Rating: 
Summary: Quirky
Review: This is book is fun and quirky. I like some of the absurdity. Cool characters and creatures.
Rating: 
Summary: Stupid and lame.
Review: This may not be the worst book I ever read, but it's close. I can't see any Piers Anthony in this, and I can't believe he allowed his name to be on the cover. This is an unwholesome blend of Alien, Scientific American, and Little Shop of Horrors. While the Mad Scientist genetically engineers sea-monsters in the back room of the fish store, and trains them to eat people, the Policewoman with Nothing to Do and the Harvard Hare-Lip Nerd Boy discover that their sexual hang-ups complement each other's perfectly and fall madly in love, walking in a Newfoundland woodland barefoot in fall looking at the bougainvillea...huh?? Since when to tropical plants grow near the Arctic circle? Since when do lovers walk barefoot on the frosty Newfoundland beach watching the icebergs cruise by?? The book starts out in a nicely Benchley-ish style, but rapidly deteriorates into green acid monster drool, ecobabble, and other idiocies. The only reason I finished it at all was an acute lack of reading material while traveling--it was this or Good Housekeeping. GH almost got the nod. My professional opinion? Yuk. CLH
Rating:
Summary: Why was this published in the first place?
Review: We have to wonder why some books ever make it to the public. Sometimes a bad book by a name author will slip through, and this is probably the case with <i>Spiderlegs</i>.Characters are unbelievable; plot is leaky; transitions are awkward. But...oh, the exposition! The characters often talk like textbooks, and they all have remarkable memories. A character will say, "Oh, this reminds me of a poem." "Recite it," says his companion (as if we usually are able to recite anything we're reminded of.) The first person recites it, of course; then the listener pipes up with, "Oh, yes. Longfellow wrote than in 1855 when he was visiting his sister in Maine. He had stomach trouble during the entire trip." Of course Anthony was brought in here to do a polish-up job on Pickover's manuscript. I don't know how they split the money, but Pickover clearly is not a writer and Anthony didn't earn his part of royalties with his efforts, either. One star, and barely that: this book ranks near the very bottom of s-f, in my opinion.
Rating:
Summary: "Bats are not bugs... and sea spiders are not crustaceans"
Review: With apologies to Bill Watterson of "Calvin & Hobbes" fame, while reading this book I kept thinking of Calvin trying to pass off his school (non-)book report on bats as bug scourges of the sky. Pickover & Anthony appear to have similarly failed to do their homework on the classification and biology of sea spiders. In an amateurish attempt to make a horror/science fiction story, the resulting tale was an editing horror story where all logic, science, and plot development were gruesomely slaughtered. Their super-human (able to survive for extended periods underwater on a single SCUBA tank) evil antagonist is able to cobble together a super spider-like creation which just cannot keep from attacking people and ships. Her effect appears to have tilted the earth's axial tilt because suddenly tropical fauna have mingled with temperate and arctic! If there had been some pretense that this was one of Anthony's fantasies (e.g., magic instead of microbes) which he used to do so well, there may have been an interesting premise... but come on, that lobster climbing out of the water on the cover isn't even close to being a sea spider.
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