Pamela Sargent very very rarely lets me down with her science fiction. I was luckily enough to just find this collection of her short stories and read it through in only two days. The vast majority of the stories are excellent -- well written and populated by enticing characters. Well worth the time and money if you like strong but realistic female characters.

This first of two books in the series about women writing science fiction both satisfies your curiousity and entertains while urging you to get the second book. There are so many things that haven't changed and yet, the stories can at times seem dated. We should be grateful, this means that some progress has been achieved.

The second collection of women's science fiction gives us insight into what has and hasn't changed. Here are some talents the common science fiction fan has heard along with a couple I didn't recongnize. What I found most interesting is that women still tend to focus on women as the main characters even after the reported "equality of the sexes". Reflection of innate views or sign of some progress left to make?

This book does *not* condemn the chances of men and women living peacefully together. One of the focuses of the story is how knowledge of the past affects the culture today and the choices made in government. Sargent shows that people need great historical narratives--stories--to live. When the current story is stale, people begin to create a new one. The people in charge of the story are the people who control the direction of the race. "The Shore of Women" is about a world on the brink of creating a new story to live by.

The story includes fascinating adventures, with first rate twists and turns. However, even though the story, the setting and the characters are so involving, the view of the differences between men and women, and a pessimistic view indeed, remains with the reader for a long time. Like "The Gate to Women Country" by Sherri Tepper, this book offers no hope for improvement in the relationship between the sexes based on the current model. Both books view women as the only key to conserving this planet from destruction. But "The Shore of Women" goes a step further, in condemning, sadly, any possibility of cooperation between the sexes. Unique in its dealing with hope, beautiful drawing of characters, thought provoking - this is a rare and highly recommended book.

Pamela Sargent has written another winner! This is not only a good book but a great book. As in many of her books the language is almost poetic and the characters so well developed they stay with you for a long time. The background (an atomic war with the sexes separating) provides the perfect foil for this journey of the heart and the mind

First of all, I am NOT a young adult - as this book is obviously written for. But, as a die-hard Pamela Sargent fan - I had to read "Earthseed". Although the story is more-or-less simplistic - it's still a rather good read - and I would suggest it to anyone (young or old) who enjoys reading Pamela Sargent. Ms. Sargent has a unique and wonderful writting style - and I would advice anyone to read her novels.

I really enjoyed this book. It was just perfect for young adults. It wasn't at all dull, like most sci-fi books for this age group. There was even a little romance, which is very rare.

When I read this book, I knew this was THE book. It touched me, but not really. In accordance, I would reccommend this book to everyone, not just people who like Sci-Fi.

I've settled Mars many times in my sci fi reading; it was a new adventure to settle Venus. "Venus of Dreams" is the Venusian analogue of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars" (which I also recommend): a realistic and entertaining story of what it might be like to make a new planet habitable for humans, including the science, the politics, and the individual human drama.

Iris Angharads is from the Plains Nomarchy in what used to be the United States. As a child, she dreams of working on the Venus Project instead of taking over the communal farm run by her mother. She and her significant others struggle with issues of ambition, family commitments, and what is worth sacrificing in order to attain your dream. ...

I too read this book -- several years ago, now. Its description
of the Islamic Imams was perhaps the only introduction to Islam
I had ever really had. Its treatment of the historical
uneasiness between the Islamic and Western worlds, even if done
in fiction, is especially poignant in a post September 11 world.

I too hope the sequal gets published.

I've just finished my third reading of VENUS OF DREAMS. I suppose that the fact I've found a third reading exciting says something about the quality of Pamerla Sargent's writing (or maybe about the quality of my memory?). As a member of that tribe which looks for realistic science underlying SF storytelling, I was very satisfied with that aspect of Sargent's story. Her exploration of ideas of social organization are very well-fleshed and believeable, and her characters are richly detailed. I eagerly await the opportunity to read the other two volumes of the VENUS series, VENUS OF SHADOWS - now out-of-print, and the forthcoming CHILD OF VENUS.

It's sad that the first two volumes of her Venus series are out-of-print. One of the terrible legacies of the Reagan era is the tax law revisions that make it more worthwhile for publishers to let most titles go out of print after only one year. I despair of finding a copy of VENUS OF SHADOWS. I am, however, delighted to see that the final volume, CHILD OF VENUS, is scheduled for publication early next year. Hopefully, if sales of CHILD are as good as they should be, the publisher will reprint the entire series.

Star Trek novel's are a dime a dozen, and many of them are worth a dime. Not this one though. This novel is childish, boring, and poorly written. The story opens with a completely laughable idea; a number of planets have acquired virus' on their database. Apparently, in the authors minds these planets have only one database and never make backups. So the plot starts off dealing with the natives upset at the Federation for downloading virus' and causing them to loose all their history & data. Stupid. Now the main part of the story deals with what the authors call a "mobile". Actually, its a big rock with some sort of intelligence.

The writing is childish, with conversations sounding like it belongs on Disney. Also, the author's use the word "murmur" everywhere. No one really says anything in this book, they murmur it.

I would recommend murmuring over to a Peter David novel, or some of the surprisingly good William Shatner Star Trek novels.

Don't waste your dime on this murmur.

An abandoned space habitat is found within an asteroid belt and is heading strait for the sun. Kirk, Spock and the rest of the gang discover an artifical world full of technological marvels and unexpected dangers. Now Kirk and Spock must find a way to save a nearby planet from distruction and time is running out...!

I hope everyone who is a Star Trek fan will buy this book and have a chance to enjoy it as I have. This book is full of action and keeps you interested till the end. Although, there is a bad part about it. It ends.

Obviously enough, there is just no possibility that in a single year there will be enough groundbreaking science fiction and fantasy written to fill a book the size of Nebula Awards 30. In fact, some of the pieces in this collection are downright tepid (at least in my opinion, but yours may differ). Included within are:

Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge by Mike Resnick: an alien archeologist gets seven glimpses into the nature of mankind (now extinct), on a progressively more radioactive Earth. May drag around the edges. 4 stars.

Inspiration by Ben Bova: a visitor from the future attempts to give young Einstein the impetus to voice his beliefs on physics (and thus, oddly enough, save the future Earth from being a radioactive dump) by giving him a copy of Well's The Time Machine. Not quite interesting. 3 stars.

Virtual Love by Maureen F. McHugh: two online virtuosos, off-line nobodies, are mesmerized by each other's mastery with false visages. Nice imagery. 4 stars.

None So Blind by Joe Halderman: "Why aren't blind people geniuses?" A child genius falls in love with a blind musician and creates a greater intelligence. 3 stars.

Fortyday by Damon Knight: in an alternate Roman Empire humans grow biologically older until they are forty, and then age in reverse. 4 stars.

In Memoriam: Robert Bloch by Frank M. Robinson: an overview of Robert Bloch's life (Bloch died in 1994).

The Martian Child by David Gerrold: Not quite science fiction. A sci-fi writer father suspects that his adopted child is a Martian. Very endearing. 4 stars.

Rhysling Award Winners - poetry by W. Gregory Stweart and Robert Frazier, Jeff Vandermeer, and Bruce Boston: since I never enjoyed Science fiction poetry, I will not evaluate this part.

Understanding Enthropy by Barry N. Malzberg: It doesn't have a plot. 2 stars.

I Know What You're Thinking by Kate Wilhelm: A telepathic Woman can't blot out the chatter in her mind and starts taking pictures of contemplating criminals as a hobby. It drags. 3 stars.

A defense of Social Contracts by Martha Soukup: In a society where strife is minimized by one's marital permit - monogamous, polygamous, or free not to marry, a woman seeks to illegally bind a "nonmonogamous" man to herself with false marital documents. This is the ultimate in writing about sex with absolutely no emotion whatsoever. 3 stars.

From a Park Bench to the Great Beyond: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of 1994 by Kathi Maio: an overview of exactly what the title says. Non-fiction.

The Matter of Segri by Ursula LeGuin: Yet another story in the Ekumen series - a planet, where men are basically breeder drones and women are the only part of the organized society per se, is slowly nudged towards the "standards". Lots and lots of the f-word. Come on, she could have used a synomim! 4 stars.

An Excerpt from Moving Mars by Gregory Benford: since this is only an excerpt, I cannot grade it.

If you like essays, deeply personal works, & poetry this is what you should stick with. Otherwise the 2 yrs best are better. "The Martian Child" was a great story that didn't really need to be science fiction & I honestly don't think it was, it wasn't fantasy either. Basically it's about the science fiction community & becoming a father. In some respects I think the SFFWA chose stories that are perhaps more interesting to sf authors then readers. Many of these stories are basically about the authors themselves or the sf community at large. Consequently ,I think, some of these stories were almost too personal & "inside" for average readers. "Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge" was a good Stapledonian story, "Defense of the Social Contracts" was a genuine sociocultural speculation, & I liked Bova's. There were other good ones too & I liked seeing the Rhysling winners. The essays were also intriguing & provocative. It was actually a great anthology, but I think I'll keep up with the year's best more faithfully then the Nebula anthologies.

Don't misunderstand this is a good collection. Some of these stories were a little too personal, but they were good. My problem's that the 2 years best anthologies A. Choose stories that cover the same ground (sometimes the exact stories that get Nebula nominations) & ,in some instances, cover it better & B. Cover more ground & have a better variety. Neither of the year's best have poetry so it does have that advantage. The essays are also an advantage, except I think Dozois does a good job in his summation. The essays do show a variety of opinions though. I didn't like griffith's because she seemed to say lesbian sf is the best sf about women. I think there are many great women sf authors who don't write lesbian or even feminist stories. The winners are ,of course among the best, but the McHugh, Bova, & the Wilhelm I also enjoyed. I've noticed that Wilhelm is somewhat unusual in science fiction in that I think her work deal with the concerns of middle aged women to a large extent. I liked her story even though I'm a 21 yr. old man, but it'd probably make more sense to the group I mentioned. I think Haldeman's won the hugo. In shot stick with the 2 yr's best unless you want essays or poetry.

I really enjoyed "Venus of Dreams," about the beginnings of human settlement of Venus, and I immediately ordered the sequel, "Venus of Shadows." I gave up on it after about 200 of its 600+ pages. It takes a long time for the story to get off the ground, both literally and figuratively. Much of the early part of the book is review of the previous book. There's little new science or technology (at least as far as I got), just some details about the domes on Venus. And I found the main characters flat and uninteresting. Malik is strikingly handsome; Risa is good at mediating conflicts; they both have trouble with intimacy; and I didn't care. Bummer.

Read "Venus of Dreams." Skip "Venus of Shadows."

Venus of Shadows is the second book of the Venus Series. This book goes further than just science-fiction and transforming Venus into a habitable world. It deals with many situations and obstacles that ordinary people deal with each day, proving that wherever mankind goes, his age-old problems will always follow him. The story is extremely well written, highly interesting and will captivate the reader. I've been waiting a long time for the next novel to be published and I'm very excited that it will be out soon!

I re-read this book about the colonization of Venus, the high hopes and hard trials of the colonists, and the obstacles laid on their pathsnot only by Nature but by human evil as well, in one night after having read it the first time long ago. It has stayed with me. It is even better than the first one in the series. It's so believable in its depiction of the wonder and tragedy of the settling of a difficult world and the founding of a new society that's almost scaring. Its characters are believable human beings with no black villains or pure-white heroes, their life and their society feel so significant that I lost track of the fact that they were fictional people living on a fictionalized world. I am eagerly waiting for Ms. Sargent to write the sequel.

The same gifts, but different paths chosen: You might say this is the premise of *Cloned Lives,* in a nutshell. When a gifted and multi-talented scientist is chosen to be the first human to be cloned, to become the "father" to a small group of artificially-birthed newborns who will grow up being physically and genetically identical to himself, the story quickly shows the resulting furor over this controversial act, with this scientist, Paul Swenson, and his "kids" at its focus. Essentially the story focuses on the lives of the children as they grow up, and the different paths and lives they take -- in a way showing us just what, in a parallel universe maybe, the path Paul Swenson himself might have taken if he'd explored his other natural talents and interests and become not a famous astrophysicist, but a novelist, or a biologist, or an artist, or even a conventional family man. In this way, Paul Swenson's "kids" (which in fact they really are, just more directly) show us just what one person may be capable if they have enough lifetime and energy in which to explore all their interests and inborn talents to their fullest. In a series of chapters that each focus exclusively on one of the young but maturing clones, whether it's Edward, James, Michael, Kira or Albert, we get to see their flaws and talents, how they each have reacted to the circumstances of their birth in different ways, not always good ways either. Pamela Sargent has written an engaging, thought-provoking but mature-level novel, with interesting, vibrant characters who seem as real as you or me. I recommend this novel for anyone who might like to get a sense of what growing up as a clone under the world spotlight might be like, as well as for the interesting turns our characters' lives take. Also, finally, for the curious way that our characters' personalities all, in a way, seem to reflect different aspects of their parent-projenitor, Paul Swenson. Other science-fiction novels have touched on the subject of cloned people and shown how it affected them, of course, but probably not to the very high degree here -- which is probably another reason to seriously consider adding *Cloned Lives* to your bookshelf. (Another novel I recall that did so is Juanita Coulson's sci-fi novel *Legacy of Earth*, which I recommend highly too, it's a great, galaxy-spanning adventure). Final comments: *Cloned Lives* is a very timely novel these days of course (if you've been following the news lately, that is), with all the recent controversy over animal cloning and now proposed human cloning that is getting a lot of ethical scrutiny by the world's politicians, even though this novel first appeared in its first complete paperback form back in 1976 -- the story of *Cloned Lives* is as relevant today as it was then. It touches on both the downside and major questionable aspect of the cloning process (the fact that the technology isn't perfect, that the process means possible loss of one or more embryos if something goes wrong -- in the story's case, they use a special mechanical womb here), but also the good side too, the fact that for childness couples, this is a way to have a child that is in every way descended from the chosen family member -- just not both, obviously (unless the female half of a couple serves as a surrogate birth-mother for the clone, maybe). Another benefit of the technique is shown at the end of the novel (I hope this isn't a spoiler...) when we meet the young clone of another child, a girl, who was tragically killed in an accident some years before, a few months after the death of the child's mother too -- such a cloning process allows the continuation of one's family even after such tragic loss, so that the product of your love with a lost wife or lover can be restored in a way that lets the family continue on and the surviving parent can get to see the fulfillment of the promise that the child-clone's sister-projenitor might have shown and experienced had she in fact lived. So there are definite pros and cons to human cloning, of course. And in fact, the novel itself is cognizant that human cloning should be a limited, case-by-case option most of the time, by which it explains that cloning should be rarely allowed "except in the case of certain exceptional people or in unusual circumstances," which the situation I've just described regarding the child certainly qualifies. Whether you agree with this or not, the novel itself is definitely worth the read in any case as quality fiction and as a good relationship story.