A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear
reviewed by Alma A. Hromic
The authors, with a degree of apparent effortlessness that is astonishing, have pulled off not one but several very difficult things in this book. The first, and by no means the least, is the sometimes vexed collaboration issue. You I have read co-authored books in which you could have chopped out and parceled into neat little piles the bits that belonged to the various authors because the voices simply never gelled enough to produce perfect seamlessness. Here, it just doesn't even matter. It flows. The two authors work as one; it's not so much cooperation as a symbiosis. A job very well done.

Ice, Iron and Gold by S.M. Stirling
reviewed by Nathan Brazil
This is a collection of thirteen short stories, drawn from across the author's career as a professional writer. It's a diverse introduction for readers who have heard of his alternate history works, but have baulked at committing to an entire series. Helpfully, there are two stories included which afford a taste of the author's best known works; an original Emberverse novella, and an Islands In the Sea of Time story. Anyone who has wondered if they'd like the style and substance of those series should try what's on offer here.

The Wannoshay Cycle by Michael Jasper
reviewed by Sherwood Smith
The time is the near future, the place North America. The Internet is the Netstream, a kind of YouTube that has swallowed various communications media. Terrorist bombings are more frequent, there is a vicious street drug called Blur that turns addicts into monsters. The world, in short, has become a scary enough place before three alien space ships crash landed in the Midwest and over the border into Canada.

Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick
Performed by Scott Brick
an audio review podcast by AudioFile Magazine
It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignment -- find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!

Click on cover/link to get the MP3 podcast file.

Star Wars: Death Star by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry
reviewed by David Maddox
It is the most destructive battle station ever to threaten the Star Wars Universe. The Death Star's name says it all. A weapon of unimaginable proportion that can destroy entire planets in an instant. How could anything stand against such a construct? But how did this monstrosity come to be? And what of those that helped build it?

Vote for SF Site's Readers' Choice Awards for 2007
2007 marks the 10th anniversary of the annual SF Site Readers' Choice Best of the Year Awards. For the past 10 years, this has been the season when we solicit you, our faithful readers for your input on what you thought were the best books you've read in the past year. We'll grind your votes through our top-of-the-line super-secret vote-counting software, and post the results in February or early March. If you've forgotten what you chose in previous years, you can find them all linked at Best Read of the Year including The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch which was the top choice last year.

First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde
reviewed by David Soyka
In Woody Allen's "The Kugelmass Episode," the titular character, an unhappily married college professor, conducts an affair with one of the classic adulteresses of literature -- Madame Bovary. He is able to do this quite literally thanks to the magician Persky the Great, whose contraption can project Kugelmass into the book. The overt joke is that after Kugelmass tires of Bovary, he asks to be thrust into Portnoy's Complaint, but instead is accidentally inserted in a remedial Spanish textbook, with unexpected consequences.

The Wit & Wisdom of Discworld by Terry Pratchett
reviewed by Charlene Brusso
When an author has published "roughly four million words," as Stephen Briggs notes (in the introduction to this volume) Terry Pratchett has done, you certainly have reason to hope that some of them will be quotable. When the author is the inestimable satirist Terry Pratchett, you know for certain that many of those words are worth repeating, which is what this nicely constructed compilation does.

Jupiter, Issue 18
reviewed by Rich Horton
This is an SF magazine -- SF as in Science Fiction -- based in the UK. The magazine's appearance is modest: A-size sheets folded in half and saddle-stapled, black and white cover and no interior illustrations. But that's really not a drawback -- the presentation is very clean, the font nicely chosen and nicely sized. The focus is heavily on fiction -- there are five stories, plus one poem and one brief book review.

New Arrivals
compiled by Neil Walsh
Some of the new and forthcoming titles we'll look at this time include the latest from Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Joe Abercrombie, Christopher Golden, Barth Anderson, Terry Goodkind, Greg Keyes, Kelley Armstrong, Sherri S. Tepper, and many more.

Babylon 5.1
TV reviews by Rick Norwood
Rick offers his thoughts on where the strike by writers stands and what may happen before it ends. He also gives us a list of SF on TV in February.

Thief With No Shadow by Emily Gee
reviewed by Michael M Jones
Driven by the need to ransom her brother back from a vicious group of inhuman creatures known as salamanders, Melke steals a necklace whose value is greater than she could ever have imagined, for it's actually the key to breaking a deadly curse laid upon the sal Vere family. Caught between honor and desperation, Melke makes a deal with Bastion sal Vere and his sister, Liana: if they'll take care of her grievously wounded brother, she'll steal the necklace back from the salamanders, using her bizarre ability to become unseen.

Precious Dragon by Liz Williams
reviewed by Peter D. Tillman
The book opens slowly and somewhat confusingly, as the auhtor has to set three or four parallel story-trains into motion. Unlike the first two D.I. Chen books, you definitely shouldn't start here. Even readers who've read the first two book may be doing a bit of head-scratching (and toe-tapping) until she gets all her balls into the air. But then -- wow!