Robert Silverberg's Worlds of Wonder

In this unusual and valuable book, Silverberg has collected 13 stories that affected him, and from which he learned, and has annotated each with a discussion analyzing its virtues and faults; these discussions form a virtual primer on the writing of science fiction. Silverberg's critiques, and especially his long introductory memoir, are rendered in an intimate first-person mode and give us a fascinating portrait of a young man becoming a writer in the exciting climate that was SF publishing in the early '50s. Finally, we have the 13 stories, almost all of which are classics of the field, wonderful to reread and in some cases to encounter for the first time. They include Alfred Bester's tale of contagious madness, ""Fondly Fahrenheit''; Robert Sheckley's perfectly executed satire ``The Monsters''; Philip K. Dick's SF horror story ``Colony''; and Brian Aldiss's inventive, surreal ``Hothouse.'' (October 14)