The New York Review of Science Fiction

In Search of Sawney Beane, by Lee Weinstein

It all began with a friendly argument. A friend and I were watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when the subject of Sawney Beane came up. The legend of Beane, the notorious Scottish cannibal, was the inspiration behind any number of horror stories, from Sweeney Todd to The Silence of the Lambs; Jack Ketchum’s first novel, Off Season (1980), was based on it. My friend insisted that Beane was a real, historical character, but I thought it was just too over-the-top to be believed.

The story goes that Sawney (“Beane” in the oldest accounts and “Bean” in later ones) was a Scottish lad who was too lazy to work for a living. Born in Lothian, near Edinburgh, he left home and set up housekeeping in a deep cavern on the Ayrshire coast in Galloway with a like-minded woman. They waylaid travelers, robbed, and murdered them, and then, to destroy the evidence, ate the bodies.

Who Owns Cyberpunk? by James Patrick Kelly

Origin Story

In the beginning, nobody could decide what to call the Cyberpunks. Various names were proposed: Radical Hard SF, the Outlaw Technologists, the Eighties Wave, the Neuromantics, and the Mirrorshades Group. You can see the problem. For a movement to catch on, it needs a catchy name. In 1983, a writer named Bruce Bethke had published a story called “Cyberpunk” in the November issue of Amazing Stories. But although he can claim the original coinage, Bethke did not exercise his naming rights. Editor Gardner Dozois is generally credited with popularizing the term. Here he is, writing in 1985: “About the closest thing we have to a self-willed aesthetic school would be that group of writers, purveyors of bizarre, hard-edged, high-tech stuff, who have on occasion been referred to as ‘Cyberpunks’” (11).

At the Very Root of the Golden Age (Editorial, NYRSF 298)

I’m reworking here for reasons I’ll explain further down a short essay I posted on my (now sadly too-fallow) Livejournal a few years ago.

A few years back, on the Locus Roundtable <www.locusmag.com/Roundtable/2009/06/best-of-sturgeon.html>, Graham Sleight posted a proposed table of contents for a collection of the best Theodore Sturgeon stories. Graham suggested that his collection could be called The Great Emo Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, and joked:

A friend of mine keeps saying that one day he’s going to compile a book called The Great Emo Stories of Isaac Asimov—containing the one percent of Asimov stories where he puts gadgets and ideas to the back of his mind and talks about emotions instead.

Of course, that friend was (is) me.

NYRSF Issue 298 (June 2013): Table of Contents

ISSUE #298 June 2013 Volume 25, No. 10 ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

• James Patrick Kelly: Who Owns Cyberpunk?
• Lee Weinstein: In Search of Sawney Beane
• Joe Sanders: Prufrock in Hollywood: Unthinkable Adaptation in Neil Gaiman’s “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories”
• Mike Barrett: Halflings & Dancing Girls: Leigh Brackett’s Other Solar System Stories
• Audrey Taylor: The Created Myths and Legends of Patricia McKillip
• Terry W. Thompson: “I Was to Have a Companion”: Rereading F. Marion Crawford’s “The Upper Berth” as Victorian Double Tale

REVIEWS

• Geek! written by Crystal Skillman, directed by Robert Ross Parker, reviewed by Jen Gunnels
• Steve Behrends’s Clark Ashton Smith: A Critical Guide to the Man and His Work, reviewed by Don Webb

PLUS

• More photos 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, Heather Masri, Lisa Padol, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, Eugene Reynolds, and Anne Zanoni.

Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty, and Eugene Surowitz.