Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women, edited by A. Susan Williams and Richard Glyn Jones (Penguin, £8.99 in UK)

Where, I wonder, is it located within the human psyche, the primeval drive to anthologise? At its most successful, it produces brilliant collections of magpie bits and pieces on related themes; but only if the theme is interesting and the collection coherent. This anthology, it seems to me, misses both targets, being an uneasy mish mash of, on the one hand, literary stories by writers like Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and Fay Weldon, and on the other, pop fiction pieces with titles like Fireflood and Cynosure. Some of the pieces, from both sides of the divide, are brilliant - Muriel Spark's weird little "UFO" story, Miss Pinkerton's Apocalypse, for example, and Anne McCaffrey's lyrical The Ship Who Sang. As a whole, however, the collection doesn't gel. Maybe "fantasy" is too broad a church: anyhow, fantastic it ain't.