This was one of my favorite books when I was a kid just starting out to read Science Fiction. It's sort of like one of those "real" nature books with drawings, habitats, and biological information, but it's all about aliens from major Science Fiction authors. You figure the authors of this book have got to have a lot of information to put something like this together. For those of a puerile nature (or those who read a lot of Niven's rishartha), they even have some alien species' mating habits. In the middle there is a scale diagram of all of the aliens' sizes which was my first exposure to the wonderful world of the metric system. Buy it, read it, in will enrich your Science Fiction library

The premise of this book is: The authors have taken various characters from various science fiction works and have visualy recreated them and write about some of their culture from what is in the books. This is one of the best Science Fiction art books I've ever read!!! and if you've read some of the books that these aliens are recreated from it's even better!!!! Colorful pictures, explanations, and even a couple of pages showing the comparative sizes of each of the aliens!!!!

What a great book! Barlowe is a wonderful painter of aliens. I have been looking for this book for years, ever since I saw it in a science magazine. Some of the best illustrations in the book are those of the "Cryer", the "Old One", the "Pnume", the "Medusan", the "Sirian", and the "Overlords". The only problem with this book is that the pictures make you want to read the books they are from, and 99% of these books are out-of-print! Urghhhhhh!!!!

'A Reader's Guide to Science Fiction' was an excellent book when it was first published over 20 years ago. Updating the book would be an excellent (and badly needed) project for Mr. Searles, et al, or some other sf/f lover.

The authors do a good job of explaining the strengths (and weaknesses) of each writer as well as covering their major works. Also at the end of each writer's section is included a "If you like the works of Fred Smith, try these writers..."

Many of the writers included in the book are all but forgotten in the year 2002. Also many sf/f talents from the past 20 years are sorely missing, including Nancy Kress, Connie Willis, Karen Joy Fowler, Michael Swanwick, Orson Scott Card, and a multitude of others. If this book were updated, it would fly off the shelves. Anybody listening?