Publisher's Weekly
Ursula K Le Guin and Poul 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.''