The New York Review of Science Fiction

December 2012 Table of Contents

ISSUE #292 December 2012 Volume 25, No. 4 ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

• Victor Grech: Changing Depictions of Santa Claus in Science Fiction Magazines and Superhero Comic Book Covers
• Michael Andre-Driussi: The Politics of Roadside Picnic
• Grady Hendrix: God and Tesseracts: Christian Love in L’Engle’s Time Quartet
• Douglas A. Anderson: Joanna Russ’s Version of The Hobbit

REVIEWS

• Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, reviewed by Jenny Blackford
• Robin D. Laws’s New Tales of the Yellow Sign, reviewed by Lisa Padol
• Hope Larson’s Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, the Graphic Novel, reviewed by Avram Grumer
• Spaceman, written and directed by Leegrid Stevens, reviewed by Aaron Grunfeld

PLUS

• Plus: Philip Wylie and nuclear destruction, photos from Philcon, and an editorial

Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Managing Editors.
Alex Donald, Webmaster; David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor; Kevin J. Maroney, Publisher.

Staff: Ann Crimmins, Jen Gunnels, Lisa Padol, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, and Anne Zanoni.

Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz.

Published monthly by Burrowing Wombat Press, 206 Valentine Street, Yonkers NY 10704-1814

Send all editorial inquiries and submissions to dgh@tor.com and kjm@panix.com.

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New York Review of Science Fiction Home Page: www.nyrsf.com

Copyright © 2012 Burrowing Wombat Press.

December 2012 NYRSF cover article on Tor.com

Changing Depictions of Santa Claus in Science Fiction Magazines and Superhero Comic Book Covers, by Victor Grech, from the December 2012 issue of NYRSF, appeared on Tor.com recently.

New Tales of the Yellow Sign by Robin D. Laws, reviewed by Lisa Padol

Alexandria, Virgina: Atomic Overmind Press, 2012; $16.95 tpb; 176 pages




When NYRSF asked me to write a review, we discussed several options. I came to the conclusion that, for quicker results, I should do a simple review of Robin Laws’s New Tales of the Yellow Sign rather than a review of the new edition of the roleplaying supplement Masks of Nyarlathotep, which, to do justice, would have to survey nearly 40 years of gaming history. After all, New Tales of the Yellow Sign doesn’t require much of a backwards look, right? Oh . . . wait. . . .

The Politics of Roadside Picnic, by Michael Andre-Driussi




The Russian novel Roadside Picnic was first published in 1972 and translated into English in 1977. Its Swedish edition won a Jules Verne award, and in 1981, it received an award for best foreign novel of the year at the Festival du Science Fiction in Metz. Over multiple re-readings of the 1977 translation in 2011, my sense of the politics of Roadside Picnic altered considerably. A breakthrough came this year when a new translation was published and I read the new edition’s foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin and the afterword by Boris Strugatsky.

December 2012 Editorial: The Hopes and Fears of All the Years




“Christmas,” said Doctor Drinkwater as his red-cheeked face sped smoothly toward Smoky’s, “is a kind of day, like no other in the year, that doesn’t seem to succeed the days it follows, if you see what I mean.” . . .

“I mean,” Doctor Drinkwater said, reappearing beside him, “that every Christmas seems to follow immediately after the last one; all the months that came between don’t figure in. Christmases succeed each other, not the falls they follow.”

—John Crowley, Little, Big

This has been quite a year, he said with some substantial understatement. I am writing this less than a week after the Newtown massacre, the fifth mass shooting in the US in the last six months. Two months ago, a late-season category 1 hurricane collided with an early winter storm at spring tide and did an estimated $100 billion in damage to New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut; entire towns along the ocean shore were drowned, or burnt, or left empty for months. The American government is on the verge of implementing austerity through a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes, racing to copy the second-stage recession that is busily destroying the entire social safety net of the United Kingdom.

December 2012 issue, #292

EPub/PDF from Weightless Books. print copies of 291/292 from lulu.com. Article of the Month, Editorial, and TOC will be posted in a few days.