This slab of a volume ate up a few days in an enjoyable fashion. The worst you can expect in a Dozois collection is worthy-but-dull-and-overlong. Outright bad is very rare; the stories are always sure to be well crafted and well-written. This edition is solid. Nothing boring, nothing spectacularly stand-out either. Memorable ones included Yellow Card Man and Nightingale, both rather nightmarish. Robbie The Row Boat was fun and clever. A good collection, overall.

A complex novel about the transition from one type of tribal living to another, brought about by one persons vision to create what we know today as Stonhenge. But in order to build it, Moloquin, the outsider, must reshape his people to suit his increasingly meglomaniacal ideas.

A thing is pure and independent, the object and the idea of the object utterly united with no division and no corruption. Then comes language and the thing acquire a name and suddenly the idea of a tree and a tree itself are divided, and the idea becomes a separate thing to the thing it's supposed to describe. Thus Nicolas Copernicus, who has a bright vision of the motions of celestial bodies that will turn everything humanity has understood about the world on its head, that will eventually unmoor us from our conception of the world and from religion, soils this vision, destroys it and mars it with his efforts to express it in language. And yet it is the world itself that is diseased and corrupt and downright petty, and he himself fears and hates the world and its imperfections.

John Banville's Copernicus, brilliant but cowed and cringing, dominated by his uncle, savagely haunted by the deteriorating spectre of his brother, seared by the knowledge that he has failed before he has even begun his great work, so that even if he completes it, he almost cannot bring himself to release it to the world because of what his flawed ideas of planetary motion will set in motion. A novel of ideas and angst, fear and base cunning, failure and futility - though his success as an administrator to his war-torn province seems oddly at odds with Banville's portrayal of his internal life, and so gets glossed over a bit.

Burke has done a few historical novels before, but none quite, I think, as full-blooded as this. Taking in the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde, the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of the death camps, the Texas oil boom, the rise of Hollywood and a few walk-on gangsters, this epic of love and honour and integrity struggling to survive in a tarnished, corrupt and violent world, as the spirit, if not the creed, that drove the Nazi tiger tanks through the Ardennes forest arises again and starts to devour the soul of the United States from the inside out. Weldon Holland and Hershel Pine rescue Rosita Lowenstein from a Nazi extermination camp, but can they build a business based on the technology of their enemies and thrive in a moral swamp that tries to suck them down and make them as bad as everyone else.

All the usual Burke themes of spiritual good and evil, and trying to make sense of a fallen world with beautifully atmospheric purple prose, wounded men, strong women and deplorable billionaires.

This is such a peculiar little book, not in and of itself, but because it is the third in a trilogy dealing with great historical scientists and their world-changing discoveries, and yet Isaac Newton barely features. The narrator is writing, and has abandoned near completion, a book about the physicist, but there is only one real direct exploration of Newton, via two letters written during or as a result of a nervous breakdown, and one of those letters is fictional. Instead, we have an odd little tale of an academic historian interloper who encounters a family, does questionable things and makes questionable assumptions only to have it all turned on its head. Perhaps there is some clever narrative conceit here, and the story mirrors or is informed by Newton's various laws, but rather it seems more like a microcosm of a world that believes one set of things to be true thrown into disarray when it turns out to be completely wrong. Having such a process re-enacted in a banal, sordid little family drama is more in keeping with the rest of the trilogy, where the great cosmic insights were set against the grinding frustrations of the prosaic everyday world.

Thrilling and clever historical treasure hunt. A new executive at a respected London Bank queries an unusual annual payment. This results in a series of written accounts of a British officer's mission to Russia in 1918, right into the heart of the Revolution in search of the Russian Royal family. However it also states that the story will bring about disaster for the bank, and the bankers must jump through numerous costly an humiliating hoops to receive each installment of the story.

Really enjoyable, though slightly reminiscent of Brian Garfield's Kolchak's Gold - albeit not as epic. Still, a lot of fun.

Three men in a head in a boat. Not the boat's head, an actual head of one of the three men. To say nothing of Mendoza. Poor old future playboy-turned-patsy-for-Martian-mass-murder Alec is obliged to live mentally and virtually with two earlier variations of himself, an effort to create a non-immortal enforcer type to do Dr Zeus' dirty work and maybe deal with ll the immortals piling up around the Silence in the future, from which no signal leaks. First order of business is to rescue Mendoza from an abominable prison in the deep past, after which she is physically restored but mentally amnesiac, leaving our beloved botanist a bit blank and pliable and naive, though there is a sense that she is enjoying a brief respite against the onset of recovered memory. meanwhile, Joseph slips into madness as he puts his own father back together and plots revenge against Alec. All the while the unknowable future creeps closer, and plans are laid and preparations for war discreetly seeded through time.

More masterful stories by Swanwick, some horrifying, some funny, all brilliantly realised and at least a little bit disturbing and mindblowing. Highlights are the utterly terrifying Radiant Doors and the Tolkeinish Changeling's Tale, but they're all damn good.

Are there villains more squalid and vile than the narrator of GBH? Answer is there none. No, wait. The answer is none there. Dammit. None. None more squalid nor vile. A pornographer and snuff merchant who tortures and murders his way through his own gangland mob when threatened by rivals, a wife and sidekick nearly as bad as him, cops in his pocket and enemies under his heel. But something is going on and it's hard to put his exposed electric wires on it. We know it all goes wrong, though, because the story is split into the past, The Smoke, with Fowler at the height of his power, and the present, The Sea, with Fowler hiding out at a deserted out-of-season beach resort.

The disintegration of his empire and the disintegration of his mind are told with wonderful, calm and literate prose, reflecting the urbane civility of the man with monsters underneath. Utterly brilliant, searing and harrowing as he is brought low first by his ego, and then by the tiny sliver of a conscience he doesn't even know he has.

A nice, varied little collection containing a mix of fairy tales, heroic stories, country yarns, and tales of saints and monsters. I enjoyed it. There's a fair bit on Biddy Early and the stories of the Gaban Saor, which I particularly remember from school. I do like the clever tales, though some of the cleverness becomes more obscure with time. I was fascinate by Maire Ruad and tickled by the idea of the ferocious fairy badger. As I've come to notice, it's the Christian stories that often end up being the more hair raising - their hagiographies rival the stories of Cuchulainn in heaping praise as well as holiness on the holy men. St Senan humbles the proud, lays low the powerful and kicks monsters in the bum by sheer dint of his utter awesomeness, then bans women from his island completely. Good man, Senan.