cover image How to Save the World

How to Save the World

. Tor Books, $23.95 (349pp) ISBN 978-0-312-85577-2

Sometimes light in tone but always serious in subject, these 13 SF stories present modest proposals for ending racism, reducing hostility, restoring the environment, benefiting from space travel and otherwise improving the world--or, at least, preserving it. Overwhelmingly, the stories are not simple wish-fulfillment, although ``Higher Education,'' by Jerry Pournelle and editor Sheffield (Cold As Ice ), risks that. Many of the tales show well-laid plans going astray, as in Brenda Clough's ``The Product of the Extremes'' and Geoffrey Landis's ``The Meeting of the Secret World Masters,'' two of the best entries here. Others highlight the temptation of solutions that may be worse than the problem, as in Mary Turzillo's ``The Guatemala Cure,'' in which an abused woman seeks vengeance against all men. When plans succeed, sometimes it is by trickery--as in James P. Hogan's ``Zap Thy Neighbor'' or Arlan Andrews's ``Souls on Ice''--but technology can prove beneficial as well, as shown in Nick Pollotta's ``Raw Terra'' and Doug Beason's ``Defense Conversion.'' While outstanding prose surfaces only in the Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg collaboration (``Buyer's Remorse''), this collection, while perhaps not up to saving the world, should at least save its readers from a few perhaps otherwise empty hours. (Sept.)