Although The Silmarillion takes place in the same imaginary world as J.J.R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and was originally published four years after the author's death and over two decades after the former book, it is set much earlier, in the First Age of the World. The tales and the book which reads as a fusion between a story collection and historical chronicle, are a matter of legend even to the characters of The Lord of the Rings:In the beginning Eru, the One, who in the Elvish tongue is named Ilúvatar, made the Ainur of his thought; and they made a great Music before him Tolkien wrote the heart of this material very early in his career, and continued to work on it throughout his life. It fell to his son, Christopher Tolkien, to edit it into book form, and such proved the unquenchable public appetite that he subsequently oversaw 12 volumes of The History of Middle-Earth. This edition features 20 highly evocative colour plates by Ted Nasmith, themselves worth the price of admission, while reinforcing the sense of a historical work are genealogical tables, an extensive index, appendix and colour map. Far removed from the genial style of The Hobbit, this is Tolkien at his most formal, his prose austere, poetically beautiful, his storytelling capturing the epic scale, high drama and melancholy wonder of myth. These stories of elves and heroes and old gods are quite literally the foundation of the entire modern fantasy-publishing revival, and are therefore essential reading. —Gary S. Dalkin

Adrian Tomine, creator of the critically acclaimed comic series Optic Nerve, has been called the comics voice of the twentysomething generation, but it's a title he rejects, and for good reason. The tales of disconnection and alienation collected in Summer Blonde—a selection of the best of Optic Nerve—aren—aren't expressions of youthful angst so much as they are meditations on the discontent we all feel with contemporary life.

The four stories here have echoes of Raymond Carver in their minimalist style and focus on dysfunctional relationships, but Tomine's real strength lies in his identification of the "undercover craziness" in us all—the damaged selves that we hide beneath facades of normalcy. In "Hawaiian Getaway," for instance, a woman's inability to navigate office politics or family expectations leads to a breakdown, and she begins calling the pay phone outside her apartment and talking to the strangers who answer. Other stories are sharp indictments of the madness of modern society. In "Bomb Scare" the brutality and disregard high-school students direct at each other reflect the casual violence of the first Gulf War playing out on their televisions. In the title story, a stalker's interference in the life of a woman exposes the empty voids that lie under our social rituals and leads to an eruption of violence.

Some readers may wonder how to interpret the ambiguous endings of the stories in Summer Blonde, but this ambiguity is the whole point of Tomine's work. The world he creates is just as confusing and uncertain as our own lives. While his characters are often unlikable, simultaneously creepy and pathetic, they remain understandable because Tomine always ensures that we see ourselves in them. —Peter Darbyshire, Amazon.ca

Alternative history SF is Harry Turtledove's speciality—he rewrote the US Civil War with added AK-47s in The Guns of the South (1992), and dropped alien invaders into World War Two in his "Worldwar" tetralogy (1994-6). Into the Darkness opens a fantasy sequence which more distantly echoes the multi-factioned complexity of WWII, as nation after nation plunges or is sucked into an escalating war. Energy sticks and magical "eggs" replace rifles and bombs; there are armoured columns of behemoths, dragon air forces, sea leviathans planting limpet-mine eggs. Names, geography and details are all new, but one nation excels in magical Blitzkrieg tactics and also persecutes the equivalent of the Jews ... foreshadowing worse horrors to come, since in this world human sacrifice is a potent source of magic and death camps could be highly practical. There's a Dunkirk-like flotilla of small boats, but it's used for attack rather than retreat. Theoretical sorcerers are on the edge of some fundamental breakthrough: an occult Manhattan Project looks likely to follow. Avoiding the genre's Good versus Evil simplicities, Turtledove's fantasy wars relentlessly reflect our real world's intractability and mess. Into the Darkness reads well once it's gathered momentum, but the excitements are tinged with considerable grimness. Sequels will follow. —David Langford

Fans who feared John Varley was evolving into another Robert A. Heinlein imitator may have mixed reactions to Red Thunder. Debuting in 1974, Varley became the freshest, most exciting and most important new science-fiction author of the 1970s. He dominated the decade with numerous stories and two novels, set mostly in his Eight Worlds future history. By 1984 he had won three Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards. Yet his output dwindled through the 1980s and in the 1990s he released only two novels, Steel Beach and The Golden Globe, a pair of Eight Worlds books that received tepid responses.

Part of SF's turn-of-the-century trend towards "Mars novels," but not part of Varley's Eight Worlds series, Red Thunder reads a lot like a Heinlein juvenile novel—if Heinlein were alive and writing juveniles in 2003. Varley's paying tribute to the master's juveniles, especially Rocket Ship Galileo and Red Planet (and also, more subtly, to the ending of Alfred Bester's novel The Stars My Destination). Though Varley is working with decades-old tropes and is not in his full wildly-imaginative 1970s mode, Red Thunder is an enjoyable SF novel that should win back many disgruntled fans and gain him a new generation of admirers. —Cynthia Ward, Amazon.com

The Hacker Diaries is well written, racy and an entertaining read. Dan Verton takes a seat way back in the bus and lets the characters he's writing about drive. These include the hackers themselves—complete with silly sounding nomme de geurres including the most famous of them all: Mafiaboy—along with those whose job it is to hunt them down. He even takes in a few who suffered the hackers' attentions.

Some facts shine out. One: high class teenage hackers usually have a better grasp of Net technologies than those paid to run them, and they're motivated by intellectual curiosity and peer respect rather than criminal or terrorist ends. Two: most "hackers" are script kiddies; vandals who would be slashing car tires or burgling homes if they had more get up and go. Three: technology is more fragile than people like to believe.

Dan Verton does a good job of showing us the people behind the hacking handles and sets the activity in a social as well as technical context, but he sensibly stops short of suggesting solutions. Just as well—Steve Wozniak was a hacker and went on to co-found Apple. Hackers, as The Hacker Diaries show, grow up and move on. —Steve Patient