I've been reading the graphic novels in order, and this is the best so far. Following the awful "JLA: Rock of Ages", "JLA: Srength in Numbers" is comprised of a number of shorter stories; each of which is filled with adventure and soul. Yes, these stories have a soul, or a spirit. One of which even brought tears to my eyes. I can't say any other comic in recent memory has had that effect on me. Zauriel is a great addition to the JLA team. Wonder Woman is under used. But as a whole, these stories worked to entertain and inspire. What else can you ask for?

Let me first preface this review with saying that I am probably the only one who hated Keith Giffen, et al's former version of the JLA. To me the JLA was never a joke and it was more than just a comic. They were, and continue to be, the World's Greatest Super Heroes. Strength in numbers impressed me enough to return to the world of comics after a 10 year absence and am I glad I came back! Three truly great writers--Waid, Morrison and the extremely underrated Christopher Priest (his work in conjunction with Sal Velluto on Black Panther is nothing short of sublime) have put the word SUPER back into superhero. Even the much maligned Aquaman seems to be embellished with a majesty that until now had not been before seen.

My one problem: the insertion of Barda and Orion into the team. Kirby was a god, but only he really knew how to handle them. Their membership makes the team too top heavy and make other more thoughtful characters like J'onn J'onzz, Zauriel and Aquaman seem as though they're out of place and awkward. But still an enjoyable read and a fine comicbook. Five stars for reinvigorating what thought to be a dying franchise--the super hero team book.

Teh JLA needs more tan the big seven to handle world threatening Threats which the threats just keep getting bigger and bigger. My only complaint. The Prometheus storyline(1st storyline) Where Prometheus figures a way to kill every one of the Jla Members except Superman(just read it!)This book is excellent, and people are saying that with the addititons of Plastic Man, Big Barda,Huntress,Orion,Steel,and oracle, Grant didn't put them there to take out Superman for steel, just to enhance the book to be more of an uncontrollable team which, most of the time aren't all together, because they go their separate ways, so why are you complaining, it puts the team into more of a powerful team that only assemble when extreme odds come against them (I.E) The Maggedon storyline from #34,36-41 which I thought was truly excellent(I won't get into it's awesomeness for now.) As of Ish 43 the team is cut down to 8 (The big seven and Plastic Man) just read this book and decide if more than twice in there were they fully united. NO.I seem arrogant don't I? (That's a rhetorcal question) In the Maggedon storyline every single super hero in the DC universe comes out and fights Maggedon with a few deaths( I won't tell you who.)

Have you ever felt the joy of locking your door behind you and shutting the world out? Feeling the relief of aloneness and privacy? What if there might be someone there, watching you. But you can't see them. What if you could never be sure? How would you feel?

The author seemed able to take the familiar feelings of being ignored, disenfranchised, excluded, feeling as if you somehow live in a parallel world unable to take part in the world proper, and elevate these to an art form. the characters have the necessary despair and desolation in their spirits to convince you and have the appearance of living reasonably normal lives. However, they don't. The work is perhaps something of an allegory in that the characters experience some of the same problems with which we are all familiar, although to a pathological degree.

The book starts slowly but quickly becomes very compelling and, while being typical of Chris Priest's work insofar as it's low key in it's method, it's frightening in its implications and builds to a terrifying conclusion. I was able easily to suspend my disbelief and was for a while afterwards visited by disquieting thoughts similiar to those provoked when I first read 1984.

Tremendously enjoyable and a very good work.

Christopher Priest's _the Prestige_ is an entertaining read; well written fantasy without asking us to view the world in any particular new way. _The Prestige's_ greatest strength lies in its ability to harken back to a Victorian style of writing while maintaining modern sensibilities of fiction.

The Victorian aspect comes from Priest's use of the diary and memoir style to develop most of the plot. He presents to us the story of a rivalry told from the points of view of the rivals, magicians Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier. Both have reasonably excellent ability in performance and skill in their trade. Priest is successful in giving each of these gentlemen separate voices. (actually creating six separate voices total; not an easy task in one novel). It is faintly reminiscent of Stoker's _Dracula_ or Hogg's _Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner_.

The other particularly Victorian (and gothic) aspect is the novel's obession with the theme of duality, doubles and the dopelganger. Here we have our Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes, Frankenstein and his monster, and even _Invasion of Body Snatchers_ played out in the novel.

Throw in some really neat stuff about stage magicians in general--Alfred Borden's "Pact" with the audience is one of the most interesting philosophical discussions about the stage i've ever read--and you have one quite entertaining and pleasing novel.

So put a little magical reading into your evenings and enjoy.

Written on the cover of this book is the phrase "Winner of a World Fantasy Award" -- those are the words that first caught my attention. And in retrospect, I find The Prestige entirely deserving of that honor. Few and far between are the books that I pick up and can still remember several years later, but it's been three or more years since I read this one, and certain vibes and moments that I took from it are still with me. This is due, in part, to an average-to-good plotline, but in the end, to Priest's own sleight-of-hand as an author -- he shows an impressive range, a nice attention to detail, and a subdued sense of style which sets the perfect tone for this tale of rival vaudeville magicians in the late 19th century...

Set in 1878, and focused on two magicians who are rivals in both business and love, this story is delivered in a style that made it literally impossible to put down (I think I surreptitiously read it during school classes for about two days, non-stop, and might as well have been absent. I don't even know what I missed). Moving from one character's perspective to another, the story unfolds almost entirely through journal entries written by the two protagonists.

The intriguing conceit of the novel is that these journals are not discovered until almost a hundred years later, when the descendants of the two rivals meet and feel a mysterious connection to each other. As they slowly uncover the series of mysterious and unnatural events which befell their warring ancestors, the action moves fluidly from past to present to future and back, almost without warning. The drastically different narrative styles used in the two journals reveal that Mr. Priest must have an incredible amount of talent -- they might as well have been written by two different people, so unalike are their tone and perspective.

The details of the plot are far too complicated to summarize, but I would go out of my way to recommend this book to fiction lovers. While the story does not leave you with any significant knowledge or insight into the meaning of life, it is pleasure reading at its best, and there is a lot to be said for that.

Christopher Priest must be one of the most decorated but unread authors around. In 1983 he was named one of the Best of Young British Novelists. And The Prestige won both the World Fantasy Award and Britain's James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Meanwhile, I'd never heard of him and when the book got some good reviews over here, it was a NY Times notable book, I couldn't find it anywhere. Bur I'm glad I finally got ahold of a copy, because the novel lives up to the hype.

Priest tells the story of two turn of the century magicians, Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden, who are first rivals and then bitter enemies as what starts out as an attempt to learn each others secrets deteriorates into obsessive hatred and is even handed down to succeeding generations. Eventually their efforts to top one anothers latest tricks draw Nikola Tesla into the picture. Angier travels to Colorado to see if Tesla's experiments with electricity have any magical implications. They do and the results are predictably, but delightfully, horrifying.

It's pretty hard to describe this novel without giving too much of the story away. It's also a story that invites comparison; I saw reviewer references to The Alienist, Robertson Davies, John Fowles, H.G. Wells, etc. Suffice it to say, the writing is terrific, the story is original but harkens back to classic themes and the tension he builds is palpable. My only complaint is that it either ended abruptly or simply before I wanted it to; I'm not sure which. Find it and read it. You won't want it to end either.

GRADE: A

Christopher Priest is one of the best SF writers around, and he seems much less well-known in the US than perhaps he should be. He made quite an early splash with books like Fugue for a Darkening Island and The Inverted World, and with short stories like the remarkable "An Infinite Summer." His later books (such as The Affirmation, The Glamour, and most recently The Prestige) have been typically on the boundary between SF and the mainstream, which perhaps accounts for the diminished notice he has received within the American SF field. His newest novel, The Extremes, published in 1998 in the UK and just now coming out in the US, is also on that boundary, and it's another good one.

Teresa Simons is an FBI agent married to another agent. When her husband is killed in Kingwood City, Texas, trying to capture a serial killer, Teresa, recovering, ends up travelling to England where she was born. She visits a seaside town named Bulverton where another serial killer went on a rampage the same day Teresa's husband was killed.

In Bulverton, Amy Colwyn and Nick Surtees are trying to make a go of Nick's parents' hotel/pub, which Nick inherited when his parents were murdered by the killer who also killed Amy's husband. However, neither knows much about running a hotel, nor is it what they really want from life, and their dissatisfaction is affecting their rekindled relationship.

So, Teresa comes to Nick and Amy's hotel. She tries interviewing the locals, trying to come to an understanding of their reactions to the serial killings in their town, but she doesn't make much headway. She ends up spending her time in a Virtual Reality simulation called Extreme Experience, something she also used in her FBI training, but in this case reviewing VR tapes of the Bulvertion murders.

So far, this is a fairly straightforward near-mainstream novel. It's apparently set right about present time, and Priest has inserted the unlikely virtual reality technology as if it exists now. The scenes in ExEx are well done, believable and scary, and comment on our fascination with violence -- and to some extent on our complicity with it -- subtly, without lecturing. The writing is excellent, and the characters are fairly well drawn, although Teresa did a couple of things that I didn't quite buy.

Ah, but this is Christopher Priest. Anyone who has read a lot of Priest, especially, say, his very fine early novel A Dream of Wessex (aka The Perfect Lover), won't be terribly shocked at the direction The Extremes takes towards the end. Priest seems fascinated with reality and how our consciousness creates our reality, and as such could hardly be expected to resist the temptation presented by a subject such as extremely realistic VR simulations. His speculations here jump off the extrapolation track a bit, in my opinion, but they are fascinating, and the ending of this novel takes on a certain logic of its own. It's moving and interesting, and well constructed. I had a little trouble, as I've hinted, quite believing in it, but it works on its own terms. That said, I was left feeling a bit like I'd read two books: one about what a cover blurb calls "the pornography of violence" and how people react and adapt to it; and another about consensus reality, and how VR might expand or alter that reality. Both subjects are interesting, and I still found this an absorbing novel, one of the best of 1998.

I picked this up by chance at a bookstore, never heard of the author prior. I was about 50 pages in when I recalled I had originally found it in the SF section. Where was the science fiction part of the story? This was starting out as just a good novel, cleanly written, with a great eye for insignificant detail that helps flesh out the tale. Having read SF throughout most of my reading career, I know most of it is plot driven with characters and settings just used to push along the nifty story. This book takes its time (luxuriates?) developing the main character, Teresa Simons, a real woman who adapts within character to the unfolding events. Its done so well I assumed the author was a woman. (He's not). She has grown up in England, the daughter of a career US military man,becomes an FBI agent, and one day loses her husband in a random spree massacre.

This is the kind of SF I need now and then, maybe the best kind; where the whole story isn't techy, there is just one added element/theme to a time that could otherwise be today, ExEx. (Extreme Experience, virtual reality on steroids.) The story takes a very pleasant ramble through Teresa's' life, and from time to time she does an ExEx scenario, first for FBI training and later through a commercial provider. The iterative process she goes through to improve her performance is the most interesting of the whole book. I want this in my life for home, work and social situations. It's like the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray, where he is trapped into relieving the same day over and over again, until he eventually he gets it right. How cool would that be??
The rich, lush detail of the novel echoes the supposed detail Teresa finds in the hyper-real VR scenarios. Eventually the plot becomes complicated as she enters an ExEx scenario during which she enters an ExEx scenario....and so on. It's like looking into two mirrors reflecting each other.

There were a couple of loose ends that didn't hit me until a few days after finishing. What happened to Nick and Amy, the folks who run the hotel? They just disappear from one page to the next after they sell their stories. Also, what is up with the execs from GunHo corp? They make a big splashy extrance and then they too exit stage right. I'm sure its all in here, I'm just too used to obvious plot points. Oh well, I'll pay more attention when I read it again.

So here's the question you'll have to solve: Does the whole story take place inside an ExEx, or does she only choose at the end to avoid "real" reality without her dead husband by staying permanently in a scenario?

Many books compell me to race through them to see what happens next. This made me keep coming back to enjoy spending a little more time with Teresa.

Christopher Preist writes stories that are on the fringe of science fiction. Calling him an SF writer is too limiting - he is a writer with imagination, who writes stories that stretch the limits of imagination.

This novel focuses on one character's virtual reality experiences. I won't bother to tell the story - another reviewer already did that. What stands out is this book, though, is the way the plot folds over and over, until the reader loses touch with reality.

I say this is a disturbing book as well - when I was reading it, I found it so skewed that I could only read a few paragraphs at a time. I had to stop and do something else for a few minutes, to anchor myself, before coming back to it. Nevertheless, I read it in one day.

This book incites a kind of subconscious itch, a discomfort that arises from not knowing what reality the characters is in. A brilliant work, along the same line as The Prestige, with its multiple realities.

In the end, this novel shows that the book is the ultimate virtual reality device. Preist's mastery of a complex plot leads the reader down dark paths to dead-ends, before finally coming to a totally unexpected resolution.

Great work, Chris.

DC has reissued Batman: Contagion in the wake of it's mega-successful No Man's Land collections, and it serves as a good reminder of just WHY the Batman books needed to be shaken up so drastically in the first place...

Contagion revolves around an outbreak of "The Clench", a fictional Ebola offshoot, in Gotham City. Batman and company attempt to contain the spread of the Disease, while trying to track down a trio of survivors of a previous Clench outbreak, with the hope of synthesizing a cure/vaccine from their blood.

The book is very choppy, especially the first chapter, which appears to be heavily trimmed from it's original presentation in Batman: Shadow of the Bat. DC hasn't taken any steps to make their collections new-reader friendly, either, which could be a very big mistake. Longtime readers will know Oracle, Azrael, Nightwing, The Huntress, etc.; A new reader browsing this in a store would no doubt put the book right back on the shelf. The story has a few compelling moments, but for the most part it seems unnecessarily padded. Did we really need the Native American tracker? What did Biis contribute to the story? The writing is average at best; Most of the stories in Contagion were written by people who had long since overstayed their welcome on the Bat-books, such as Doug Moench & Alan Grant; The art ranges from okay to sub-par; Kelley Jones' chapter seems especially ugly thanks to poor color reproduction which mars his intricate pencils. The ultimate revelation of who is behind the spread of The Clench is sure to be a head-scratcher to new readers, since no background at all is offered to explain who these people are and what their motives are. DC really needs to get on the ball with their trade-paperback program; Preaching to the Choir is nice, but they need to try for new converts. Junk like Contagion is NOT the way to expand their readership......

In this history you can see a different Batman, one that found something he cant't fight. There was a virus and he can not trap it or take it to the justice. You can see a different Batman, not necesesary a dark one but a human,a man. I enjoyed it a lot!

I cannot believe why some people do not like "Contagion". Like Knightfall, Knightquest, KnightsEnd, Prodigal, and Cataclysm & No Man's Land, "Contagion" is an awesome book. It has Poison Ivy (drool), Batman, Robin, Nightwing, Huntress, Azrael, Catwoman, Oracle, Commissioner Gordon, the Penguin, and many other supporting characters like Alfred and Ariana.

...reality or perception? What do we really know? This book spins these concepts and leaves you unsettled. A dream within the real world, or the world within a dream? Perhaps a dream within a dream? If you dream far enough can you come full circle?

A charmingly dated book, gritty and unstylised. Set, in common with those other of Chris Priest's works which I've read, within pastoral Dorset, but invested with dread inside the alter-Dorset occasionally inhabited by the characters. Do they visit this alternate reality or do they create it? Does it exist apart from them? Shades of virtual-reality concepts, which followed this work much later, but suggesting dark possibilities and existential issues unvisited in contemporary virtual-reality works. The introduction of an individual into the melee who disturbs the delicate balance destabilises the experiment, with interesting consequences.

The book takes images which would normally be reassuring and familiar in their peaceful permanence and imbues them with what felt to me like a brooding disquiet. The whole timbre is one of threatened violence, although there is very little, and no gratuitous violence in the work.

It has Priest's gentle touch in the writing and was thoroughly enjoyable. Good to read before progressing to Fugue for a Darkening Island and The Glamour.

It should not be surprising, perhaps, that the reviews of this book are so polarized; Ellison, for better or worse, always seems to elicit this sort of response. Readers who love Ellison hate this book; those who hate Ellison love it. But as a reader who enjoys Ellison's work, and yet who also enjoyed this account of the never-published "Last Dangerous Visions," perhaps I can offer a new perspective.

The fact is, "Book on the Edge of Forever" is a fascinating account of one of the most famous non-books ever not-published--indeed, LDV is the science fiction genre's equivalent to Truman Capote's notoriously-unwritten "masterpiece," "Answered Prayers": the same kind of endless public promises from the author/editor; the same kind of total, unexplained nondelivery.(In his late-career megalomania, as well as his tendency to play fast and loose with facts, Ellison does uncannily resemble Capote--there is an MA thesis here for some enterprising graduate student.) Christopher Priest has put together his short (too short) essay masterfully, letting Ellison's words hoist him on his own petard; no one who reads this book objectively can be left in any doubt that Ellison has seriously mistreated any number of writers over this project, and that LDV has become some sort of unscaleable Kilamanjaro for him, one that he will never climb but which it would be too humiliating to publicly abandon.

So, is "Book on the Edge of Forever" nothing but an exercise in character assassination? It certainly is that in part, but there is a deeper level to this work, one which Ellison himself might even recognize as laudable: a warning as to the danger of hero worship. This book reveals Ellison not as a monster, but as a flawed human being--one who got in over his head on a project which has, alas, caused many people (certainly including Ellison himself) considerable pain. Those who wish to view Harlan Ellison as perfect, super-human, will no doubt be offended by this portrait. Others will find it refreshingly honest and a needed corrective to the fawning versions of Ellison so often found in fanzines (and in his own self-congratulatory essays).

In an interview twenty years ago, Ellison himself said: "I don't want to be anybody's hero...I screw up regularly and I want to be allowed to screw up." There is no question that with LDV, Ellison screwed up. But that is his right, as a human being as flawed as the rest of us. If, in the broad view of modern literature, he remains a minor writer, his influence is nonetheless unparalelled in the world of genre science fiction--an influence which has been almost entirely positive, raising the level of literacy in the field and often shaming writers, through his scathing and usually accurate reviews, into producing their best. He himself has written at least a dozen stories that must rank with the field's genuine masterpieces. Thus the genre owes him its gratitude--but not its deification. In a strange way, "Book on the Edge of Forever" presents the most *human* Ellison ever seen in print. For those (few?) who can read it objectively, Priest's essay will be a revelation.

I was in college in the mid-1970's when I was introduced to Harlan Ellison's anthologies, "Dangerous Visions" and "Again, Dangerous Visions". The third and final book in the trilogy, "The Last Dangerous Visions" was imminent and eagerly awaited by everyone who had any contact with the sci-fi/fantasy subculture. Now, almost a generation later, the book still hasn't appeared. Neither has it been cancelled; there have been periodic announcements that it is about to be released.

What happened? What's going on? I bought Christopher Priest's book on a whim, curious to re-open this question that we once kicked around at the college coffeehouse.

It's a short book, 56 pages. You can read it in an hour. It's a strange, absurd tale. A simple anthology has somehow turned into a never-ending black hole, sucking in the work of a generation of science fiction writers. Christopher Priest delivers the story with drama and dry wit. I enjoyed it a lot. I'm glad I read it; it gives me some sense of closure.

For those who don't know, the title is a parody on the name of an old Star Trek episode written by Ellison, "The City on the Edge of Forever"

"Dangerous Visions" and "Again, Dangerous Visions" are two of the most influential sf volumes ever published, but the promised third volume, "The Last Dangerous Visions," has never appeared. Christopher Priest's "The Book on the Edge of Forever" makes great strides forward in explaining what events have taken place concerning this volume of sf history. Is it an Atlantis that sank into a publisher's ocean, or a noose holding a weight around Ellison's editorial neck? While this slim volume cannot adequately explain why the book remains in purgatory, it does chart the small amount of progress made over the past two decades, proposes ways the book could be made available (should Ellison make the effort), and gives a better understanding of what happened to this once profound and influential series of books. The only thing missing is direct comment from Ellison himself, though Priest posts letters and comments from Ellison which are damning, to say the least.

It's unlikely that "The Last Dangerous Visions" will ever see print. "The Book on the Edge of Forever" is your only chance to find out about this lost chapter of sf history.

And Steven Bryan Bieler's comment about collecting the stories reclaimed from TLDV's coffin into a book makes one wonder if an enterprising publisher will capitalize off something Ellison couldn't pull of himself. Are you reading, Harlan?

Priest's book isn't a good transposition of Cronenberg's eXistenZ, in my opinion. I'll give you some short items: 1. there are many different things and episodes between them 2. the author describes characters' feelings in a way that has no correspondance with their behavior 3. the book explains really EVERYTHING! The readers should have the chance to try to play their own game! 4. why in the end TranscendenZ and not transCendenZ? Anyway, I'm not a writer, only a reader, and I hope you will not get angry for my comments! Bye, Paola