AMAZING STORIES
edited by Kim Mohan
Amazingly enough, it's nearly 70 years since the legendary Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories. This sampler anthology comprises eight original and six reprinted pieces, the latter including the late Robert Bloch's 1984 essay ``Fantastic Adventures with Amazing,'' which forms an appropriate afterword; Bloch's 1953 story ``The Pin'' also appears. Of recent vintage, and familiar to Amazing subscribers, will be Ursula K. LeGuin's stunning exploration of future physics and reality, ``Dancing to Ganam''; Alan Dean Foster's virtual-reality shuffle, ``Hellado''; Gregory Benford's ``A Tapestry of Thought''; and Thomas M. Disch's ``The Burial Society.'' The original entries include Paul Di Filippo's ``Linda and Phil,'' in which Philip K. Dick, married to Linda Ronstadt and working in a hardware store in another reality, still struggles to promote social justice and change things for the better. Ronstadt also appears, coincidentally or not, in William Barton's space program as it should have been (``In Saturn Time''). And a typical piece of R.A. Lafferty lunacy, ``Happening in Chosky Bottoms,'' contrasts strangely with ``Maskal,'' Janet Berliner Gluckman and George Guthridge's horrid Nazi alternate reality. An agreeable blend of the old and the new: definitely worth a try for Amazing regulars and short-story fans.