THE JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARDS

A better-late-than-never continuation of the defunct New Voices series, which presented stories by Campbell award nominees (for "best new writer in science fiction"); these four originals and one reprint are by the 1977 nominees. Winner C. J. Cherryh has two entries, one a variation on the Sisyphus myth (the reprint), the other a novella about a castaway on a world without animals who develops problems with his robot and with an insubstantial alien. Jack L. Chalker offers a brisk but wobbly retread about an alien history-gathering machine that changes those who enter it. M. A. Foster describes a love affair amid a bleak, machine-like future urban landscape. And Carter Scholz applies catastrophe theory to the individual in a smooth, dense, non-sf tale. Painstaking, thoughtful work, but largely tepid and drab.