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Flying Cups & Saucers collects 13 winners and finalists for the James Tiptree Jr. Award, named for science fiction's ultimate gender pioneer, the woman writer everyone thought was a man. Accordingly, the Tiptree Award (est. 1991) honors the best science fiction and fantasy to explore and expand gender roles. As you might expect, these stories are feminist; non-heterosexist; focused on sex and desire; and sometimes androgynous (a few stories feature three sexes, and one even stars Freud's nightmare, the woman with a penis). But this list hardly begins to describe the contents.

Kelley Eskridge's terrific and gender-bending And Salome Danced is the perfect opening story: it not only examines oft-ignored aspects of desire, it operates on several levels to explore how what we expect to see defines and limits our perceptions. Science fiction's founding mother Ursula K. Le Guin contributes two brilliant stories: Forgiveness Day explores the intricacy of gender roles in a society where they are further complicated by slavery and war, while The Matter of Seggri is set on a world with near-absolute segregation of the sexes. L. Timmel Duchamp incisively delineates how men react to a woman who doesn't fit the feminine role. James Patrick Kelly's seemingly traditional idea-SF story Chemistry just might be the most radical in the book, for it explores the purely chemical nature of love. The other contributors--Eleanor Arnason, Ian McDonald, Carol Emshwiller, Graham Joyce, Peter F. Hamilton, R. Garcia y Robertson, Lisa Tuttle, Delia Sherman, and Ian R. MacLeod--also contribute strong, insightful, well written, challenging, and often threatening fiction. --Cynthia Ward.
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James P. Blaylock has been publishing singular, literate, evocative stories since 1977, but Thirteen Phantasms and Other Stories appears to be his first (and a complete) collection Its 16 stories have little concern for genre; Blaylock slides from the fantastic to subtle horror to slipstream, sometimes in the same story. His introduction, with its mentions of an antique shop of mysterious orientalia and of aquaria stocked with obscure oddities, perfectly prefigures the concerns of his stories. The past is sometimes the setting, and it often haunts or drives the characters. But this is no simple nostalgia; Blaylock knows the past, irrecoverable yet inescapable, can be a burden and a trap. Mysteries, too, compel or lure many characters, with their strangeness and shadows and dangers. And some characters pursue--or are controlled by--peculiar obsessions.

Thirteen Phantasms does not present the stories in chronological order, but reading them chronologically reveals Blaylock's evolution into a great writer. His first sale, 1977's atmospheric ship-of-fools/bus-of-bozos fantasy "The Red Planet," is creepy, but too mysterious and underdeveloped to please many readers. A decade later, Blaylock would win the World Fantasy Award with the deserving and powerful "Paper Dragons"; set in a world in which matter has become mutable, it is one of the most unusual dragon stories ever written. The most recent story, 1998's "The Old Curiosity Shop," is a tremendous work in which a man who abandoned his wife discovers she has literally dwindled away from grief, and the objects she left behind, curios sold to a strange shop, are so invested with the weight of memories that a man might be crushed beneath a single item.

Most of the stories take place in contemporary California, but three of the exceptions ("The Ape-Box Affair," "Two Views of a Cave Painting," and "The Idol's Eye") are set in an alternate-history England in which H.G. Wells's science fiction must be fact; and they belong to that rarest of subgenres, comic steampunk. These entertaining adventures feature Langdon St. Ives, a Victorian scientist-adventurer after the manner of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger, and the hero of Blaylock's novels Homunculus (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award) and Lord Kelvin's Machine. --Cynthia Ward.
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Thorough and versatile beginning band method by band director Bruce Pearson With a strong emphasis on unique problems encountered by students of the various instruments, this highly researched and tested method has earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the premier band methods available..
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