Cliffs Notes: Science Fiction, An Introduction. L. David Allen (Cliffs Notes Inc., Lincoln, Nebraska, $1.95). Political Science Fiction: An Introductory Reader. Eds. Martin Harry Greenberg, Patricia S. Warrick (Prentice-Hall, Inc., $5.95, cloth $9.95). As Tomorrow Becomes Today. Ed. Charles Wm. Sullivan, III (Prentice- Hall, Inc., $4.95, cloth $7.95). Speculations: An Introduction to Literature Through Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. Thomas E. Sanders (Glencoe Press, Beverly Hills, California, $6.95). Modern Science Fiction. Ed. Norman Spinrad (Anchor Press, New York, $3.50). Science Fiction: The Classroom in Orbit. Beverly Friend (Educational Impact, Inc., Glassboro, N.J., 1974, $3.75; $3.00 for 20 or more). The English Assassin. Michael Moorcock (Harper & Row, $6.95)

It's important to kill mosquitoes, especially malaria-carrying ones. Cliffs Notes may be refreshing to masochists in search of a new intellectual thrill, but every teacher of Frosh Comp will find this volume wearisomely familiar; it is the ultimate bad paper that drives us all stark, staring bonkers: the compulsive (usually polysyllabic) hedging, the endless plot summaries (redundant if you've read the book, baffling if you haven't), the blank ignorance of anything more than two years old (the “tremendous effect” of Dune on the young is mentioned as being without parallel; sic transit gloria Stranger), the cumulatively unsettling inaccuracies, the eerie sloppiness (based on an intense, unspoken belief that words don't really mean anything), and worst of all – because ignorant, desperate, or hurried students are particularly vulnerable – the assumption that fiction is put together assembly-line fashion, out of detachable pieces (except for titles, all italics in the following quotes are mine):