This anthology, edited by Martin Greenberg, showcases several tales told about Superman - arguably the most popular and well-known comic book character ever.

I picked up this anthology at a bookstore, but after finishing the book, I have some reservations about it. While several of the stories are nice, they're a bit too bland for my taste. Many of them are just sort of there; they're not really bad stories, all things considered, but there's nothing really special about them, nothing that sets them apart. They're just average, run-of-the-mill stories about Superman doing various good deeds. If you're a die-hard Superman fan, maybe that's enough. For me, it left me wanting a good deal more.

If you're a big Superman fan, and you simply MUST have anything written about the character....maybe this book is for you. Otherwise, I'd recommend against picking up this book. It's nothing horrible, it's just, unfortunately, quite average. And when there are other, better books out there written about the Superman character (such as Roger Stern's adaption of the "Death of Superman, or even certain comic book graphic novels / trade paperback such as the excellent Paul Dini / Alex Ross work "Superman: Peace on Earth" or the wonderful Jeph Loeb / Tim Sale miniseries, "A Superman for All Seasons"), I can't see justifying purchasing this particular anthology.

This is a wonderful collection of misc. Superman stories. As a die hard Superman fan and a serious collector of superman comics, I am familiar with MANY Superman stories. These are definately very good ones. The best one is definately "Excerpt From The Diary Of Dr. Morris Funkelstein" by Mike Resnick. It tells the story of Clark Kent attempting to enlist in the military to fight the Nazis. If you are a fan of Superman stories these should be added to your collection.

Arthurian fiction in general is steeped with awful fiction, and short story collections are a mixed bag. Let me simply say that I was left unimpressed - and often disgusted - by the stories in here. There are some good ones, but they are few and far between. (Do not be led astray by the pretty cover art! It is pretty, but that's almost all it has going for it)

We start with an icky poem by Jane Yolen; then a groanworthy Mercedes Lackey story "The Cup and the Cauldron" -- it stars girls and yes, has more Christian-pagan stuff if you're as sick of that as I am; an incoherent Andre Norton story "That Which Overfloweth"; Marion Zimmer Bradley's equally groanworthy feminist-Goddess-server "Chalice of Tears." We hit something far better in Diana L. Paxson's "Feast of the Fisher King," which is both well-written and entertaining, as well as being in play format; also Brad Strickland's enjoyable elf-fantasy-Arthurian story "Gift of Gilthiliad."

Then it's back into "groan" territory with Ilona Ouspenskaya's gypsy tale "Curse of the Romany," where you wonder what-the-heck-does-this-have-to-do-with-it? James S. Dorr's "Dagda" is pretty; Gene Wolfe's odd "Sailor who Sailed After the Sun" is another where you wonder what the relevance is; Lee Hoffman's indifferently-written western-fantasy "Water" takes a long time to get to the point, as does Alan Dean Foster's "What You See..." and Richard Gilliam's "Storyville, Tennessee" and Jeremiah Phipps' "Hell-Bent for Leather" (are you seeing a pattern of irrelevance here?)

Lisa Lepovetsky pens another icky poem; Orson Scott Card's "Atlantis" stretches indefinitely; Dean Wesley Smith's "Invisible Bars" is pretty amusing; Janny Wurts bores and annoys with "That Way Lies Camelot"; Kristine Katherine Rusch's "Hitchhiking across an Ancient Sea" is a pale, pale short story; Lawrence Watt-Evans's story has a good idea, but is poorly written; Lionel Fenn's "The Awful Truth in Arthur's Barrow" is just plain bizarre, as is Brian M. Thompson's "Reunion." Margo Skinner redeems the poetry angle with "Quest Now"; Neil Gaiman's "Chivalry" is enchanting; Bruce D. Arthurs is weird again in "Falling to the Edge of the End of the World", same with Rick Wilber's "Greggie's Cup."

As you can see, this mixed bag tends toward the dull, irrelevant, pretentious and just poorly written. Half the stories seem to have the Grail thrown in (if it's there at all) just as an afterthought. Except for Margo Skinner's poem, the poetry all stinks; only a few of the stories retain the beauty and prose that one espects to see in an Arthurian story. When I buy a book classified as Arthurian fiction, I WANT Arthurian fiction; I do not want stories about pregnant gypsies, fantasy westerns, or genies.

There are much better collections out there, however bright the bright spots in this are. Read "The Doom of Camelot" and the upcoming "Legends of the Pendragon" if you want good Arthurian short stories.

The Gaiman story in this collection is brilliant. There are other bright spots as well, particularly the contributions from Diana Paxson and Alan Dean Foster. Good, fun stuff.

I found this book at a used-book store in Wisconsin and bought it solely for one of its newer stories -- the original Ender's Game novella, by Orson Scott Card -- later turned into an award-winning novel. However, in reading the other stories, I found that some of the other stories are quite good. The authors are your basic sci-fi group -- Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, etc. -- and some newer ones, like Card. The stories themselves are good science fiction, if not particularly deep -- none of them really stick with you as 'great literature', some of them -- like the Asimov story -- have a gimmick that can carry the story well. Generally this is an anthology for those who are already fans of science fiction war stories -- a small population, but one who would enjoy this book.

This book presents us to several short stories written by MZB with her incredible imagination, showing many different worlds, going from Earth to Darkover. You can read one story telling about the renunciants organization(Darkover), another one is about Lythande (a blue star magician with a secret). In my opinion, the best short story in this book, is the one about the Centauru's Children - where having a baby is the same to a death sentence to the mother... Well everyone can decide what is the most interesting of the 15 short stories of this book and vote in it.

I enjoyed this first book of the series, but not the second or third volumes. If you like cats and are thinking that these are going to be cute stories with the cats as the protagonists, you may or may not like this series. The cat doesn't always "win" and sometimes the stories in the series are only peripherally related to cats.

This book includes few horror stories, which may interest you. The stories in here are not much of a horror story, but more of a suspense. As the scenes reveal you will be anticipating for the story to go on, but you will find youself saying, "HUH? " -at least that's what i did. sureley this isn't a story written by Stephen King. But for those who are interested in horror itself, try it. Who knows if you will have a different opinion than me.

You don't really get the sense when reading "A Century of Mystery Stories 1980-1989" that these were the best short stories in the genre written during that particular decade. Rather, the book reads like these were the best stories the publishers could get the rights for. The husband and wife editing team of Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller are first rate mystery writers themselves (and each contribute one story to this collection), and they have come up with a few dandys. Loren Estlemen's "Greektown," for example, is among his best Amos Walker shorts, while Pronzini's own "Stacked Deck" may his best ever short story. Lawrence Block is rightfully included, though he produced many stories in the 1980s better than "As Good as the Rest," which was included. Several of the stories truly don't rank with the best, and at least one, Clark Howard's "The Dakar Run," barely qualifies as a mystery story.

At a mere 310 pages of text, the book is also far too short to cover an entire decade. Overall, this is a fairly undistinguished collection of shorts, despite the book's grandiose title.

Olympic contests between the Soviet bloc and America were often exploited for propaganda purposes, the outcome of an athletic event supposedly saying something significant about the victor's country. This 1984 anthology, from the height of the Cold War, has several stories built around that notion.

Tom Sullivan's "The Mickey Mouse Olympics" and Nicholas V. Yermakov's "A Glint of Gold" both feature Soviet and American Olympic athletes genetically modified for their events. Sullivan plays the notion for genuine laughs. Yermakov's story is much more serious and shows the price the competitors pay as propaganda pawns. He also works in a defection subplot.

Walter F. Moudy's "The Survivor" abandons all together the notion of mere symbolic combat in the Olympics. In his future, the USSR and USA each put 100 man combat teams into the arena, and they don't come out till one side is annihilated. It's all televised, of course. Moudy is not content to just do a story of future gladiatorial matches. He also delves into what the combat conditioning does to the soldier, what kind of person it produces. It isn't idle speculation, either, because all the survivors of an Olympic War Game get to do whatever they want with no legal sanctions. It's one of the highpoints of the anthology.

Not all of the stories deal with future Olympics; the general theme is competition.

In the case of the dentist in Piers Anthony "Getting Through University", basis for his novel PROSTHO PLUS, the competition is to get accepted to galactic University, School of Dentistry. Anthony creates an entertaining story out of the complexities of dentistry on the galaxy's aliens.

Other highpoints are Norman Spinrad's "The National Pastime", "The Wind from the Sun" by Arthur C. Clarke, and "Prose Bowl" from the team of Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg. Spinrad's story tells of the invention of Combat Football and its fans very violent enthusiasm for it. It's a 1973 story but hasn't dated that much, especially since wrestling promoters now talk of starting their own football league. Clarke's story combines hard science and melancholy in a solar sail race. Also titled "Sunjammer", it was probably the first story to use the idea of solar sails. "Prose Bowl" makes hack writing into an hilarious spectator sport, but it also says some serious things about writers and their audiences.

On the decidely low end of the anthology are Jack Vance's "The Kokod Warriors", about aliens who fight elaborate combats and the humans who bet on them, and Charles Nuetzel's "A Day for Dying", one of those stories with a decadent society of televised bloodsports and an unconvincing revolution to topple it. George Alec Effinger's "From Downtown at the Buzzer", about some aliens fascination with basketball, is marred by a vague ending.

In the entertaining-but-nothing-special category are the rest of the anthology's works. George R.R. Martin's "Run to Starlight" has aliens playing football against humans. The aliens turn out to have a more realistic view of the games' ultimate significance than the humans. Bob Shaw's "Dream Fighter" is another one of those stories where combatants assault each other mentally with horrifying symbols. Suzette Haden Elgin's "For the Sake of Grace" is a feminist story about a poetry contest on a world with an Arab-type culture and the young girl who dares to enter it despite the horrifying consequences of failing. Robert Sheckley's "The People Trap" is a witty, grim tale of a race for land in an overpopulated world. "Why Johnny Can't Speed" by Alan Dean Foster is another combat on the highways story. It was possibly a response to Harlan Ellison's classic "Along the Scenic Route". "Nothing in the Rules" by L. Sprague de Camp is about the chaos caused by a mermaid entering a swimming match. "The Olympians" by Mike Resnick is not, despite the title, a future Olympics tale. The Olympians are an elite group of humans who specialize in humiliating aliens in athletic competitions.

There are enough good stories here to justify taking a look at this anthology.

Robots in Judgment was editor Asimov's preferred title for this anthology since the stories cover more ground than just robot detectives.

Oh, there are robot detectives here all right. Asimov's famous human and robot detective team of Lije Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw are here for their only short story appearance, "Mirror Image." The murderous mobile law enforcer of Ron Goulart's "Into the Shop" captures the same criminal -- again and again. A robotic Sherlock Holmes, his Cockney-rhyming robot dog, and a Watson of mysterious origins investigate the case of a possibly mad industrialist on a future greenhouse Earth in Edward Wellen's "Voiceover".

Wellen also gives us an interesting, proto-cyberpunk story, "Finger of Fate", with its hard-boiled, if immobile, computer who prowls databases and public records to solve his cases. The machines of Harry Harrison's "Arm of the Law" and Harlan Ellison's and Ben Bova's "Brillo" are not exactly detectives but robot cops, and each must deal with police corruption and the difference between theoretical law enforcement and carrying a badge in the real world of humans. "Brillo" also deals with bluecollar fears of being replaced by machines. The tin stars of Larry Niven's famous "Cloak of Anarchy" supervise a Free Park where anything except physical violence goes -- until an artist decides to put his political ideas into effect and disable them. Stephen R. Donaldson's "Animal Lover" is a cyborg federal cop sent to investigate a hunting preserve with an oddly high body count of hunters.

Stories that don't feature robotic investigators and law enforcers are Christopher Anvil's tedious "The King's Legions", a tale of political machinations and a nearly-magical, sentient spaceship. Technological innovations since its original publication date of 1963 make Larry Eisenberg's "The Fastest Draw" a fully realistic story. In it, a man obsessively tries to make his fast draw competitions with a gunfighter simulcra more realistic. Harry Harrison's "The Powers of Observation" is a predictable but involving tale of espionage and androids in a Cold War Yugoslavia. "Faithfully Yours" by Lou Tabakow, about a convict fleeing some implacable retribution, is flawed by an irrelevant beginning and an ending that stops at the point where things get interesting. The strength of Donald Wismer's "Safe Harbor" is undercut by the rather unbelievable motivation of a central character who opts out of a world largely automated and administered with the help of "bugs", skull implants that monitor health and track their users in case they need emergency aid. Henry Slesar's "Examination Day" is famous but doesn't really work. Its surprise ending is probably there to make a satirical point but about what, exactly, is unclear.

Robert Sheckley's "The Cruel Equations", though, is a clever and funny story about an inflexible guard robot and the man who has forgotten his password but must pass by it -- or die on a desert world.

Not every story is perfect but, with the exception of Slesar's and Anvil's, they're all worth reading, and readers should, especially with the Wellen stories, find some overlooked gems here.

This book is not exactly very bad, but it is quite weak. A shallow story, weak characters and not well written. I had the impression that the author, opposite to the REAL Clancy, didn't alwyays know what he's talking about. Dear guys at RED STORM: I'm getting tired of books with Tom Clancy on the cover but not inside. I think that even Mr. Clancy didn't like the book too much. Look at the editorial. In his "Op-Center" series he always thanked his ghost-writer for the "invaluable contribution" to the book. This time, in POLITIKA, he only thanked the ghost-writer for the "valuable contribution." Quite a down-turn, isn't it? Mr. Clancy, WRITE another book on your own and stop launching boring spin-off series!END

//From an unacknowleged letter to the publisher about the paperback edition// Page Erratum Comment 18 Bashkir...Far Eastern I think you mean "Siberian"; the Bashkirs are not in the Far East. If "Bashkir" is not an ethnic Bashkir, why does he have this name? (There is a famous pianist with the name Bashkirov) 30 Romual Perhaps you mean the Polish first name Romual'd (the apostrophe indicating the Russian soft sign, that being how the name is spelled in Russian) 43 Bishir yetso Neither I nor another experienced Russian linguist have any idea what this means. 62 vor v. zakone The period is not necessary (it's not a middle name!); rather than "godfather", such a person is more like the Mafia "made man" or, simply, "professional (as opposed to petty) thief", who subscribes to a code. See "Soviet Prison Camp Speech", by Meyer Galler, based largely on Solzhenitsyn's early works, for an excellent reference on this subject 110 Republican convention ?the previous summer"; in 1998? 181 Gorbachev He wasn't president in 1992 235 MIDI MIDI is a digital protocol governing the transmission of musical data between sound modules/synthesizers and computers or other sound modules/ synthesizers 261 Zgranitsa etc. Za granitsa (SIC) is a prepositional expression; no native Russian speaker would use it as the subject of a sentence like an English speaker might. 337 Mercedes Wold a rabid Russian nationalist/ Communist be seen in one of these? Bad image. . 343 Komerade ??? You mean "tovarishch"? "Komerad" is what German soldiers traditionally say when about to surrender 364 IL-76 This is a cargo plane, not a passenger plane. Although it is used to carry paratroopers, they don't sit in "passenger seats" any more than US airborne units do.

Politika is a book that has an intriguing plot, with different exciting events woven

into it. Tom Clancy, in this book, braves waters no author has journeyed into before,

adding in terrorists, Mafia intrigues, and even the DEATH of Boris Yeltsin, leaving

Russian factions battling for control of the world power, and leaving one important

government businessman in the middle of the whole thing. Roger Gordian, is the man

behind Government and military technology. His corporation is attacked by Terrorists

and Mafia Russian factions. At the head of this secret war, is a Russian Gangster

known only as Penchanko , who has employed a world class assassin known as

Gregor . Roger Gordian must strike back using a covert team called SWORD, and is

forced to watch the new millennium turn into a terrorist attack as Times Square on

January 1st, 2000 is turned into sulking ruin...