Spice Up Your SF Life This Spring!

With summer coming, it's time to toss out those heavy winter novels and go for some new, bright magazine sf! This year's covers are certain to be clean and pure looking - heavy-going blacks and greys are definitely OUT! And as Spectrum #1 proved back in February, stylish readers in the millennium will ONLY be seen with a multitude of slim and sexy volumes made from a wide variety of writers.

And variety is the key this season - let your reading hair down and don't feel you have to be seen reading the same author, day in day out!

Spectrum #2 gives you no excuse to be dowdy anymore, and positively revels in that "just written" feeling, guaranteed to make sf readers feel sexy!

Start with Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown's collaboration Green-Eyed Monster, a breezy undemanding read for early on; Keith Brooke's .Zipped will go particularly well with a late morning cappuccino. In the full glare of the lunch hour we can ONLY recommend the doomsday chic of Stephen Palmer's Dr Vanchovny's Last Case, followed by the distinctly chilly aura of Jack Deighton's The Gentlemen Go By. Brrr!

Take a break now, reader - you deserve it, relax and put your feet up with the comfortable familiarities of Keith Roberts Drek Yarman - that's how they're reading them in Milan, we promise you!

The perfect early evening story, gearing up for the night to come, must be Barrington J. Bayley's The Sky Tower - seemingly familiar but with a sharp twist to follow!

And then, for those of you who simply MUST have a novella in the evening, is Destiny On Tartarus by Eric Brown, the perfect end to any day's hard reading!

Spectrum #2 only stumbles at the very last with the slightly superfluous Archive section, but then, it's still early days yet!