author : John M. Ford

Grailer is a child prodigy, able to reach the forbidden Fourth Literacy with his computer access. At the age of nine he is rescued and trained by a variety of strange characters before the dreaded CIRCE agents can kill him. But once grown, he must eventually face his fate.

I really expected to like this book, given the other John Ford novels I've read and enjoyed. But I just couldn't get into it. Set in an unpleasant high-tech interstellar civilisation, where decadent long-lived humans seem to have nothing better to do than dress up, play games, and kill each other, it is told in a particular flowery elliptical fractured style that I find unrewarding to read. So I gave up at the end of chapter 6. (However, I did appreciate the fact that a plausible mechanism was put in place to allow the VR Hounds to kill a hacker through a computer terminal.)

A superior Star Trek novel, with ST:TOS characters appearing only in cameo, focusing on Klingons (before they were good guys).

The inhabitants of a planet rich in Dilithium wants neither the Federation nor the Klingons, so resorts to rather original tactics to discourage them. That notorious Star Trek novel of Gilbert and Sullivan slapstick.

An excellent rites of passage novel, set on the moon, spoilt for me only by the fact that I didn't understand the ending.

Contents (possible spoilers)

• Gregory Benford. As Big as the Ritz. 1986

Clayton Donner gets invited to visit the strange experimental world of the Brotherhood, but they don't realise that he is an astrophysicist, able to understand how the world works.

• John M. Ford. Fugue State. 1987

• Nancy Springer. Chance. 1987