The New York Review of Science Fiction

Off to ICFA 2013

This week is the 34th annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts . NYRSF will be there in force, soaking up sun and scholarship and all the fun thereof. In attendance: staffers David Hartwell, Kevin Maroney, Jen Gunnels, Ann Crimmins, and dozens of past and present contributors. Say hello! We don't bite.

NYRSF Issue 295 (February 2013): Table of Contents

ISSUE #294 February 2013

Volume 25, No.6 ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

• Photoessay: Boskone 50, Boston, Massachusetts, February 2013
• JeFF Stumpo: Until Someone Loses an I: The Deconstruction of “self” in Borges and Lovecraft
• Mike Barrett: Iron Angels & Annihilators: John Morressy’s Novels of Heroic Fantasy
• Damien Broderick: The Mellor’s Tale<
• Tom Easton: A Post-Steampunk Manifesto
• Dave Drake: Manly Wade Wellman, Reporter
• Andrés Lomeña: Ways of Reading Fantasy: An Interview with Farah Mendlesohn
• Victor Grech: Star Trek’s Picard: Humanity’s Conscience

REVIEWS

• Karel Capek’s R. U. R. and Richard Manly’s The Truth Quotient, reviewed by Jen Gunnels
• Ian McDonald’s Planesrunner, reviewed by Damien Broderick

PLUS

• A glimpse of futures past futures, screed, 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, and Lisa Padol.

Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, Jason Strawsburg, and Eugene Surowitz.

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.

The Mellor’s Tale, by Damien Broderick: A Foreword to Greg Mellor’s Wild Chrome




Forty-five years ago, when I was young and in love with science fiction, and Gregory Mellor was a toddler, the great sf fantasist Theodore Sturgeon faced a tough task, introducing the first collected stories of a then-new writer. Here’s how he began:

There has been nothing like Zelazny in the science fiction field since—

Until Someone Loses an I:The Deconstruction of “self” in Borges and Lovecraft, by JeFF Stumpo




There are a surprising number of parallels in the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges—views on the universe (infinite and incomprehensible), time (nonlinear), mirrors (abhorrent because of their reflection and duplication), God (generally absent and/or indifferent to mankind), and false creations (Lovecraft’s Necronomicon has become a real-life hrön). Besides the thematic links in their work, there existed a professional awareness. Borges was aware of Lovecraft, enough so that he construed him in an interview as a writer barely worth attention (Burgin 40), and yet dedicated a story to his memory (“There are more things” in The Book of Sand). Some scholars, generally associated with Lovecraft studies, have looked to this story for a thread between the two. Juan José Barrientos even proposes that “El Aleph” is “una especie de parodia de Lovecraft” [“a sort of parody of Lovecraft”] (443). The most serious and comprehensive comparative study to date, “Synchronistic Worlds: Lovecraft and Borges” by Barton Levi St. Armand, is an excellent examination of the universal aspects held in common by the two writers. Unfortunately, his work does not cover issues of identity. The fact remains that, while some scholarly, comparative studies have been undertaken, they are rare in Spanish, nearly nonexistent in English, and none of them appear to have covered this particular ground. In the following essay, I will concentrate on the self/Self in the short stories of Lovecraft and Borges, specifically the way in which both utilize false and fractured personalities to eventually deconstruct the possibility of a stable self.