IN THE UPPER ROOM AND OTHER LIKELY STORIES

Bisson offers up a wide-ranging second story collection (after Bears Discover Fire) of cutting-edge SF. The future of virtual reality comes under his gaze here and there--as in his Orwellian "An Office Romance," in which, for office temp Ken678, even a furtive love affair with co-worker Mary97 is less compelling than the reassuring predictability of Microserf Office 6.9. Or the title piece of the collection, which offers week-long online vacations to the lonely, courtesy of Inward Bound, and for one pair of lovers, virtual eternity together. On an equally sinister note, "Macs" presents the ultimate Swiftian solution for victims of terrorism, with the opportunity to legally murder a cloned copy of the terrorist who killed their loved one ("Mac" for copies of "the real McCoy). In a lighter vein, there's "The Edge of the Universe," a tale delivered with a sugary dose of Southern charm that shows how a lovesick law student reverses universal entropy through one good whack with a big stick--or "an anti-entropic field reversal device." Those who relish presidential embarrassment will savor "Tell them they are full of sh*t and they should f*ck off," in which an obtuse future chief exec somehow manages to overlook a first contact with an annoyed group of aliens. In its promo, the publisher compares Bisson to Vonnegut and Harlan Ellison; that's not too much of a stretch.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Another collection from accomplished storysmith Bisson, his first since Bears Discover Fire (1993), composed of 16 ``likely stories,'' 19942000. Bisson has developed a strange obsession with sexy lingerie, which appears prominently in no less than four entries: the title piece, a VR vacation resort; a sexual con artist that turns out to be an alien plasma intelligence; a future where state-of-the-art computer workstations run Microserf Office; and an electronic telephone answering routine comes alive. Elsewhere, there's a clever Rudy Rucker pastiche; a time travel yarn involving distinguished physicist Richard Feynmann; clones; history that repeats at the touch of a button; an interstellar music probe; ``Tell Them They Are All Full of Shit and They Should Fuck Off'' features an alien contactalmost; a dead man trapped in a weird pocket universe; and a reworking of Arthur C. Clarke's ``The Nine Billion Names of God.'' Elsewhere, the universe starts to contract, and a mellow old man with Alzheimer's turns back into the sadistic psychopath he used to be. Other yarns remain indescribable. More playful, less thoughtful, than the earlier collection, but rousing entertainment, underwear, equations, entities and all. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.