The New York Review of Science Fiction

Harry Martinson: The Star Song

Translator’s Introduction

The Swedish author and Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson (1904–1978) wrote only one work that can be considered sf, yet it remains his most well-known. The epic poem Aniara: En revy om människan i tid och rum (1956) has been adapted into an opera (1959), a ballet (1988), a musical (2010), a feature film (2018), and several plays. It has been translated into English twice—in 1963 as Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space by Hugh MacDiarmid and Elspeth Harley Schubert, and in 1999 as Aniara: An Epic Science Fiction Poem by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg. Set in a future marked by environmental destruction, Aniara tells the story of an evacuation from Earth to Mars gone awry: the spaceship Aniara, carrying 8,000 refugees, gets thrown off course and drifts off helplessly into the depths of space. In addition to being a critique of nuclear armament and technological civilization, Aniara contains stunning poetry that captures the incomprehensibility of the universe of modern science, including deep time and the vast distances of interstellar space.

NYRSF 353 Editorial: Vexed by Pestilence

My last editorial signed off with:

As I write this, there are now six known cases of Covid-19 in New Rochelle, about five miles from my house. I came home from work early today with a cough and apparent fever, but it seems that the fever was an inaccurate reading from an old thermometer and the cough was just a slightly amplified version of my usual allergy symptoms. So it’s back to work for me tomorrow, washing my hands every time I think of it. Take care of yourselves and we’ll see you in April.

Issue 353 Table of Contents

• Victor Grech: Pandemics: Known Unknowns and Our Failure to Prevent Our Unwilling Participation in a Dystopian SF Scenario, in Two Parts
• Harry Martinson: The Star Song
• Carlis Nixon: A Different Perspective on Maia’s Journey in The Goblin Emperor
• Mike Barrett: Unearthly Encounters: The Weird Fiction of Bernard Capes
• Joe Sanders: The Hearse on the Borderland: Kate Wilhelm’s “Mystery” Fiction
• Read This: recently read and recommended by Lee Weinstein
• Brian Stableford: Farewell to the Fays
• Editorial: Vexed by Pestilence

Carlis Nixon: A Different Perspective on Maia’s Journey in The Goblin Emperor

A response to Leah Schnelbach’s “A Quiet Hero’s Journey: Processing Trauma in Fantasy” (Tor.com, 27 February 2019; <www.tor.com/2019/02/27/how-jo-waltons-among-others-and-katherine-addisons-the-goblin-emperor-tell-stories-of-trauma-and-recovery/>)

I was delighted to encounter Leah Schnelbach’s article featuring Addison’s The Goblin Emperor—a book I love. I was even more tickled to immediately recognize in her introduction a shared enjoyment of the extent to which the story is not about “those action scenes that would be in the trailer for Goblin Emperor: The Movie....” Yes, I exulted. Indeed.

But from there I was startled to find how much Schnelbach’s reactions diverged from mine. I’d like to present an alternative perspective.

NYRSF Issue 352 Editorial: Opens Up One Eager Eye

Well, that was a while, wasn’t it?

Around the time our last issue came out in April of last year, my day-job company announced that it was purchasing another firm. My work involves supporting a stock trading desk, and we acquired a smaller trading firm to move our trading operations onto the smaller company’s proprietary technology. This was the largest professional project I’ve ever been involved in; the number of people involved in just the aspects that directly affected me was several times the number of people who worked for Crossover Technologies/Unplugged Games, the computer game company tht employed me through the 1990s. The main project lasted six months, from the end of March to the middle of September, with long days and few breaks. I was off balance and worn out for the entire time. When that project was done there was a great backlog of household tasks that carried me into the next big work project....

Issue 352 Table of Contents

• Ian Campbell: Double Estrangement and Developments in Arabic SF: ’Aḥmad Sa‘dāwi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad
• Joan Gordon: The Ghostly Archive of Gene Wolfe’s “Memorare”
• Get in Trouble by Kelly Link, reviewed by Joe Sanders
• Moderan by David R. Bunch, reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes
• David Langford: Introduction to New Maps: More Uncollected John Sladek
• Zen Amen: A Collection of Abecedarians by Michael Kriesel, reviewed by Sandra Lindow
• Brian Stableford: The Science Fiction of Paul Gsell
• Donald M. Hassler: Survival of the Fittest in Sonnet Form
• Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart: A Novel of First Contact by Steven Erikson, reviewed by John Clute
• Clark Ashton Smith: The Emperor of Dreams, a film by Darren Coelho Spring, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer
• Editorial: Opens Up One Eager Eye

NYRSF Issue 351 Editorial: Losses and Setbacks

Gene Wolfe died back in April. I don’t think it’s a secret that Wolfe was one of our favorite writers—my own and also NYRSF’s. Wolfe’s work, elusive and allusive and bursting with creativity, is the white fountain at the center of the substantial science fiction that this magazine was founded to celebrate.

Issue 351 Table of Contents

Camille Butera: “The Dismal Fantasy of the Cold Vacuity”: Lovecraft, Lewis, and Science Fiction as a Means of Processing the Great War

Skye Cervone: Fostering Responsibility: Human/Animal Relationships in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries

Twelve Tomorrows 2018, edited by Wade Roush, reviewed by John Clute

The Asylum of Dr. Caligari by James Morrowreviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

Nader Elhefnawy: Of Science Fiction and Forecasting

Terry Thompson: “An Umbrella, Broken”: du Maurier, “The Birds,” and the Chamberlain Years

Donald M. Hassler: Joan Slonczewski’s The Highest Frontier, Preceded by Tentatively Seeded Genre Implications, After Suvin

Mack Hassler: Easter 2018

Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age, edited by Everett Hamner, reviewed by Damien Broderick

Gregory Benford: Losing Lennon

Photos

Editorial: Losses and Setbacks

Victor Grech: The Battle for New York: Disaster Movies and the Ongoing COVID-19 Onslaught

New York City ... the splendor, picturesqueness, and oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities ... costly and lofty new buildings ... the tumultuous streets, Broadway, the heavy, low, musical roar, hardly ever intermitted, even at night ... the assemblages of the citizens in their groups, conversations, trades, evening amusements ... these, I say, and the like of these, completely satisfy my senses of power, fulness, motion.

—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Introduction

In a previous paper, I outlined the events that have led to the current pandemic (Grech “Pandemics”). This essay briefly describes the propensity of science fiction authors to unleash disasters on New York City and then goes on to outline events currently unfolding in the United States in relation to COVID-19, with particular emphasis on New York City.

Victor Grech: Pandemics: Known Unknowns and Our Failure to Prevent Our Unwilling Participation in a Dystopian SF Scenario

Introduction

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.

—Albert Camus, The Plague, 1948.

COVID-19 is currently a global pandemic. A pandemic is a disease outbreak that is prevalent over a wide area, from a group of countries to the entire world. The current pandemic disease, COVID-19, is caused by a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. The global spread is following an approximately exponential curve: it took 67 days to reach the first 100,000 cases; 11 more days to reach 200,000; and just 4 more to reach 300,000 cases. This virus’s deadliness lies in its stealth, spreading silently with an incubation period of weeks. It kills slowly, weeks after infection (Chen et al., Ferguson et al.).

Issue 350 Table of Contents

• Michael Bishop: Afterword to The Sacerdotal Owl and Three Other Long Tales: A Long Tale Cut Short?
  
• Michael Swanwick: Two Terrors and the Myth of Solitude
• Ron Drummond: On the Reach of Her Words
• Dave Drake: How It Was Back Then
• Donald M. Hassler: Special Creation
• What Is Anything? Memoirs of a Life in Lovecraft by S.T. Joshi, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer
• Michael Andre-Driussi: Jack Vance, Man of Mystery
• Brian Stableford: The Unabolished Fays: Some Successors of the Comtesse De Murat
• Victor Grech: Star Trek: Voyager—a Homeric Odyssey
• Photos
• Editorial: Glorantha: Another Magical World