The New York Review of Science Fiction

April 2013 Editorial: How the Game Is Played in Atlantic City




Back in June 2011, John Perich wrote on Overthinking It about an emerging genre. His basic premise was this:

You’d be forgiven for confusing the many, many period dramas that have aired on premium cable in the last six years. . . . Rome, The Tudors, Deadwood, Spartacus, Boardwalk Empire, The Borgias, Camelot, Game of Thrones, and doubtless others. The historical eras depicted by these films span thousands of years—and even enter the realm of fantasy—and several continents. But they all share one genre. In this genre, familiar stories are retold with an emphasis on violence, sex, and dishonest scheming. If there’s not a better name for this genre, I’m calling it Blood, Tits and Scowling. . . .

The beauty is that, when you put them all together, it creates a perpetual engine for drama. www.overthinkingit.com/2011/06/28/blood-Tits-and-scowling.

The whole essay is worth reading for anyone interested in the mechanics of storytelling. In addition to discussions of the particularities of telling stories at extended length, he goes on to discuss precisely why the BT&S mode is such a comfortable fit for stories set in either fantasy worlds or historical periods so distant they “might as well be another world.”

A fine example of the similarities came that year. The Game of Thrones episode “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things” concludes with a chance encounter at a crossroads inn: Tyrion Lannister, a dwarf, the king’s brother-in-law, meets Catelyn Stark, a lady of house Tully, wife of the king’s most trusted advisor. Catelyn believes that Tyrion has attempted to murder her son. In George R. R. Martin’s novel, the scene unfolds thus:

“You in the corner,” she said to an older man she had not noticed until now. “Is that the black bat of Harrenhal I see embroidered on your surcoat, ser?”

The man got to his feet. “It is, my lady.”

“And is Lady Whent a true and honest friend to my father, Lord Hoster Tully of Riverrun?”

“She is,” the man replied stoutly.

Ser Rodrik rose quietly and loosened his sword in its scabbard. The dwarf was blinking at them, blank-faced, with puzzlement in his mismatched eyes.

“The red stallion was ever a welcome sight in Riverrun,” she said to the trio by the fire. “My father counts Jonos Bracken among his oldest and most loyal bannermen.”

The three men-at-arms exchanged uncertain looks. “Our lord is honored by his trust,” one said hesitantly.

“This man came a guest into my house, and there conspired to murder my son, a boy of seven,” Catlyn proclaimed to the room at large, pointing. Ser Rodrik moved to her side, his sword in hand. “In the name of King Robert and the good lords you serve, I call upon you to seize him and help me return him to Winterfell to await the king’s justice.”

Six months later, the second episode of the second season of Boardwalk Empire featured this scene. “Chalky” White, the undisputed leader of the black criminal gangs of Atlantic City, is held in a large, segregated, cell with several other prisoners. Dunn Purnsley, newly arrived from Baltimore, starts taunting White.

WHITE: . . . get your finger out of my face.

PURNSLEY: What I don’t like about you? . . . the uppity way you tell the world you better than Dunn Purnsley when all you be is another jigaboo in a jail cell.

WHITE (speaking past Purnsley to another prisoner): Harold C. Madison. How your daddy keeping?

HAROLD: Tolerable, sir. He thank you for the doctor bill.

WHITE (to a second prisoner): Noah Hookway. . . . Things good down at the gold room?

NOAH: Supposed to work today.

WHITE: I’ll talk to ’em. (to a third and fourth prisoner) Timothy. Cornelius.

TIMOTHY: Mama grateful for the turkey, sir.

WHITE: All righty then. (The others grab Purnsley from behind and beat him. Chalky returns to his bunk.)

Centuries, universes apart. History is a series of stories. The same words shape them; the same narratives flow around.

Stories repeat because the shapes of the bricks are all alike.

—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors

A PDF or ePub copy of the NYRSF issue in which this editorial first appeared is available for purchase at Weightless Books.

A printed copy of issues 295 and 296 is available for purchase from lulu.com.

March 2013 Editorial: And Boy Are My Arms Tired




It’s been a very hectic month, as March always is. As I write this, we are actually in the midst of the Work Weekend for the April issue, but because of the gigantic hole that the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts tears out of the month, we’re just putting the finishing touches on the March issue.

Feb. 2013 Editorial: When You're Six Months in . . .




“You see, if you’re five miles out over the English Channel, with nothing but sea underneath you, er, there is a very great impetus to stay in the air.”

—Terry Jones, Monty Python’s Flying Circus

So, here we are, our sixth month of post-paper existence. Other than some teething pains related to the intricacies of turning a double-columned, magazine-formatted PDF into an e-reader-friendly epub, we’ve been pretty happy with the results. As one reader put it, “I love how the magazine now has color pictures.” We have the print-on-demand double-issue version available through Lulu.com, for those who want it (and there are a few of you, I’m pleased to report.) And best of all, we don’t have the expense (and, increasingly, sheer frustration) of dealing with a physical printer, or of figuring out how to warehouse new back issues.

January 2013 Editorial: Ends of Eras




A pair of landmark events in the fantasy field have been drawing my attention back to themselves over the last month, so I thought I’d write about them here.

Lynn Willis died a week ago as I write this, midway through January. His is not a name well-enough known in the prose f&sf field, or even in his home field of hobby gaming, but he was a major figure behind the scenes. He started off in the 1970s as a wargame designer for Metagaming Concepts. Metagaming, though small and short-lived, had a disproportionate influence on the field, with a number of innovative games in inventive formats. Willis’s games there—Godsfire and the mini-games Holy War and Olympia—didn’t have the splash of Steve Jackson’s Ogre or The Fantasy Trip, but they were all clever and memorable.

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.

November 2012 Editorial: The Future Is Coming, Good and Hard




As I write this, superstorm Sandy is just under 2 weeks in the past. The spacious world headquarters of Burrowing Wombat Press, situated in Yonkers a mile inland and 200 feet above the surface of the Hudson, was spared direct damage from the storm. We didn’t even lose our power, in large part because the trees in our neighborhood have been pruned of dead limbs by a long sequence of violent windstorms and late fall snowstorms over the past several years. We did lose landline phone service and cable/broadband internet for three days; in a brilliant instance of the LivingInTheFuture experience, we were able to limp around both of these by routing calls and connectivity through my smartphone for the duration.

October 2012 Editorial: Duty Now for the Future




So, here we are, our second post-paper issue. At some point, that will be so unremarkable that I can stop remarking on it, but for now, it’s still . . . futuristic, weird, uncanny, astonishing, all of that. For the next few months, a lot of our attention is still going to be absorbed by the transition. But not all of it! So, here’s our hit parade for this month.

September 2012 Editorial: The Future, Soon




Welcome to the first post-paper issue of NYRSF. This has been a long time coming. We first determined back in November of last year that this was the only way we could continue into volume 25. The sad fact is we were consistently receiving less money in subscriptions and back issue sales than we were paying in printing and postage, and something had to change. The happy fact is everyone has been extremely supportive of this move—our contributors most of all. It’s been a ride.

August 2012 Editorial: It Is, Perhaps, the End of the Beginning

[Note: Comments are open!]

With the publication of this issue, NYRSF completes 24 years of continuous monthly publication. In those years we have published many fine issues, and we are proud of even the least of them. We have gained and lost many fine staff members and editors, fostered relationships and seen the breakup of relationships, and unremittingly tried to raise the level of discourse about sf and fantasy. And you know what? We are going to keep right on doing it.

July 2012 Editorial: The Fifth Age of NYRSF

And now we are grinding onward down the ringing grooves of change toward August and the Hugo Awards at Worldcon in Chicago. By the time we get there, we will have changed a lot. For in August we produce the September issue, which will be the first of the new age for NYRSF. For now we transcend all the pain we have suffered in the last months, and continue in all formats. We will have electronic issues for subscribers and for sale individually available via <weightlessbooks.com>; [see the sidebar] and also in pdf format, for ease in printout. And in addition, we plan to offer two-issue print-on-demand booklets to subscribers who prefer hard copy on a subscription basis, six books a year. We are firming up the details now. But we will never print a single copy issue again, though you can do it yourself from the pdf if you wish.