FULL SPECTRUM 3
by Lou Aronica & edited by Amy Stout & Betsy Mitchell
Twenty-two new variations ranging—as the title promises—from hard sf to the supernatural, and sometimes successfully blending them. Outstanding examples of the latter include Karen Joy Fowler's long story about voodoo and drugs, Michael Bishop's extended parable exploring apartheid and physics, and Ursula K. LeGuin's tale of space habitat refugees who hallucinate the ruined Earth they've fled. The finest entry of all is Marcos Donnelly's ``Tracking the Random Variable''—a sparkling, witty study of statistics, obsession, and infidelity. Also, interestingly, two translations appear, one from French (descent into madness) and one from German (resurrection). While more variable in quality, the remainder should provide sufficient scope—ecological parables, ghosts, sculpture, helpful aliens, psychic powers, witches, mathematical puzzles, werebeasts, and more—to tempt even readers turned off by the bland, dull, writers'-workshop uniformity so characteristic of short stories in recent years.