More Amazing Stories

Amazing Stories Magazine

by Kim Mohan (Editor)

The world's oldest science fiction magazine has died and been resurrected more times than most Dungeons & Dragons characters. So it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that although this trade paperback was touted as "the very last issue of Amazing Stories!"--well, it wasn't. After the initial hardcover of this collection was released in 1998, Amazing Stories was bought by Pokémon makers Wizards of the Coast, which revived Hugo Gernsback's venerated SF periodical and kept it alive until the summer of 2000.

But even though this collection of just over 20 short pieces wasn't the magazine's last gasp, some of them prove superior to the Star Wars, Star Trek, and Babylon 5 fiction that followed in the Wizards years. Editor Kim Mohan (who stayed on for the revival) collected then-new works from the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Benford, and Howard Waldrop, as well as other shorts from less-established writers. Of particular note is a Robert Silverberg-Philip K. Dick tandem: a 1953 Amazing reprint of Dick's Noah's Ark-inspired "The Builder," followed by Silverberg's praise and ruminations in "Quality and Quantity: The Short Fiction of Philip K. Dick."

Aside from Noah's Ark, quite a few other ideas get tossed around--everything from divine androgyny to time travel to the parameters of dream flight (the last being the title of a piece by Arlan Andrews Sr.), all at an easily digestible length and most matching the quality of previous Mohan-edited collections. --Paul Hughes

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Anthologies

320 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1998

About the author

Kim Rudolph Mohan (born May 4, 1949 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American author and editor.

Mohan was born in Chicago, Illinois, and moved to Williams Bay, Wisconsin when he was five. He became an avid science-fiction and fantasy reader and occasional wargamer, and graduated third in his high school class. He attended Beloit College, switching majors between philosophy, mathematics, and other subjects. "I decided that what I really wanted to do was write, so I sort of fell into a job working for the Lake Geneva Regional News as a reporter, and dropped out of college. That lasted for a few months, then I joined the staff of the Beloit Daily News, where I stayed for nine years." During that time, Mohan worked as everything from a sports writer, an editorial writer, the state editor, and the wire service editor. After nine years, he had grown tired of the newspaper business, and became a freelance writer for various newspapers.

Reviews

[Ketan Shah]

Starts strong but the later stories seem a bit mediocre.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good anthology, but more misses than hits for me.

An anthology of (mainly) stories left in inventory when Amazing folded in 1997. Many of these are minor stories by name authors; see TOC at http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?2.... There are a few standout stories:

• "The Gauze Banner", by Eleanor Arnason
A wry, amusing Hwarhath tale, never reprinted per ISFDB. Nominated for the 1998 Tiptree Award. Worth seeking out, if you're an Arnason fan. As you should be ;-]

• "The Experiment", as by SN Dyer (Sharon N. Farber). Dark humor about two f-ckups in Vietnam, drafted into an LSD experiment back in the World. Entertaining but slight.

• "Visitors", by Laurie A. Taylor. Post-apocalypse visitors to a partially-functional automatic house, à la "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury. Nice story; grim, plausible ending.

• "Hardware Scenario G-49" (1991), by James Alan Gardner. George, a kindly hardware-store manager, meets Diana, Goddess of the Hunt. Hijinks ensue. This is a variant on the Night Life of the Gods schtick, but the story that immediately came to mind was Keith Roberts' wonderful "Ariadne Potts". Not quite in that class, but pretty darn good. This, the second of four reprints in the book, was also reprinted in Gardner's 2005 Gravity Wells collection.

• "Unchosen Love" (1994), a Hainish story by Ursula K. Le Guin.
This well-received story was nominated for three major awards, and has been reprinted three times, most recently in a third edition of The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2010). Sadly, "Unchosen Love" didn't click for me.