Dreamer's Dozen

Fans of Hugo-winner Lupoff (Claremont Tales) will welcome this collection of 12 short stories, many of them pastiches (in a variety of genres) written with obvious affection for the originals. "Dead Winter," a tribute to Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe set in the late 1930s, features a detective named Caligula Foxx, though unlike the sedentary Wolfe, Foxx doesn't hesitate to fire a gun at some fleeing bad guys during a car chase on the streets of New York. "Scorpion Men of Mars" contains prose that could have been written by Edgar Rice Burroughs himself ("Armed only with machetes, their flame-tempered blades honed from Venusian ironwood trees, the courageous sable-tressed Venusian maiden and I beat back our vegetable attackers"). In "Sisoh Promatem," a contrary take on Kafka's "Metamorphosis," a cockroach awakens in the body of a human. Another tale with an imaginative twist, "Greetings from Comrade Kim," explores a world in which Henry Wallace, not Harry Truman, succeeded FDR as president. Not every selection is a hit, but a fair number of readers are likely to agree with Christopher Conlon's assessment in his introduction that Lupoff is an "extraordinary literary chameleon." (May)