NOVA 2

Spanking, professional, and mostly predictable. Editor Harrison highlights the two themes of environmental anxieties and self-parody; in the former, concern must foreshorten imagination, since the swarming, smog-smothered, media-tyrannized futures of Frank M. Robinson, Brian Aldiss, and Ed Bryant are hardly extrapolations; and most of the latter are trifles. Still, Poul Anderson turns a fine O. Henry ending around electronic mind control, and on the parodic side, John Sladek's ""The Steam Driven Boy"" is consummate. Only two stories really break new ground: Naomi Mitchison's venture into the double mind of a hand-reared raven, and Brazilian Andre Carneiro's ""Darkness,"" a fable from the at once simply human and mystico-epistemological realm of the South American imagination.