The New York Review of Science Fiction

Sandra J. Lindow: Crafting the Hinge in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home

Influenced by the women’s movement, Ursula K. Le Guin’s controversial 1985 carrier bag novel Always Coming Home (ACH) depicts the Kesh, a dynamic, postapocalyptic, matrilineal, matrilocal culture that balances male and female qualities as well as human and environmental demands. Aside from her poetry, it is possibly her most personal work, reflecting the Northern California ranch that was an intimate part of her childhood experience, a place where she played in the red adobe dirt with her little houses, cars, and people (756). In early 2019, ACH was republished by the Library of America (LOA) in a high-quality authorized, cloth-bound edition as part of a series that reflects Le Guin’s status as one of the most influential creative geniuses of American literature. Edited by Brian Attebery, the book includes Le Guin’s original hand-drawn maps and illustrations by Margaret Chodos-Irvine; it adds “Chronology;” “Notes;” two more chapters of Dangerous People, a novel within the novel; a poem by a Kesh poet; “Kesh Syntax,” “Some Kesh Meditations”; and “Blood Lodge songs”; plus “May’s Lion” (1983) a short story told and then retold through a Kesh perspective. Seven previously published essays provide the essential theoretical concepts that inform ACH’s construction. Of these, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” (1982) and “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986) are particularly valuable when considering Le Guin’s work as a whole. “The Making of Always Coming Home” transcribes a panel from Mythcon panel 19 on July 31, 1988, where Le Guin interacts with collaborators regarding the maps, art, and music that came with the initial publication.

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn, reviewed by Damien Broderick

Unbound, September 2019, $32.95 hc; 480 pages

The title of this thoughtful, challenging book about the work of a writer once hailed as the Dean of Science Fiction and first to be inducted as a Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America but now often ignored or even “canceled,” provides a sharp, twenty-first-century jolt of the unexpected.

Eric Leif Davin: The Facts in the Matter of Hugo Gernsback and Stanley G. Weinbaum

The idea that Hugo Gernsback paid “absolutely nothing” for Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” and the other five stories Weinbaum published in Gernsback’s Wonder Stories seems to be one of those vampire legends that will not die no matter how often a stake is driven through its heart. I am revisiting this ancient legend once again because it has raised its hoary head once again.

Mir Seidel: Tesla and Gernsback: An Untold Influence on the Birth of the Genre

The relationship between Hugo Gernsback and Nikola Tesla is hidden in plain sight in the pages of Gernsback’s early publications. Yet the influence of the older inventor on the younger publisher and writer has never been closely examined, and it can shed new light on the emergence of modern science fiction. To put it conservatively, I believe that Nikola Tesla and his inventions and ideas had a profound influence on Hugo Gernsback during the period that Gernsback felt was formative to his understanding of science fiction—the twenty years or so before he launched Amazing Stories.

NYRSF Issue 355 Table of Contents

• Mark Scroggins: Wheldrakean Lineages: Michael Moorcock and Algernon Charles Swinburne
• Mir Seidel: Tesla and Gernsback: An Untold Influence on the Birth of the Genre
• Eric Leif Davin: The Facts in the Matter of Hugo Gernsback and Stanley G. Weinbaum
• The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn, reviewed by Damien Broderick
• Jonathan Hay: The Posthuman Trajectory of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Universe
• Read This: recently read and recommended by Donald M. Hassler
• Terry Thompson: An Outpost of “Technology and Empire”: H.G. Wells’s “In the Avu Observatory”
• Michael Swanwick: Singular Interviews: Henry Wessells
• The Lady from the Black Lagoon by Mallory O’Meara, reviewed by Pete Rawlik
• Gustavo Bondoni: Ellison’s Love Letter to Bradbury: “He Who Grew Up Reading Sherlock Holmes”
• Ron Drummond: as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch
• Editorial: Getting Past

NYRSF Issue 355 Editorial: Getting Past

Okay, it’s been a little while again. While the pandemic is not gone, here it is waning. Thanks to the efforts of local politicians, the New York government opened a region-specific vaccination site in lower Westchester which helped cut through the logistical nightmare of the early days of the vaccine rollout; as a result, our household has been vaccinated since late March. One point I make periodically is that the shape of the future is a political question, not (just) an engineering one, let alone a “science” one. Over the last year that’s become more and more obviously true of the future of the covid-19 pandemic specifically. The creation of the vaccines was a scientific miracle—especially of mrna vaccines, new technology in its first field test.

David Langford: Beyond the Outposts: An Introduction

To repeat myself: Algis Budrys (1931–2008) was a noted science fiction author—his Rogue Moon in particular is an acclaimed classic—who also wrote much memorable and witty criticism of the field. His 1985 volume Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf, assembling the review columns he published in Galaxy magazine from 1965 to 1971, is one of the few single-author books about SF to be as highly regarded as the pioneer works In Search of Wonder (1956; expanded 1967, 1996) by Damon Knight, New Maps of Hell (1960) by Kingsley Amis, and The Issue at Hand (1964) and More Issues at Hand (1970) by James Blish.

To Rouse Leviathan by Matt Cardin, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

New York: Hippocampus Press, 2019; $20.00 tpb; 374 pages

Post-Ligottian Fiction

A lot of people go mad in this book. This is not just an occupational hazard for Matt Cardin’s characters; it almost seems required of them. Most of the stories involve someone discovering that the universe, existence itself, is hostile and unutterably foul so that the best we can do is hold back chaos and death for a little while, for all it may not be worth doing. In one of the most impressive pieces, a novella aptly enough entitled “The God of Foulness,” a wannabe religious scholar turned newspaper reporter investigates the “Sick Seekers,” a new death-and-transcendence cult that embraces disease so that the foulness of both body and soul may subsumed into its divinity, which is, in effect, the universe:

Everything is empty and good for nothing but to rot, except for this chaos, this madness, this filth. In the end, there is no real choice for me to make, for I have nothing else from which to choose. Nor do any of us. (279)

NYRSF Issue 356 Table of Contents

• Sandra J. Lindow: Crafting the Hinge in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home
• American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe, reviewed by Joe Milicia
• Michael Swanwick: Singular Interviews: Greer Gilman
• To Rouse Leviathan by Matt Cardin, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer
• Jonathan Crowe: Maps in Science Fiction
• The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again and Settling the World: Selected Stories 1969–2020 by M. John Harrison, reviewed by Rob Latham
• David Langford: Beyond the Outposts: An Introduction
• Editorial: What Year Is It, Anyway?

NYRSF Issue 356 Editorial: What Year Is It, Anyway?

Welcome to our fourth issue for March 2020! Time has officially ceased to have any meaning in the face of the pandemic, so why not embrace it?

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.