New York Blues by Eric Brown
reviewed by Victoria Strauss
In this 2nd installment of the Virex Trilogy, set in a near-future North America catastrophically altered by nuclear disaster and climate change, beautiful actress Vanessa Artois makes the trek up to private eye Hal Halliday's grotty second-floor office-cum-apartment. She wants Hal to find her kid sister, Canada, who vanished several days ago. But, as Vanessa is laying out the facts of Canada's disappearance, a deadly beam of laser fire lances through the open window, missing her by millimeters.

Redsine Ten edited by Trent Jamieson and Garry Nurrish
reviewed by Lisa DuMond
As anyone who has read an issue can tell you, this series is a dead cert for quality speculative, fantasy, and horror fiction. A blend of the best of Australia and the rest of the world, the stories deliver amazement, sorrow, and a generous share of unsettling afterimages. Not to mention an in-depth interview conducted by the talented Nick Gevers. The magazine can hold its own with any other fiction periodical in or out of the genre.

SF Site News
compiled by Steven H Silver
Every day, items of interest to you arrive in our email. Our bi-monthly format doesn't lend itself to daily updates. However, this is a small inconvenience to our Contributing Editor Steven H Silver. He's begun a new column which will fill you in on recent news in science fiction. We'll be updating the page as he sends in new items.

The Fall of the Kings by Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman
reviewed by William Thompson
Basil St. Cloud, Doctor of History and candidate for the Horn Chair, is the University's most vocal advocate for the study of the ancient kings, believing their legacy has in part become clouded by the passage of time and the absence of reliable texts following The Fall of the Kings. In searching through old archives, St. Cloud has come to suspect that not all the kings were tyrants, nor the wizards that supported them simply charlatans whose reputation for sorcery was used as mere smoke screen to prop up support for the king. He has begun to conclude that there may be more to their story than long-held tenants of current scholarship, or the probable biases and extrapolation of historians who wrote long after events had occurred.

Babylon 5.1
TV reviews by Rick Norwood
Rick offers his thoughts on what to watch in January including Enterprise and Farscape. He also tells us why the top twenty TV shows are all either very smart or very dumb.

Deceptions by Susan Sizemore
reviewed by Cindy Lynn Speer
Olympias, who once ruled at the side of Philip of Macedon, who gave birth to Alexander the Great, is a powerful woman who history has not always portrayed in the most positive of lights. Centuries later, she finds herself in another power struggle, as the Enforcer of Washington D.C. A vampire of terrible power, she is responsible for ensuring the safety of her charges. A secret government project is threatening to expose their existence.

Apprentice Fantastic edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis
reviewed by Rich Horton
The premise here is that each of the 13 stories are told about apprentices. As the stories are all fantasies, and as the most traditional fantastic trade to emphasize teaching is sorcery, most of the stories feature sorcerer's apprentices of one variety or another, though none of them is a retelling of the famous story.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
a DVD review by Trent Walters
Some dozen or so years after reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the DVD of the BBC TV version (will linguistics hold nothing but acronymous nouns in the future?) finally clarifies Trent's initial reading experience. He remembers laughing at one point, but which point he doesn't remember. Watching the six-part series, the one-liner that made him laugh out loud came when a planet's worth of middlemen (hairdressers, marketers, and financial men) have crash-landed on a new planet and crowd around a hot tub for the 573rd meeting to discuss what they intend to do about colonization.

Sharamitaro by Jonathan M. Rudder
reviewed by Rob Kane
We are introduced to the youth Brendys. A good-natured teenager, he is son of the HorseMaster Brendyk, an equally good-natured man. Brendyk's nature and desire to help has led him to take in numerous wanderers and homeless souls over the years, providing them with a room and productive work to do at the ranch. When one day a man and his son appear, hungry and homeless, Brendyk does not hesitate to bring them in like the countless others before. But something is different this time.

Tathea by Anne Perry
reviewed by Cindy Lynn Speer
In one night, Ta-Thea, empress of the Shinabari, loses everything... her husband and son are all killed in their beds by their own rebelling people. She only escapes death because one loyal man helps her flee into the desert. With only a handful of jewels taken from her dead husband's body, she journeys to the land where her mother came from. She is welcomed by her long-lost family, but she has no idea what to do with herself.

The Golden Fool by Robin Hobb
reviewed by William Thompson
Like a spider slowly spinning its web -- a strand spun here, a thread strung there -- Robin Hobb's story slowly evolves until, almost unaware, the reader is ensnared. Since Farseer, it has almost become almost a signature, tales that increasingly are pinned upon foundations gradually laid, plot lines whose long development are not immediately apparent. There is a lingering on detail, a charting of the author's world and a fascination with its characters that in its emerging evolution creates a physical and social landscape more complete and less intrusive than is typical of epic fantasy, without recourse to gaudy display or dependence upon flashy magic and over-wrought swordsmanship.

Morgawr by Terry Brooks
reviewed by Cindy Lynn Speer
Sen Dunsidan's visitor moves like a whisper of night, his power as frightening as it is full of possibilities. He is Morgawr, mentor of the Isle Witch, and he wants a fleet of the best airships ever made, and crews to fly them. Dunsidan is reluctant, but the promise of becoming Prime Minister, his two closet rivals to be dead by morning, is too much temptation. He finds himself in a pact with Morgawr.

The Two Towers
a movie review by Rick Norwood
The Two Towers takes far greater liberties with J.R.R. Tolkien than did The Fellowship of the Ring. They reduce Gimli to comic relief. His friendship with Legolas should be a major theme in the story. That only works if Gimli and Legolas meet as equals. Here, Gimli is reduced to the role of side-kick.

Thorn Ogres Of Hagwood by Robin Jarvis
reviewed by Martin Lewis
The werlings are a race of small shape-shifting creatures who live almost forgotten in a small corner of the ancient Hagwood. Gamaliel Tumpin is a young werling who has reached the age where he is to be inducted in their grand tradition of transmogrification. His first task is to master the simplest change; from werling to mouse. To do this, his group goes out into the wood to study the mice, under the guidance of Finnen Lufkin, a brilliant shape-shifter a few years older than them.

New Arrivals
compiled by Neil Walsh
Highlights in this batch of arrivals include new novels from Graham Joyce, Steven Brust, Sara Douglass, Simon R. Green, Paul Kearney, and several impressive new anthologies.

Darkest Heart by Nancy A. Collins
reviewed by Cindy Lynn Speer
Sonja Blue is not happy. She has been a vampire for over thirty years, and she hasn't gotten over her anger at her fate. She has since channeled that anger into two areas. One, tracking and killing vampires, and two, fighting The Other, the vampire inside herself. It is not always easy. The Other is inside her head, she can take control at any time, forcing Sonja to do the very things she hates. It also makes it harder for her to get close to anyone.

Star Trek: Nemesis
a movie review by Rick Norwood
Rick is a Trekie from way back, so he enjoyed the movie. All they have to do is play the music from the original Trek and he's hooked. But if you are neither a Trekie or a Trekker, but one of the vast untrekked, then all the movie has to offer you is a pretty good space battle at the end. Among current films, it is not as bad as My Big Fat Greek Wedding, not as good as 8 Mile.

The Center Cannot Hold by Harry Turtledove
reviewed by David Soyka
While historians traditionally focus on major trends and events -- the wars, the political debates, emergent religious doctrines, technological advancements -- and the exceptional figures who shape them, one branch of scholarship takes a different approach in examining how these various historical eddies affect the everyday lives of "regular" people. The workers, the soldiers, the families whose lives are dramatically changed or disrupted -- sometimes immediately, sometimes incrementally -- because of the larger social, political and scientific upheavals.

Weird Scenes Inside the Godmind by Douglas A. Mackey
reviewed by Georges T. Dodds
The book has Ronan doing a Edgar Cayce exercise in channeling a presumably Dick-like author's posthumous masterpiece, Mark getting involved in a play with a woman who is actually a good old fashioned BEM (Bug-eyed Monster), Mary Anna, an unstable therapist who becomes a homicidal whore while possessed by the evil entity Da, and Cora a nouveau-vampire who is reaching new spiritual levels through her Tibetan guru. These four misfits are supposed to unify in some transcendent state when the apocalypse comes...

Children of the Shaman by Jessica Rydill
reviewed by Steven H Silver
Annat is a Wanderer adolescent whose ailing aunt has dropped her and her brother, Malchik, off with their long-missing father, Yuda. Although currently employed as a guard for the railway, Yuda is about to take a job in a frontier village as an healer, using his skills as a shaman. At the same time, he will coach Annat in her own abilities as a Shaman.