Reading Into the Past: Week of 1/29

Here's my usual Sunday-night post, looking back at the books I read this equivalent week in a past year. This time we're going back nine years, to 1997:

• Greg Egan, Axiomatic (1/22)
  Egan's first short-story collection. It's absolutely brilliant, but I have to imagine anyone serious about science fiction has read it by now. This book is the essential summary of what was exciting and new in SF in the early '90s.
• Sean Stewart, Clouds End (1/23)
  I enjoyed this one, but the plot hasn't stuck in my mind very clearly. I think this was Stewart's take on epic fantasy, though more of a view on what happens after the big quest to save the world.
• Bob Kahan, editor, Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 6 (1/24)
  I love quite a lot of the history of the Legion, right up to the mid-90's "let's make them young and stupid again" reboot. I haven't picked up a single issue since then. This collection was from the Silver Age, back when the stories were not quite as random as Superman tales, but still pretty odd by today's standards.
• David Chelsea, Welcome to the Zone (1/25)
  I have no idea what this was. I'm assuming it's comics, and that it was the same David Chelsea as David Chelsea in Love, but I have no memory of it.
• Michaela Roessner, The Stars Dispose (1/26)
  A historical fantasy that I didn't think did all that much; the historical world was evoked nicely, but the plot didn't have much fantasy, or anything clearly different from the known past. It all seemed rather pointless, which was a shame, since I'd really liked Roessner's Vanishing Point.
• John Sladek, Roderick (1/27)
  Sladek is one of the great funny/cruel SF writers (along with Sheckley), and the "Roderick" books are his best sustained work. (Though I sometimes think Tik-Tok is his best work, just on sheer force of malice and anger.)
• V. Segrelles, The Mercenary: Year 1000, The End of the World (1/28)
  European comics, in a vaguely Heavy Metal style (though I don't recall if it had the requisite random nudity), about a dragon-flying warrior in a world that was probably post-apocalyptic. Nice pictures, but the story was nothing special.
• John Sladek, Roderick at Random (1/29)
  If I remember right, this is middle third of the "Roderick" saga, as butchered for original US publication. (The whole thing is now available in one volume on both sides of the Atlantic, so the point is now moot.)

A nice week; I generally started a new year with a burst of energy (coming off a long Christmas vacation with a renewed zeal to read a book a day), and 1997 was no exception.