If you like the brain-stretching work of William Gibson (author of Neuromancer) and Philip K. Dick (author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?, which was the basis for Blade Runner), you'll feel right at home with this latest futuristic thriller from the author of the well-received Spares (available in paperback). It's 2017, and the first time we meet Hap Thompson he's being hassled in a bar in Ensenada by his alarm clock, which not only talks but walks and has a bad attitude. Hap, a prodigious computer hacker with a pretty bad attitude himself, works for an outfit called REMtemps, which offers a unique service—removing clients' bad dreams by sucking them into the heads of paid professionals. (Could Smith have been influenced at all by the title of one of Dick's best stories, "I Can Dream It for You Wholesale"?) Unfortunately, one of the bad dreams Hap is called on to swallow involves a real murder, and the search for the woman who dreamed it in the first place takes him—and us—on a literally mind-bending journey of scientific and philosophic discovery. But there's plenty of action, gadgetry, and snappy noir dialogue to make it all go down easily. —Dick Adler

There are those SF readers who resent the authors and publishers who attempt to downplay the genre aspects of their books to grant them more mainstream credibility. This resentment is fair enough, in that no one need be ashamed of creating a top-notch SF novel. But these readers will be doing themselves a great disservice if they do not pick up Michael Marshall Smith's superb collection of short stories What You Make It merely because the jacket has been designed to suggest mainstream fiction without the slightest SF association.

Smith has always been one of the most quirkily inventive and surprising of writers, with novels such as Only Forward and the remarkable Spares demonstrating an imaginative grasp all too rarely encountered these days. But his greatest achievement is his totally individual use of language and dialogue, and this highly diverse collection has 17 brilliant microcosms of his style. From terror in cyberspace to bizarre fusions of man and machine, through twisted manifestations of the artistic impulse to highly disturbing future sex, Smith has the measure of it all. And his gift for the bizarre image remains as acute as ever: About a week afterwards, I noticed that my back was looking a little hairy. I figured, what the hey, maybe some hormonal thing. Then it started getting harder to hold things. My thumb seemed to be going a little weird, not as opposable as it used to be. There were a couple of days when it looked like there was some kind of tail deal developing. —Barry Forshaw