folded Himself and Dinosaur Beach.

Submarine warfare in space.

An overdramatic soap opera set on Mars. I broke on of my rules on this one and skipped ahead to the ending. The ending is no better than the beginning.

Unremarkable but not awful. A spaceship has failed and the crew must walk across the planet to get to safety. Didn't I already read this in "A Walk in the Sun"?

Several deserving people are on a train bound for hell.

A manned mission to Jupiter returns. A plague is devastating the New York area. This is not a coincidence.

I gave up on this one.

18th century woman is transported to the late 20th century. I didn't finish this.

Decent YA contemporary fantasy. I didn't finish the second book.

1980s near future cyberpunk dystopia. I didn't finish this but I may return.

The cover summarizes the book: "A boy and a dead cosmonaut, trapped in the brain of a giant whale!" It wasn't any better than it sounded, and I didn't finish.

Neel said I would love it or hate it, but I was just indifferent and stopped reading. I suspect the author's opinions would annoy me if I kept going, but they hadn't yet.

Late 19th century proto-SF by a Nobel Prize-winning biologist. It was fun to read the 19th century Spanish attitude towards women out loud to modern women, but the stories are mostly interesting for their historical value.

Adam Roberts is one of the new crop of British writers. In his first novel, men live on a vertical world. One inhabitant goes exploring and discovers interesting things. The author seemed to get tired of writing and stopped in the middle. Christopher Priest may have provided some inspiration.

Roberts' second novel is his best. An anarcho-communist group tricks a religious colonization fleet into letting them tag along. The two groups do not get along well. One person to whom I recommended this novel let out a loud sigh with every page until she gave up after about 50. You really do want to reach into the pages and give the narrators a hard slap, because they are deliberately blind to any way but their own.

In a utopian future society that has colonized a big part of the galaxy, there is a single maximum security prison, with a single prisoner. He is imprisoned for genocide. This is his story, as told to his pet rock.

Voodoo Pirates of the Carribean! Didn't finish, but plan to someday

I forget the stories in this collection.

Aliens take over earth. Not everybody likes this idea. Typical themes and execution for pre-stroke Laumer.

A mobile city moves endlessly across a strange world on rails. It turns out there is a reason for this. There is even a reason why the inhabitants are human and speak French.