September Publications

Five Star offers fiction collections from three SF masters: Human Voices: Science Fiction Stories by Hugo-winner James Gunn ($23.95 355p ISBN 0-7862-4317-1); The Retrieval Artist and Other Stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, author (under the pen name Kris Nelscott) of Thin Walls (Forecasts, Aug. 12) and other titles in the Smokey Dalton mystery series ($23.95 309p ISBN -4330-9); and Aristotle and the Gun and Other Stories by the late L. Sprague de Camp, with an introduction by Harry Turtledove ($24.95 222p ISBN-4311-2).

Military SF fans of the Falkenberg legion saga will need to be in fighting trim to lug home The Prince, by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Sterling. This hefty compendium includes the four novels Falkenberg's Legion, Prince of Mercenaries, Go Tell the Spartans and Prince of Sparta. (Baen, $28 1152p ISBN 0-7434-3556-7)

Almost as weighty is the late Evangeline Walton's The Maginogion Tetralogy, which brings together Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon and The Island of the Mighty. Based on the medieval Welsh epic The Mabinogion, this series ranks with the best of 20th-century works of fantasy. (Overlook, $35 980p ISBN 1-58567-241-6)