NEW DIMENSIONS: Science Fiction #8

Somehow the dimensions don't seem as new as they did a few years ago. There are some real clunkers here, like Daniel P. Dern's noisy crowings over the notion of male pregnancy and Donnon Call Jeffers, Jr.'s elaborate, pseudo-Miltonic rigamarole about a musical starship. But most of Silverberg's harvest is more than good. The best efforts seem to center on the city and its future descendants: artificial environments enclosing fools' paradises or civilizations outlived by once-appropriate technologies. Gregor Hartmann's ""Sun-1"" brilliantly charts the deadly power games of a vast enclosed colony trying to contain and modulate the radiation of an entire star. Robert R. Olsen's excellent ""Metal"" depicts the defense of a dead city by robot warfare. Greg Bear's longish, ingenious story of humanity in exile from its own creations has much to say of cities and their builders. Jack Dann portrays a society whose delusions of control through acceptance are crowned by a euphoric fantasy-glorification of death. Other attractive contributions from Jeff Hecht, Michael Bishop and Craig Strete, and J. A. Lawrence--and a fine, chilling tale of mental and physical contagions from Christopher Priest.