MORE AMAZING STORIES

The world's oldest science fiction magazine has died and been resurrected more times than most Dungeons & Dragons characters. So it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that although this trade paperback was touted as "the very last issue of Amazing Stories!"--well, it wasn't. After the initial hardcover of this collection was released in 1998, Amazing Stories was bought by Pokémon makers Wizards of the Coast, which revived Hugo Gernsback's venerated SF periodical and kept it alive until the summer of 2000.

But even though this collection of just over 20 short pieces wasn't the magazine's last gasp, some of them prove superior to the Star Wars, Star Trek, and Babylon 5 fiction that followed in the Wizards years. Editor Kim Mohan (who stayed on for the revival) collected then-new works from the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Benford, and Howard Waldrop, as well as other shorts from less-established writers. Of particular note is a Robert Silverberg-Philip K. Dick tandem: a 1953 Amazing reprint of Dick's Noah's Ark-inspired "The Builder," followed by Silverberg's praise and ruminations in "Quality and Quantity: The Short Fiction of Philip K. Dick."

Aside from Noah's Ark, quite a few other ideas get tossed around--everything from divine androgyny to time travel to the parameters of dream flight (the last being the title of a piece by Arlan Andrews Sr.), all at an easily digestible length and most matching the quality of previous Mohan-edited collections. --Paul Hughes