Full Spectrum 3

Ursula K. Le Guin and Poulsp okay Anderson are the best known of the 22 talented contributors to this diverse and richly imaginative collection, the third in a series of speculative fiction anthologies. In ``Desert Rain,'' Mark L. Van Name and Pat Murphy give a high-tech variation on the familiar relationship triangle: a man named Jeff, a woman named Teresa and a prototype of a computerized home management system named Ian, a caring kind of guy who could ``steal your heart.'' In Wolfgang Jeschke's ``Loitering at Death's Door'' (translated from the German), coming back from the dead isn't all it's cracked up to be, when Kristos Katsuranis returnspk as a ``really lousy copy'' of his former self. An Afrikaner realizes what it means to be black in South Africa when he becomes invisible to other whites in Michael Bishop's ``Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana.'' In Ted Chiang's ``Division by Zero,'' a brilliant mathematician's world begins to crumble when she discovers she can prove, irrefutably, that one equals two. The people of Earth learn a lesson in humanity when they detect a sign of life on another planet: an SOS from ``alien, but cute'' beings, in Norman Spinrad's ``The Helping Hand.'' (June)