Wynne Jones, Deep Secret (2014)

Diana Wynne Jones, Deep Secret. Tor Books, 2014. Pp. 414. ISBN 978-0-7653-3807-5. $16.99.

Reviewed by Cait Coker

Tor has released a reissue of Diana Wynne Jones’s 1997 novel Deep Secret for American audiences with new artwork, this time sans the cartoonish centaurs that were the hallmarks of other covers. The new cover would seem abstract if Jones’s work weren’t so iconic and if the text itself so tied up in the idea of traveling to other worlds (not quite as obviously stepping through actual doors as Howl’s Moving Castle), but—well, that’s the point of stepping into a good book, isn’t it? Deep Secret carries multiple levels, not the least of which is the “deep secret” referenced in the title itself, but for genre readers, the meta discussions of books and the time spent at the science fiction convention are what will push this book from “cute” to “must read.”

Rand, Anthem (1936)

Ayn Rand, Anthem. Cassell & Co, 1936. Pp. 105. (various editions)

A feminist review by Paul Wilks

Anthem is a dystopian novella by Ayn Rand first published in 1938. It is set in a devolved and semi-primitive future society, beneath an oppressive ruling body known as the ‘World Council’. The protagonist is a male named Equality 7-2521 and the novel tells of his life and subsequent disenfranchisement with society. The novella itself is essentially an early exploration of Rand’s own philosophical ideas regarding individualism and subsequent criticism of the opposing ‘collectivism’. These ideas would be realised in greater depth by Rand’s later novels; namely The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but Anthem demonstrates a brief critique that relates to her country of birth, a socialist Soviet Russia.

Amis/Conquest, Spectrum 2 (1962)

Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest (edd.), Spectrum 2: A second science fiction anthology. Gollancz, 1962.

Reviewed by Djibril al-Ayad.

This is the second of the Spectrum anthologies edited by Amis and Conquest, in which they present a handful of high-quality science fiction stories originally published in the late 1940s or early '50s. These two writers are both known in-genre and respected in literary circles, and part of the agenda behind these anthologies (explicitly recounted in the introduction) is hinted at in the epigraph:
‘Sf’s no good,’ they bellow till we’re deaf.
‘But this looks good.’—’Well then, it’s not sf.’
This volume includes stories by authors as legendary as Aldiss, Asimov, Dick, and van Vogt, as well as luminaries whose names may be less familiar to twenty-first century readers. Pieces range from visionary and thrilling, to silly and dated, but all are important examples of their type, and fit as well into the literature of the mid-twentieth century as they do into the history of the genre. I picked up a battered copy of the Pan paperback reprint of this volume from the £1 clearance shelf in a London bookstore, and this review will be one reader's personal reaction to each of the eight stories within.

Hamilton, Reality Dysfunction (1997)

Peter F Hamilton, The Reality Dysfunction. Pan Books, 1997. Pp. 1225. ISBN 0330340328. £8.99.

Reviewed by Bruce Stenning

I bought this book over a decade ago, and when I started to read it I got less than ten pages in before deciding not to carry on. I cannot remember quite what put me off, but something did. It sat unread on my bookshelf all these years, until eventually I decided to give it another chance.

At over 1200 printed pages, this is space opera at its most rambling: It is quite a chunk of text to read. The story meanders into the horror genre, at times, and then back out again. It tentatively touches on religion, politics, and the supernatural, but only in a very superficial way.