The New York Review of Science Fiction

ISSUE #249 May 2009

ISSUE #249 May 2009

Volume 21, No. 9 ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

Amy J. Ransom: WorldCon 2009 in Montréal: How the Other Half Lives; or, SFQ: More than Just a Hobby: 1

Eric A. Johnson: My London Time-Slip: 1

Tom Purdom: When I Was Writing: Installment Five: 11

Chuck Gannon: A “Dear John” Letter to a Fallen Giant: Revisiting Updike’s Marginalization of SF: 18

Darrell Schweitzer: Robert Bloch and the Death of Science Fiction—1951: 19

REVIEWS

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s TH.2058, reviewed by Michael Swanwick: 9

Kage Baker’s The House of the Stag, reviewed by Jenny Blackford: 10

C. J. Henderson’s Tales of Inspector Legrasse, reviewed by Peter Rawlik: 13

Cory Doctorow’s Content: Selected Essays, reviewed by Robert Bee: 21

Brenda Cooper’s Reading the Wind, reviewed by David Mead: 23

PLUS

David Langford’s Random Reading (14) and an editorial (24).

 

Kathryn Cramer, Art and Web Site Editor; Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman, Associate Managing Editor.

David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor; Kevin J. Maroney, Managing Editor.

Staff: Ann Crimmins, Alex Donald, Jen Gunnels, Eugene Reynolds, and Anne Zanoni.

Weekly Crew: Avram Grumer, Aubrey Lynch, Lisa Padol, and Christine Quiñones.

Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz.

Published monthly by Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570.

$4.00 per copy.Annual subscriptions: U. S. Bulk Rate, $40.00; Canada, $44.00; U. S. First Class, $50.00 

Overseas Air Printed Matter, UK & Europe, $47.00; Asia & Australia, $48.00. Domestic institutional subscriptions $42.00.

Please make checks payable to Dragon Press, and payable in U.S. funds.

Electronic subscriptions are available; e-mail <nyrsf.payments@gmail.com> for information.

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

An up-to-date index of back issues in Excel format is available; e-mail <nyrsf.mail@gmail.com> to request one.

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

Copyright © 2009 Dragon Press.

Spring Forward

From NYRSF ISSUE #249, May 2009

Ah, the weather is improving as April progresses, as it should. Global warming progresses, and is taken ever more seriously, as it should. The price of oil goes up, as it should not. Source Interlink, the distributor that accounts for 25 percent of U.S. wholesale distribution, has settled its lawsuit with the magazine publishers to its advantage in order to stay in business for the moment. The angel Warren Lapine has announced the purchase and continuation of Realms of Fantasy. Major US newspapers have already ceased publication—either closing completely or moving to an online-only publishing model—and the rest are in some difficulty. A decline in advertising, worldwide, is projected for the year. Book sales in the US are declining some, but in genre not as much, for the moment. Let all that rest for now.

We have been nominated for the Hugo Award once again, our twenty-first nomination, and although we do not anticipate winning, we are pleased and proud to be nominated. We encourage everyone in our readership to attend the World SF Convention in Montreal this August, and to vote for the Hugos, and to attend the business meeting at 10 a.m. on Saturday where the final vote will be held on whether the Best Semiprozine Hugo award will be abolished. We are opposed to that abolition for several reasons: we cannot honorably compete in any other category; we derive great personal satisfaction from our nominations; and most of our competitors in the category feel the same way. The Semiprozine Hugo is one of the Hugo awards that actually supports the essential infrastructure underpinning the worldwide argument that is the science fiction field, that continues the discourse of who we think we are and what we think we are doing. So it is vote or be disenfranchised. See <www.semiprozine.org> for an extended discussion of the issues involved.

Meanwhile: Yay! We’re a Hugo nominee!

We attended ICFA in Orlando in March, and Ad Astra in Toronto at the start of April, and have pictures of both on page 3. We are still offering packages of back issues, our choice, 40 for $20 or 80 for $40, and so on up to 200 for $100, to subscribers. And our experiment with offering electronic copies to foreign subscribers, to reduce their postage to zero, has had some small success. Most subscribers still want the hard copy for the full price, though. But the offer still stands; enquire at the addresses on page 3 for more info. Postage is going up too far and too fast for at least our comfort. 

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

ISSUE #248 April 2009

ISSUE #248 April 2009

Volume 21, No. 8 ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

Darrell Schweitzer: An Interview with Charles Stross: 1

Mike Barrett: Mostly in Shadow: The Work of Mary Elizabeth Counselman: 1

Douglas A. Van Belle: A Comprehensive and Totally Universal Listing of Every Problem a Story Has Ever Had: 17

Donald M. Hassler: Entropy, Entertainment, and Creative Energy in Ben Bova: 20

REVIEWS

Eileen Kernaghan’s Wild Talent, reviewed by Ursula Pflug: 5

Michael Flynn’s The January Dancer, reviewed by David Mead: 7

Robert M. Price’s Blasphemies and Revelations, reviewed by Peter Rawlik: 13

Justina Robson’s Selling Out, reviewed by Jenny Blackford: 14

Justina Robson’s Going Under, reviewed by Niall Harrison: 15

John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale, reviewed by Joe Sanders: 16

Greg Egan’s Incandescence, reviewed by Karen Burnham: 19

Dirk Wittenborn’s Pharmakon, reviewed by Paul Kincaid: 22

PLUS

Dave Langford on Christopher Priest (10); much Screed (23); and an editorial (24).

 

Kathryn Cramer, Art and Web Site Editor; Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman, Associate Managing Editor.

David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor; Kevin J. Maroney, Managing Editor.

Staff: Ann Crimmins, Alex Donald,and  Eugene Reynolds.

Weekly Crew: Avram Grumer, Aubrey Lynch, Lisa Padol, and Christine Quiñones.

Special Thanks to: Arthur D. Hlavaty, Eugene Surowitz, and Anne Zanoni.

Published monthly by Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570.

$4.00 per copy.Annual subscriptions: U. S. Bulk Rate, $40.00; Canada, $44.00; U. S. First Class, $50.00 

Overseas Air Printed Matter, UK & Europe, $47.00; Asia & Australia, $48.00. Domestic institutional subscriptions $42.00.

Please make checks payable to Dragon Press, and payable in U.S. funds.

Electronic subscriptions are available; e-mail <nyrsf.payments@gmail.com> for information.

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

An up-to-date index of back issues in Excel format is available; e-mail <nyrsf.mail@gmail.com> to request one.

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

Copyright © 2009 Dragon Press.

First the Flood, Then the Drought

From NYRSF ISSUE #248, April 2009

Today, the Sunday morning of the March work weekend, a water main broke and flooded Laurel Lane, just down the street. And so we are without water for the moment. Here is a picture of our water going away:

On February 16, Anderson News, the distribution company that controlled about 25% of the mass market and magazine in the U.S., closed, after failing to impose a distribution surcharge on the magazine publishing industry as of February 1. Anderson covered, for instance, much of Wal-Mart. Their delivery assets (trucks and such) have been sold to a competitor, News Group. A third distributor, Source Interlink, who account for another 25% of U.S. wholesale distribution, is suing the magazine publishers in order to stay in business for the moment. It appears that both magazine publishers and paperback book publishers are going to lose both money owed to them and distribution immediately. Bad news indeed in a time filled with economic difficulties. 

SFWA has announced a radical change in the rules and procedures for their Nebula and other awards, replacing the widely criticized practices (see for instance the article by John Clute in NYRSF #131) that have been accumulating around their awards since the 1970s, resulting in their awards having no commercial credibility or value and too little aesthetic basis or grounding as well. We applaud the changes and hope they are not too little, too late.

On page three you will see pictures from Boskone and from the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference in early February. We’ll have a piece on the TOC Conference and more pictures in the next issue, but our intrepid reporter, Kathryn Cramer, left the conference with a virus that then kept her from attending Boskone, and the following weekend suffered an auto accident that resulted in a displaced vertebra in her neck, so the report is yet to be written.

This has been a long and stress-filled winter, with two minor operations, many colds, and one job loss within the core staff of NYRSF. We are grateful for the continued support of our readers and subscribers and hope for the immediate restoration of our water supply before another major snowstorm hits tonight. We look forward to warmer weather, in its time.

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

ISSUE #247 March 2009

ISSUE #247 March 2009

Volume 21, No. 7 ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

Braulio Tavares: Camp Concentration at The Reading Gaol: 1

Brian Stableford: The Reign of the Absolute Savants: Gaston de Pawlowski’s Idealist Future History: 1

Robert von Stein Redick: Altered States: Paul Park’s Roumania Quartet and the Honoring of Complexity: 13

Tom Purdom: When I Was Writing: A Literary Memoir, Pt. 4: 17

REVIEWS

Jo Walton’s Half a Crown, reviewed by Joan Gordon: 12

Christine Cornea’s Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality, reviewed by Joe Milicia: 14

Jay Lake’s Escapement, reviewed by Joe Sanders: 19

M. John Harrison’s Nova Swing, reviewed by Alex Donald: 22

PLUS

Wolfe and Kafka (7); hi-test Heinlein (16); and a new-fangled editorial (24).

 

Kathryn Cramer, Art and Web Site Editor; Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman, Associate Managing Editor.

David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor; Kevin J. Maroney, Managing Editor.

Staff: Ann Crimmins, Alex Donald, Eugene Reynolds, and Eugene Surowitz.

Weekly Crew: Avram Grumer, Aubrey Lynch, Lisa Padol, and Christine Quiñones.

Special Thanks to: Arthur D. Hlavaty and Anne Zanoni.

Published monthly by Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570.

$4.00 per copy.Annual subscriptions: U. S. Bulk Rate, $40.00; Canada, $44.00; U. S. First Class, $50.00 

Overseas Air Printed Matter, UK & Europe, $47.00; Asia & Australia, $48.00. Domestic institutional subscriptions $42.00.

Please make checks payable to Dragon Press, and payable in U.S. funds.

Electronic subscriptions are available; e-mail <nyrsf.payments@gmail.com> for information.

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

An up-to-date index of back issues in Excel format is available; e-mail <nyrsf.mail@gmail.com> to request one.

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

Copyright © 2009 Dragon Press.

And now the news

From NYRSF ISSUE #247, March 2009

I refer of course to the classic sf story by Theodore Sturgeon. Any of you who do not see its relevance to the present state of the world and sf need to go back and read it soon. It is an idea of Robert A. Heinlein’s, set to the musical language of Sturgeon, and at the center of the question of prolepsis in sf.

It is now a plausible scenario that all the professional printed sf magazines in the U.S. will cease publication this year—along with many other magazines. The circulation figures for sf publications as printed in the Locus summary show dire progressions downward for all magazines in 2008—and Realms of Fantasy will cease publication as of April 2009. As I write, there are conflicting reports that fifty percent of the magazine distribution in the US is about to cease business—some reports say it has in fact happened, some deny it. What is certain is that there is a per-copy surcharge just levied on all magazines by two huge distributors, and that some big magazines, such as Time and People, are refusing to pay it. What is also uncertain is how this will affect the distribution of mass market books in the US—mass market books are distributed to non-bookstore locations by magazine distributors, who put the books into airports, supermarkets, and Wal-Mart stores, for instance. But these are only five percent of the distributors’ business. The Trumps of Doom interpretation for sf is that it will bring about a short-term cascade of returns on all titles from the distributors, and then decrease the already decreasing distribution of all sf and fantasy, forcing nearly all smaller books into unprofitability. The end result of that scenario would be a sharp, sudden decrease in the number of mass-market paperback titles published by the end of 2009 and a concomitant increase in pressure to publish more titles in trade paperback. I don’t even want to speculate at this point on what it might mean for electronic publication, which is just beginning to show some noticeable profitability. Let us consider this all a dystopian sf scenario for the moment, and we will report back next month.

I had hoped to devote this editorial entirely to John Updike, but a condensed version will have to do. Updike was one of the principal arbiters of literary taste in the U.S., a writer of extraordinary talent, and, like Edmund Wilson, a fine book reviewer, principally for The New Yorker. Like W. H. Auden in the generation before him, he was interested in science as well as literature, and Updike was the single most influential force in establishing the literary acceptability of Ursula K. Le Guin in the mainstream in the US. He uttered an authoritative marginalization of science fiction as a whole in his New Yorker review of my own A World Treasury of Science Fiction—in part authoritative because it came from a selective sympathizer. He set up his discussion with what he called the crucial question: “What keeps science fiction a minor genre, for all the brilliance of its authors and apparent pertinence of its concerns?” His answer I always found unsatisfactory: “Each science fiction story is so busy inventing its environment that little energy is invested in the human subtleties.” My short version response is that this is fairly clearly a restatement of the Modernist position that good literature is solely about the inner life of characters in ordinary situations. Science fiction is general does not attempt that but excels at the behavior of characters in unusual and at best entirely plausible invented settings. I invite our readers to comment.

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

ISSUE #246 February 2009

ISSUE #246 February 2009

Volume 21, No. 6 ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

Christopher S. Kovacs: “. . . And Call Me Roger”: the Early Literary Life of Roger Zelazny: 1

Judith Moffett: POD Self-Publishing: Caveat Emptor: 1

David Drake: A Belated Thank-You: 21

REVIEWS

Paul Melko’s The Walls of the Universe, reviewed by Michael Levy: 7

Helen Collins’s Neurogenesis, reviewed by Joan Gordon: 11

Isaac Asimov’s Pebble in the Sky, reviewed by Donald M. Hassler: 13

Matthew Hughes’s Template: A Novel of the Archonate, reviewed by David Mead: 19

John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale, reviewed by Niall Harrison: 20

PLUS

Ink flows through it (7); lots of Screed (22); and an editorial (24).

 

Kathryn Cramer, Art and Web Site Editor; Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman, Associate Managing Editor.

David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor; Kevin J. Maroney, Managing Editor.

Production Staff: Ann Crimmins, Alex Donald, and Eugene Reynolds.

Weekly Meeting Crew: Avram Grumer, Lisa Padol, and Christine Quiñones.

Special thanks to: Arthur D. Hlavaty, Eugene Surowitz, and Ann Zanoni.

Published monthly by Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570.

$4.00 per copy.Annual subscriptions: U. S. Bulk Rate, $40.00; Canada, $44.00; U. S. First Class, $50.00 

Overseas Air Printed Matter, UK & Europe, $47.00; Asia & Australia, $48.00. Domestic institutional subscriptions $42.00.

Please make checks payable to Dragon Press, and payable in U.S. funds.

Electronic subscriptions are available; e-mail <nyrsf.payments@gmail.com> for information.

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

An up-to-date index of back issues in Excel format is available; e-mail <nyrsf@comcast.net> to request one.

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

Copyright © 2009 Dragon Press.

Slow Progress, Fast Times, II

From ISSUE #246, February 2009

No one is yet privy to all the information shaking the industry; all we know are fragments, puzzle pieces, and snapshots. Among these: Doubleday and Bantam are no longer publishers, and some imprints and some employees of other publishers are gone, too. Gordon Van Gelder has announced that The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is now bi-monthly, not monthly. It is rumored that other magazines are for sale. Some editors are promoted, some are out of work. If any company in sf publishing met or exceeded sales expectations in the second half of 2008, we are not aware of it. No one is bailing out publishers. What everyone knows is that this is near the start, not near the end, of all the changes. 

One sign of the times for us is that after Year’s Best Fantasy #8 received the most enthusiastic reception so far for a volume of YBF, sales decreased in bookstores; and in a surprising development, we got a contract to continue the book via Tor.com as their first book. Year’s Best Fantasy #9 will be primarily an electronic publication, but physical copies are planned under the  Tor.com brand—Tor.com is associated with Tor Books but is not an imprint of Tor. 

Another signpost is that we have gotten thus far only enthusiasm from our non-US subscribers for our PDF project, which begins with this issue.

Once again at this time of year, a snowstorm has impeded but not prevented the NYRSF work weekend. And that comes a mere three days after an ice storm that knocked over one hundred-foot high tree in our back yard and caused another to split and lean. Ah, winter.

Kathryn and I are finishing this month as usual the Year’s Best SF and the Year’s Best Fantasy, so we can make some comments on the short fiction of 2008. In our opinion, it was an especially good year for science fiction and only a decent year for short fantasy. There were a bunch of really good anthologies of original fiction in the US and UK. Australia and Canada each produced high spots (Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again and Claude Lalumière’s Tesseracts 12). What was particularly noticeable to us was that these days Peter S. Beagle is a one-person fantasy renaissance in short fiction. Other high points include Daryl Gregory’s first novel, Pandemonium, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s first collection, Pump Six and Other Stories, possibly the two most important first books our field in 2008. We should probably single out Subterranean and PS as particularly distinguished small presses this year, with Night Shade and Small Beer of equal quality to them, though with fewer titles. Three cool original anthologies from the UK you might otherwise miss are Celebrations, Myth-Understandings, and Subterfuge, all edited by Ian Whates under the Newcon imprint, and all containing interesting selections of fantasy & sf. Among the magazines, F& SF had a particularly good year, Interzone got darker, Asimov’s and Analog got smaller (fewer pages per issue by the end of the year), and Postscripts bigger, morphing into an anthology series. In the aether (online), Helix ceased publication, Subterranean switched from print to electronic, Strange Horizons persisted, Lone Star Fiction and Flurb continued and improved.

A lighter than usual travel schedule ahead: I am headed to Boskone in February and then the ICFA in March. Much of the NYRSF staff will be at one, or the other, or both as well; see you there! 

—David G. Hartwell

& the Editors

ISSUE #245 January 2009

ISSUE #245 January 2009

Volume 21, No. 5 ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

Iain Emsley: Lighting the Lamp: Destabilizing the Occident in Aladdin: 1

Jess Nevins: The Nineteenth Century Roots of Steampunk: 1

Michael Swanwick: The View from the Wharf Rat: A Letter from Otakon 2006 in Baltimore: 10

David Drake: Surreal Splendor: Three Novels by Mark S. Geston: 11

Mark S. Geston: Fires Far Away: 12

Traci N. Castleberry: Twisting the Other: Using a “Third” Sex to Represent Homosexuality in Science Fiction : 13

Robert Guffey: Jack Kirby’s OMAC: Captain America Loves Big Brother: 17

Gary G. Garner: Observations Regarding the High-Tech Piracy Science Fiction of Murray Leinster: 19

REVIEWS

Thomas M. Disch’s The Wall of America, reviewed by Eugene Reynolds: 6

Ben Bova’s Mars Life, reviewed by Pierce Watters: 21

John Brunner’s The Compleat Traveller in Black, reviewed by Robert Bee: 22

PLUS

Lovecraftian anime (15) and an editorial (24).

 

Kathryn Cramer, Art and Web Site Editor; Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman, Associate Managing Editor.

David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor; Kevin J. Maroney, Managing Editor.

Production Staff: Ann Crimmins and Alex Donald.

Weekly Meeting Crew: Avram Grumer, Joshua Kronengold, Lisa Padol, and Christine Quiñones.

Special thanks to: Arthur D. Hlavaty, Eugene Surowitz, and Ann Zanoni.

Published monthly by Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570.

$4.00 per copy.Annual subscriptions: U. S. Bulk Rate, $40.00; Canada, $44.00; U. S. First Class, $50.00 

Overseas Air Printed Matter, UK & Europe, $47.00; Asia & Australia, $48.00. Domestic institutional subscriptions $42.00.

Please make checks payable to Dragon Press, and payable in U.S. funds.

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

An up-to-date index of back issues in Excel format is available; e-mail <nyrsf@comcast.net> to request one.

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

Copyright © 2008 Dragon Press.

Slow Progress, Fast Times

From NYRSF ISSUE #245, January 2009

Well, the world rolls on, and not entirely downhill. Thanks to all of you who have recently renewed your subscriptions; and for those of you who have not, please do. We have decided to cut back our print run, after nearly a decade of unfounded optimism that the store market would perhaps recover and that our subscription level would increase. Instead, our subscription level has stayed rock steady at the same level and our increase in bookstore distribution totals three copies monthly. And so we have decided to stock fewer copies of our back issues.

And after working frankly too slowly on this for months, we are about to launch electronic subscriptions for our Canadian and overseas subscribers, who are being forced to pay a huge premium in postage for hard copies. If you live outside the US and want to participate in this new service, for which we will charge the same rate as a domestic US subscription, please email us and tell us so, at <nyrsf.payments@gmail.com> and we will respond. We are particularly interested in updating our database of international email addresses, which is woefully incomplete.

Our plan is to fulfill current subscriptions with both physical copies and electronic at the current rate. After that, we will offer renewals and new subscribers either an electronic subscription, or a combined electronic and physical subscription at the higher rate to cover postage. If you are paying via SFRA or IAFA, we will figure out how to make a transition.

We are establishing a password-protected FTP site, on which we will place a PDF copy each month for a period of time. We will email the password to subscribers on the day of release and the issue will remain available at the site until the next issue is published. We are, admittedly, concerned that unlimited circulation of the PDF (either electronically or via multiple printed copies) will reduce our paid circulation, but we hope that will be balanced by the number of subscribers we will gain from making this lower-cost option available. If our subscription base drops significantly, we will fall below the break-even point and will be forced to reconsider the program. 

As a side benefit, we are establishing a PayPal account linked to the email address above, to receive electronic payments from all subscribers (electronic or paper). We hope it will be active by the time you read these words.

One benefit of these changes in the long run is that we will potentially be able to post back issues for free when we run through our supply of physical copies, probably within a year of publication. Sad to say, we lack electronic files for many of our early issues, and currently have insufficient volunteer time, equipment, and software to create such files. But maybe someday.

So as 2009 begins, there are hopeful signs of progress on our end. We wish you a year of happy reading.

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors