A large number of people are M H Zool, and they have all come together to create in Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy (Bloomsbury, £4.99) a feisty little conspectus of the field which might have been better, but could have been a lot worse. In 160 small pages – to which they were presumably restricted by their publishers, who were also almost certainly responsible for naming the book after themselves – the Zool crowd manages to cram a good nuumber of alphabetical entries on a fairly wide range of science-fiction and fantasy authors. Recent figures are more adequately represented than earlier ones. The system of cross-references veers to the Heath-Robinsonian, especially in view of the tininess of the book; and the reading "skeins" – columnar presentations of titles various members of Zool have free-associated to lemmas like Isaac Asimov's Foundation, or John Crowley's Little, Big – does not much reward the intense referencing use a book of this sort might seem to elicit. And it might have been better not to have dated any books at all, if the alternative was to date only some of them, and when doing so to ascribe dates according to criteria that seem to have varied pretty wildly. But the heart of the endeavour is the entries themselves, which are witty, succinct, original, batty, impertinent, innovative, fey, smug, canny, young. But there should have been much more. Not Zool's fault, surely. The publisher's fault, surely. It has to be said. This Good Reading Guide is not Bloomsbury at all. Its Twigshack.
– John Clute