REAL SF FANS DON'T READ PRIEST

CHEAP TRUTH stalwart Sue Denim sharpens her lance and charges the windmill:

There's a saying: "REAL programmers don't eat quiche... they eat Twinkies and Szechuan food." This kind of junk-food mentality is true of your typical SF fan, too. Your REAL SF fan doesn't read Priest. He doesn't read Dick or Ballard, either. He reads David Brin and Larry Niven and Anne McCaffrey. Junk food for the brain.

And what's more, he's proud of it. He holds his head high so the light will catch his coke-bottle glasses, hoists his basketball gut, and, with the odor of Twinkies on his breath, tells you, "I'm SPECIAL. It takes a special kind of person to appreciate this stuff."

And the hell of it is, every so often something that really IS special comes along in a junk-food wrapper. Like a granola bar, or maybe chicken cordon bleu on a bun -- it looks like junk food, tastes like junk food, but it's actually got real nutrition in it. This year we're lucky -- we've had a couple of rich, vitamin-packed granola bars already, and at least one of them is being scarfed down by junk-food addicts everywhere.

Certainly they like the taste of NEUROMANCER (by William Gibson, an Ace Special, $2.95 (Gollancz L 8.95)). I mean, this is high-tech enough to satisfy the most acned sixteen-year-old hacker whose only sex life is getting his modem on-line with an X-rated bulletin board. Never mind that it shows you how the future may very well BE, never mind the political issues, this guy knows what it's like the be plugged IN, man.

But that's okay. Literature, the really good stuff, has a way of changing your thinking whether you want it to or not.

But let's talk about our other granola bar for a minute. You see, the problem with this kind of literature is it's got a short shelf life. A book that comes out in September might as well have a little printed squib on the back that says "Best if enjoyed before November 1," like you see on bags of Twinkies, because in no time at all it's going to be gone.

You may already have trouble finding THE DIGGING LEVIATHAN (by James P. Blaylock, Ace, $2.95). You probably passed it by the first time because you weren't interested in some Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche, or because it looked like a kid's book. I suppose it IS a kid's book, at least in the sense that Jim, the main protag, is only 15 -- but then Daniel Pinkwater's LIZARD MUSIC is a kid's book, and you shouldn't miss that one either.

What makes this book special is its integrity. Blaylock refused to humiliate his characters for the sake of a cheap laugh, quite an achievement when those characters are a bunch of lunatic pseudo-scientists trying to get to Pellucidar. This isn't Burroughs' junk-food Pellucidar with the dinosaurs and all, though -- this is the 'real thing,' the hollow earth written about by countless other nutcases over the years.

These people get so real that it's scary. We see them at their Newtonian Society meetings and in the backyard workshop where they are training mice to be amphibians. But we also see Jim's father William raging in paranoia at a neighbor's dog, even, in one of the book's most brilliant scenes, at a tube of toothpaste.

Blaylock's best trick, though, is the way he draws you in so deeply. When William looks in the mirror, the readers see their own faces.

When you finish this book, give it to somebody who likes Twinkies -- but don't tell them it's good for them. You don't want to scare them off.