Born With the Dead. Robert Silverberg (Random House, $5.95). Some Dreams Are Nightmares. James Gunn (Scribners, $6.95). Total Eclipse. John Brunner (Doubleday, $5.95). Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. Philip. K. Dick (Doubleday $6.95). The Texas–Israeli War: 1999. Howard Waldrop & Jake Saunders (Ballantine, $1.25)

A reviewer's hardest task is to define standards. “Good” can mean almost anything: what the British call “a good read,” “for those who like it, this is what they'll like,” “it won't poison you,” “good enough for minor entertainment,” “mildly pleasant,” “intelligent, thoughtful, and interesting,” “charming!” and just plain “good” – excluding the range of better, from fine to splendid to superb to great. Reviewers also tend to adopt a paradoxical sliding scale in measuring a book's quality, i.e. the more ambitious a book, the more it's likely to fail; yet the competent, low-level “success” can be less valuable and interesting than the flawed, fascinating, incomplete “failure.” For example, in July 1973 I reviewed James Gunn's The Listeners (which belongs emphatically in category two, above) and managed to make it sound worse than Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, a considerably lower-level (although fun and interesting) category one. Novels don't only provide different kinds of pleasures; they involve a reader more or less profoundly. Listeners was “bad” because parts of it were so wonderfully good. Dream was “good” partly because it demanded so little of the reader – some of this by the author's deliberate choice, which only adds to the complexity of the whole business.

None of this month's hardcover novels lives up to its author's own best work and in that sense they are not good books. They're certainly not in the “good-by-any-standards” class. Yet none of them is in the droopyeyeball or loathsome class, either, and all have some excellences. The reviewer's business (as so many reviewers have said) is distinguishing between various levels of failure, keeping in mind that by “good” here I mean very high standards indeed.

Robert Silverberg is a sossidge-factory trying to become an artist.