Andrea Higbie briefly reviews Gahan Wilson's The Cleft and Other Odd Tales , ''a collection of meticulously eccentric stories. The literary SF webzine Event Horizon is profiled as challenging conventional wisdom about both online publishing and SF magazines. Experts Pick Their Favorites of 1998'' but, though there are selections of science books, literary fiction, and thrillers, there are none of science fiction. The latter is ''a perfect novel for wintertime reading'' . Citing Kim Stanley Robinson, Christopher Priest, Doris Lessing, and Margaret Atwood, the reviewer says ''In our confused, science fictional world, perhaps the distinction no longer exists.
Science fiction is fashionable again.
The revival started in the early 1990s when dance music producers began to mix samples from Bladerunner and 2001 with their experimental beats. After four novels in which club culture is a motif and setting, Jeff Noon leads the British arm of this revival. Updating Philip K Dick, via William Gibson and Lewis Carroll, Noon sets his cyberfiction in a fantastically imagined futuristic Manchester, where humanity and technology have evolved and mutated. He concludes that the book is ''paradoxically his best work yet'' . All rights reserved.