SF/Fantasy/Horror Notes

Sides, the first collection of nonfiction from bestselling horror master Peter Straub, is a mixed bag. While the two decades’ worth of introductions and speeches include some intriguing material, the quirky and self-deprecating short essays by the author’s alter ego, fictional critic and academic Putney Tyson Ridge, provide little insight into Straub’s approach to his work. Die-hard fans may pick this up, but most will hold out hope for an analytic work more akin to Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. (Cemetery Dance [www.cemeterydance.com], $25 310p ISBN 978-1-58767-165-4)

The reissue of Hugo-winner Mike Resnick’s episodic 1988 novel Ivory: A Legend of Past and Future puts his strengths and weaknesses on full display. Thousands of years in the future, after most wildlife on Earth is extinct and humans have spread to distant stars, the last descendant of the Maasai hires a researcher to locate the massive tusks of the Kilimanjaro Elephant. Resnick’s fluent writing and respect for African cultures and wildlife are not always enough to rescue the numerous vignettes about the tusks’ various owners over the centuries; some are smoothly ironic while others descend into gimmickry, culminating in an overall pleasant story that just misses being truly memorable. (Pyr, $15.95 paper 319p ISBN 978-1-59102-546-7)

Several slim anthologies of recent Russian SF have appeared in English over the years, but Alexander Levitsky, a professor of Slavic languages at Brown University, takes a more retrospective and scholarly tack with Worlds Apart, a weighty tome of stories, poems and novel excerpts from the 1700s to the 1950s. Oft-translated authors such as Pushkin and Dostoyevski are in the minority, and most Western readers will be glad of the introductory essays that expertly place each set of pieces in historical and political context. This necessary volume is perhaps too scholarly for the lay reader and more of a reference book than light entertainment. (Overlook, $37.95 656p ISBN 978-1-58567-819-8)