Roverandom
By J.R.R. Tolkien
Houghton Mifflin, $17
ISBN 0395898714

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Nebula Awards 32
Edited by Jack Dann
Harcourt Brace, $26
ISBN 0151003068

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With The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien secured for himself a special place in fantasy literature. Many of those tales of Middle-earth were originally written or spoken as family stories and letters to Tolkien's children. His newly released, never-before-published fantasy tale, Roverandom, evolved in the same fashion.

In 1925 Professor Tolkien, his wife Edith, and their children -- John, age eight, Michael, age five, and Christopher, age one -- went on holiday to the Yorkshire coast. While playing on the beach Michael lost his favorite toy -- a miniature lead dog painted black and white. This loss caused heartbreak for five-year-old Michael, and to compensate Tolkien invented a story in which a real dog named Rover is turned into a toy by a wizard and then lost by a boy on the beach. There Rover encounters adventures on the moon and under the sea.

Tolkien's canine hero, who comes to be known as Roverandom, meets a wonderful cast of characters including a "sand-sorcerer," the Man-in-the-Moon, a wise old whale, and a dangerous dragon who causes lunar eclipses with his smoky "red and green flames."

This delightful fantasy story will charm every reader and is accompanied by Professor Tolkien's own illustrations.

Nebula Awards 32, edited by Jack Dann, contain stories that are almost as good as Tolkien's tales. No surprise since this volume honors the short stories, novellas, and novelettes that were voted by the professional members of the Science Fiction Writers Association as the best science fiction and fantasy of the year for 1996.

These millennium-ending stories feature Leonardo Da Vinci's flying machine, a vampire story in a nursing home, an alternative American Civil War, time travel, and Mayan archaeology. My only disagreement is that I would have voted for Ursula LeGuin or Allen Steele in the novella category over Jack Dann, but that's a small quibble about an outstanding array of the best modern science fiction has to offer.