The New York Review of Science Fiction

Special Announcement: NYRSF Issue 300, Free to All

As a thank you to the many people who have made it possible for us to reach this milestone, the digital edition of NYRSF Issue 300 is FREE. It's a sampler of all the types of material NYRSF publishes—appreciations of authors both well-known and forgotten; reviews, long and short, of good science fiction, fantasy, and horror books; theatre reviews; personal essays related to the larger f&sf field; and a vigorous letter column.

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NYRSF Issue 299 (July 2013): Table of Contents

ISSUE #299 July 2013 Volume 25, No.11 ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

• Brian Stableford: The Appealed Apocalypse: Edgar Quinet’s Ahasvérus and the Uncertain Future
• Darrell Schweitzer: An Interview with Katherine MacLean
• Mike Barrett: The Time of the Wolf: Robert McCammon’s Werewolf Tales
• Gregory Benford: Sunshine Technopolis: Southern California’s Utopian Futures
• Alex J. Kane: Individualism, Atheism, and the Search for God in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

REVIEWS

• Richard A. Lupoff’s Visions, reviewed by Joe Sanders
• John D. Haefele’s A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos: Origins of the Cthulhu Mythos, reviewed by Don Webb
• Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, reviewed by F. Brett Cox
• John Scalzi’s Redshirts, reviewed by Joe Milicia
• Goldor$Mythyka: A Hero is Born, written by Lynn Rosen, developed with and directed by Shana Gold, reviewed by Jen Gunnels

PLUS

• A classic vademecum, 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, Jason Strawsburg and Anne Zanoni.

Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz.

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Copyright © 2013 Burrowing Wombat Press.

On the Pleroma and a European Peninsula (Editorial, NYRSF 299)

One of the common descriptions of a genre is as an historical phenomenon, a group of works bound together by (among other things) a community of readers with shared expectations. David Hartwell promoted this concept in his “Thoughts on Genre” here in issue 202 back in 2005. I think there’s something to that, but I think it has a clear consequence. Allow me to sidle up to my point.

My own “golden age of science fiction” was 1976–78, the period when the Ballantine Adult Fantasy run was replaced by Lester & Judy-Lynn del Rey’s Del Rey Fantasy line. So just as I was ramping up as a novel reader, there was an explosion of fantasy, new and rediscovered. I read fantasy and science fiction interchangeably. My father and older brother were both avid readers of both forms, so our house was overflowing with books I could read, and I moved from Niven to Tolkien with barely a blink. Bradbury, Leiber, and de Camp were particular favorites. In fact, I didn’t even know that there were people who made a sharp distinction between sf and fantasy until I was in high school. My senior-year math teacher, “Bud” Stewart, read exclusively science fiction and had no interest in fantasy. All of my sf-reading classmates read both freely.

The Appealed Apocalypse: Edgar Quinet’s Ahasvérus and the Uncertain Future, by Brian Stableford

In his patchwork treatise Le Roman de l’avenir (1834; tr. as The Novel of the Future), which attempted to establish a new prospectus for the fiction of the future—in both senses of the phrase—Félix Bodin wrote off all previous futuristic fiction as “utopias” or “apocalypses,” both of which forms he considered ripe for replacement. Because he wrote his (uncompleted) text before publication, it was out of date before publication. In 1833, Charles Nodier published two elements of an (uncompleted) text entitled “Perfectibilité” in the Revue de Paris, which was not a utopia but a subversive anti-utopia, and Edgar Quinet published excerpts from his epic Ahasvérus in the Revue des Deux Mondes (published in full in book form the following year), which is an anti-apocalypse, at least in the sense that it intended to make all past and future apocalypses redundant. As if to add insult to injury, the two works were initially published in the two principal organs of the French Romantic Movement, whose philosophical influence Bodin had come to deem pernicious and dangerous to his own quest for a rational future of social progress equipped with a fiction to match.