The one good entry? Rachel Pollack’s Delusions of Universal Grandeur. Sufferers’ symptoms include "the severe delusional belief that the universe is ever more gigantic" and "typically is accompanied by the belief that the universe is vastly old". But I imagine that if I proposed this as a funny disease to my friends, they’d think I was being obscure much as I think the rest of this book is just too obscure.

(Full review at my blog) ( )

I love the idea of this book a lot more than I love the book itself. As with any anthology, some parts are better than others, but any part of it can provide a few moments amusement. As a book for dipping into, Guide is wonderful. And there really are some storming ideas in here, as long as you are willing to embrace its terrible oddness. ( )

Because of my natural inclination towards interesting diseases, my brother passed on to me the Thackery Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. Now one should note that this is a fake medical guide. Each diseases (written by an absurdly large collection of great fiction authors including Gaiman, Mieville, Moore and others) is given two or three pages to describe symptoms, a case history, epidemiology. The best are the diseases that are contagious simply by reading about them or touching the pages (Printer's Evil). Some are just creepy (Tian Shan-Gobi Assimilation which is transmitted by enraging onlookers who then proceed to dismember a victim), and some are simply too close to a real disease (Inverted Drowning Syndrome in which one liquefies is just a little to close to cholera for my tastes). Strangely it satisfied my sick and twisted predilection for horror/fantasy mixed with just the right element of victorianism, epidemiology, and fake scientific jargon. A delight for wierd people like me.

The basic idea behind this book is one of brilliance: Take a group of scattered science fiction writers and have them come up with absurd, funny diseases and then tie the whole thing together with a history and personal accounts about the titular disease-obsessed doctor. For the most part it works. The main chunk of the texts, the various entries concerning diseases such as "Ballistic Organ Syndrome" and "Razornail Bone Rot," has some great comedy writing from Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, China Mieville and other modern sci-fi luminaries. While the entries can be hit and miss, they contain enough brilliant descriptions and clever metafictional games to make the whole a highly entertaining read. The editors' biographical and historical notes are dryly witty and set the book on the right tone. However, the various accounts of the doctor's life from different writers, which brings the book to a close, are almost uniformly dull and could have been lopped off without much loss to the whole. Still, a solid collection for fans of great humor writing and science fiction alike.

(This review originally appeared on zombieunderground.net) ( )

Discredited Diseases:

http://www.teaattheford.net/viewpost....