The New York Review of Science Fiction

“A Story” Kim Stanley Robinson




[A version of the following appeared as the introduction to The Very Best of Gene Wolfe from PS Publishing in 2011.—the eds.]

Once there was a boy named Gene Wolfe who loved to read, who was sick fairly often, whose mother read to him and with him. Then the boy grew up and was drafted into the army and was sent to fight in a war.

It’s a cliché in our culture to say that while Vietnam veterans suffered on TV and came back to America and dealt with their demons very publicly, the Korean war veterans returned and went into the gray ranks of 1950s commerce and started families and didn’t say much about what had happened to them. Wolfe both fits and doesn’t fit this image. He did return home to live an outwardly conventional life, but his fiction, which is a kind of speaking out, has often been very concerned with war and is particularly good at describing prolonged murky bitter little wars; they recur in many of his novels, including The Book of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun, and The Book of the Short Sun, where the depiction of war and the battlefield in the aftermath is particularly intense and horrible. So the matter has remained with him throughout his career.

The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin, reviewed by Eugene Reynolds

Volume 1: Where on Earth

Easthampton, Massachusetts: Small Beer Press, 2012; $24.00 hc; 281 pages

Volume 2: Outer Space, Inner Lands

Easthampton, Massachusetts: Small Beer Press, 2012; $24.00 hc; 333 pages




Morality and aesthetics are old, old companions, subjects of human pondering and conversation for millennia. Rare is the philosopher who has not opined on each, rarer the critic who does not wield both in praising the virtuous and punishing the wicked. Yet the two domains seem not to share so much as a common border. Aristotle, working his way through the entirety of human thought, taught that the Good and the Beautiful are different (heteron), the Good being always in motion, the Beautiful often motionless. He did admit that the Good could be beautiful and that the Beautiful could outweigh the Useful and Needful; he was, after all, Greek. Later thinkers worked back and forth through various oppositions, placing the Good or the Beautiful foremost depending on how the Universe was constituted (divine ground-of-being or insensate material). Artists occasionally chimed in with formulations for Truth being Beauty, Beauty Truth, gnomic un-utterances that puzzle and vandalize Greek pots. (Again, Greeks.) Some artists did do more but typically in a didactic or satiric way. Aesop and Jean de La Fontaine wrote fables, tales with a moral, the Good wrapped up in the Beautiful, in much the manner of a distasteful pill molded inside a bit of strong-flavored cheese. Very, very few could blend the two or even grow the Beautiful out of the Good, not as a sensual misdirection but as from a seed planted in fertile soil. It would take perhaps the work of both a philosopher and an artist, both geniuses. Enter William James and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Quartered (Editorial, NYRSF 300)

80 percent of success is showing up.

—Woody Allen

Well, we made it. With this issue, we reach two landmarks: the end of our first year of electronic publication, and the end of our twenty-five years. When I first read Professor Tolkien’s works, I was struck by the simple wisdom of the hobbitish tradition of celebrating one’s birthday by giving gifts to all your friends and relations, so this free issue is our gift to you.

If you’re a new reader, welcome! The New York Review of Science Fiction was founded in 1988 by the staff of The Little Magazine, who saw the need for a science fiction critical magazine to fill the wide space between the lightweight reviews of the fanzines and newszines and the heavier apparatus of academe. We designed this issue to be 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.

If you are a long-time reader, thank you! We hope this issue holds up our traditions well. This issue has been added to your subscription for free.

NYRSF Issue 300 (August 2013): Table of Contents

ISSUE #300 August 2013 Volume 25, No. 12 ISSN #1052-9438

ESSAYS

• Kim Stanley Robinson: “A Story”
• Jonathan Crowe: Here Be Blank Spaces: Vaguely Medieval Fantasy Maps
• David Drake: Ghosts of the Past
• Mike Barrett: Lady Cynthia’s Ghosts

REVIEWS

• The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin in 2 volumes, reviewed by Eugene Reynolds
• Bruce McAllister’s The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic, reviewed by Michael Bishop
• The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer, written, created and performed by Tim Watts, reviewed by Jen Gunnels
• John Scalzi’s Redshirts, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

PLUS

• photos, Screed, and an anniversitorial.