Two more from the Science Fiction Bin

The first was a "classic" SF tale from 1979.  Philip José Farmer has written a lot of very popular SF, and I've read some of it.
Part space opera, part picaresque adventure and quest, lots of strange beasts and weird names and languages.The story went along pretty well, but the descriptions of the peculiar characters were too hard to follow, swallow and imagine. The green leafy centaur (half-plant) in the cover picture is rather like the description. The sentient rock, an alien, was too much for me. The human characters in the picture are too muscly for 15-year olds, but SF cover art has never been realistic.

I thought the story lacked internal logic in parts. I didn't like it much, really, but it was free and occupied a few hours.








The second was much better. Also free, but worth at least a few dollars. I've always been fond of "Year's Best" collections. Short stories suit my summer attention span, and there are so many different styles and ideas. This was the 2006 crop of stories, published in 2007, so really pretty recent. Some were better than others, but all were very good and thoughtfully entertaining.