My dad bought Ian Summers' Tomorrow & Beyond when I was just a kid back either in the late 1970s or early 1980s (somewhere between 1979 and 1981). All this book is is a collection of science fiction artwork, which tells you who does each of the paintings. There is nothing much to read in this book, just a collection of artwork. Most of the artwork is very surrealistic, many of the artwork you see was new to 1978 when this book was first published. I can't remember the artists featured in this book because this book hadn't been with me since 1995, it was left behind when I moved after my mother had a divorce with my dad, so the book is still (as far as I know) in the hands of my dad. When Tomorrow & Beyond was published late in 1978, OMNI was a brand new magazine dealing with science, and many of the illustrations in this book would later be featured as covers of various issues of OMNI. If you're fascinated with how sci-fi artwork was like in the 1970s, be sure to find a copy of Tomorrow & Beyond.

This is a wonderful book with detailed pictures and descriptions of aliens light and dark,good and evil, cruel and kind, and large and small. It has vibrant illustrations that grab the eye, and descriptions that send the mind and imagination to worlds millions of light years away. You will not find these alien faces anywhere else but in this book. I would recommend it to any science fiction lover who can get their hands on it.

I first read this book when I was 10, and it freaked me out. It was one of the major reasons I began reading science fiction. This book can be reread endlessly without losing an ounce of wonder, for Barlowe's representations of alien anatomy are truly inspired. I constantly recommend this to my friends, and they are never disappointed, even the ones who can't stand sci-fi. Unfortunately, his paintings are much more interesting than some of the books they're taken from.

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!!!!

There are two Australias: there's the sanitized Australia of myth encompassing Crocodile Dundee, koalas and kangaroos, Nicholas Roeg's WALKABOUT, Peter Weir's early films, and Bruce Chatwin's THE SONGLINES. Then there's the gritty, no-hope, hardscrabble world of the stories in this GRANTA anthology.

Good writing is alive and well Down Under. Some of the pieces were haunting, especially Ben Rice's "Pobby and Dingan," about a child's invisible friends who take on a whole new reality; Paul Toohey's "The Road to Ginger Riley," about the last days of a drunken journalist who wants to "find" Australia before he dies; and Thomas Keneally's "My Father's Australia," about life in a small town before World War I.

The Aborigines are a ghostly presence in this anthology, except for Robyn Davidson's eerie "Marrying Eddie" and Polly Borland's haunting photos and interviews of Aborigine men and women spiralling down into oblivion. There's no COOPER'S CREEK heroism here: You have to find your own way, Mate!

However dark the vision of most of these selections, this volume is a worthy addition to GRANTA's growing library of stories and essays. When you pack your bags to go on vacation, you could do worse than take ANY volume of GRANTA with you. Each one is a window into a different world -- maybe not a pleasant one, but always a fascinating one.

I first read "Mute Evidence" - a journalistic dissection of the "cattle mutilation" craze of the late 1970's-early 1980's - in 1989, and find much of it fresh today. For roughly a decade following the end of the war in Vietnam, cattle farmers of the southwest reported finding their prized steers dead and, apparently mutilated by forces unknown. Dead cows appeared to have body parts selectively and precisely removed in ways that feral scavengers wouldn't. It's not clear when, but blame for these incidents soon took a turn for the sinister, with sentiment hinting at the use of cattle carcasses for secret experiments by the government, sinister corporations, secret paramilitary organizations, aliens, devil worshippers or some weird combination involving all of them.

With no plan to turn up little green men or pitchfork-weilding imps out for a quick chorizo, Kagan and Summers find that the truth, even when plausible, can often chill more than fiction. In their journeys, they encounter the usual suspects - crackpots and the ambitious small-town meida hounds that exploit them. While the authors wisely refrain from attempts to avoid explaining the phenomenon of cattle mutilation, they also offer competent evidence suggesting that there was no phenomenon - somewhat overzealous reporting that exagerated the number of actual cases combined with slipshod investigating that should have found no indicia of mutilation.

But the author's don't stop there. While the stories of alien scientists probing the southwest night may be entirely fanciful, the fear upon which they rely is very real - a product (the author's are willing to speculate) of uncertainties generated by the Vietnam war, Watergate, Ab-Scam, the oil-embargo, Iran, Stagflation and the other assorted horrors of the Nixon-Carter years. With so many symbols proving all-too unreliable, is it any surprise that people would now see themselves surrounded by amoral aliens?

The X-Files didn't exist when I read this book; It was another two years afterward that I even heard of Roswell or Area-51. Yet, not even Oliver Stone has jaded me enough to rob this primer on conspiracy theories of its impact.

From the point of view of a modeler, this book is a great source on all details about WWI french soldiers. It has plenty of (black and white) photos as well as the usual Osprey center color plates, with complete explanations at the end.

For even more complete information on the French Army, I'd recommend adding another Osprey book: THE FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION 1914-1945.

This of course, is far from a comprehensive work on the period. Its major emphasis is on the soldier's life and clothing and equipment while serving in combat, mainly on the Western Front but does cover the Balkans operations. The colonial forces except as they were used in France are ignored.
That said, this should satisfy the general reader mainly curious about the Great War.
Before the Great War of 1914, the French Army had yet to reform itself after the defeat of the Franco Prussian War. Though they had some excellent weaponry including the splendid French 75mm field gun, and the Hotchkiss heavy machine gun M1914, they lacked heavy guns and most of all, a modern appreciation that the outmoded doctrine of "l'audace" and always attack would win through. They seem to have completely ignored the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 which proved that the only way for infantry to survive cannon fire and machine guns was to go to ground especially when attacking dug in and barbed wire protected opponents. To compound all this, for political reasons, the Army had been unable to develop a new less visible field uniform and began the war wearing great coats of blue with red trousers; this of course, highly pleased the German machine gunners. By the end of 1915, they had adopted a horizon blue uniform and a steel helmet of rather complex construction with poor ballistic properties. Based on a French fire brigade helmet it at least was dashing. :-) (For some reason, the Paris Fire Brigade was then actually part of the Army.)
This work is a splendid example of the new emphasis of the publisher on producing comprehensive works in a handy cheap format compared with the earlier broad brush treatments which covered too much in too little detail.
The new emphasis is on sets and volumes covering various national armed forces in as much detail as is available, consistent with the current purpose of the works in the series, which have evolved from an original emphasis on serving the military miniature maker market into works intended to enlighten the general reader in enough detail to satisfy the merely curious and to point the way to further reading.
Most of us, including myself, have little need for, or the patience to read, voluminous studies, often in foreign languages, covering many eras and nations. My main interest is in the US forces, their allies and their enemies in the twentieth century.
This should be read along with the volumes on the Foreign Legion 1914-1945. (see my review.) If you want an introduction to the fascinating variety of clothing and equipment of the forces covered, this is for you.