The Best of Crank!

The 17 stories harvested from the pages of Cholfin's cutting-edge SF zine Crank! provide an excellent survey of today's writers in the field, from the old guard (Ursula K. Le Guin) to the newer and edgier (Jonathan Lethem) and the promising but little known (A.M. Dellamonica). Though the collection is militantly antithematic, there's a noticeable lack of hard science here. Generally, the SF hooks take a back seat to character and plot. In ""Moonbender,"" one of three stories by Lethem, a vendor of disposable ambiatronic puppets and a middlebrow artist drag each other to ruin when they attempt to combine their efforts. ""I, Iscariot"" by Michael Bishop puts Judas on trial using scripture and a running fictional online commentary. ""Nixon in Space"" by Rob McCleary posits a world based on the myth of the disgraced president's pathetic efforts to participate in a moonshot. Lisa Tuttle's ""Food Man,"" one of the more inspired stories in the anthology, portrays a teenage girl's eating disorder as an incubus that comes to life out of the food she hides under her bed. Tuttle ingeniously and unexpectedly resolves the tension between food and sex with an ending reminiscent of insect mating ritual. Also notable, not least for its originality and its brilliant playfulness of language, is Eliot Fintushel's ""Santacide."" Other name authors represented in this fine sampling of the field include A.A. Attanasio and Gene Wolfe (whose entries, not surprisingly, tend more toward fantasy than SF), as well as Brian Aldiss, R.A. Lafferty and David R. Bunch. (Sept.)