The New York Review of Science Fiction

Thomas F. BertonneauContact, Communion, and the Marriage of Minds: Olaf Stapledon in Context

I. Introduction

William Olaf Stapledon (1886–1960) is the prodigious unknown of science fiction, too little kenned directly, but familiar to readers of the genre anonymously and indirectly through the profound influence of his work on the creative tradition. Other writers began mining the lode of Stapledon’s mythopoeic imagination from the appearance of his first proper book Last and First Men in 1930. The work of Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) and the late work of Poul Anderson (1926–2001), to name but two instances, have foundations in Stapledon’s text; and of the two Anderson more closely approximates Stapledon in spirit and achievement than does Clarke. Nevertheless, the Clarke-Kubrick collaboration in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is inconceivable without the example of Last and First Men and Star Maker. The late Sam Moskowitz, whose chapter on Stapledon in Explorers of the Infinite (1963) began the secondary literature on its subject, writes that Last and First Men on its publication “caught both the literati and the science fiction devotees by surprise.” Moskowitz asserts that readers came unprepared “for the cosmic sweep and grandeur of the ideas and philosophical concepts to be found in the work,” which would especially have daunted those looking for an actual novel or an actual literary entertainment.

This Spacesuit Intentionally Left Blank (Editorial, NYRSF 302)

I recently saw, as did I suspect about 175% of all of sf fans, the Alfonso Cuarón film Gravity, a story about astronauts on the International Space Station dealing with a catastrophic accident. It’s a riveting piece of filmmaking, simultaneously epic and claustrophobic, graceful and harrowing and beautiful in small things and large.

A few days later, Jonathan Strahan said on Twitter <bit.ly/NYRSFGravityTweet>, “Interested that there is a question over whether Cuarón’s Gravity is sf.” On its face, I find this question predecided—the makers of Gravity did their best to make everything in the film not merely possible (the hallmark of a certain flavor of sf) but actual. There’s no thing in Gravity that is a novum, nothing (absent some scientific errors) that couldn’t happen today, or yesterday, to the actual crew of the actual ISS. In this sense, calling Gravity a “science fiction” film makes no more sense than calling The Pelican Brief “alternate history” on the basis that no one has actually assassinated a Supreme Court justice.

NYRSF Issue 302 (October 2013): Table of Contents

• Patrick L. McGuire: The Strugatskys’ Traditional Science Fiction Revisited, Part 1
• Grzegorz Trębicki: Distinct Yet Analogous:Visions of Posthumanism in Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy and Masaaki Yuasa’s Kaiba
• Read This, by Anne Zanoni
• The Lazarus Machine by Paul Crilley, reviewed by Greg Johnson
• Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh, reviewed by Michael Levy
• Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold, reviewed by Alec Austin
• Michael Andre-Driussi: The Adventures of Jack Vance in Traveling and Writing
• Mike Barrett: Bad Places: The Macabre Fiction of Frank Chigas
• Editorial: This Spacesuit Intentionally Left Blank

Patrick L. McGuire The Strugatskys’ Traditional Science Fiction Revisited, Part 1

The present article was never intended as a book review. Nonetheless, it was inspired by a book. In 2012, a volume on the Strugatsky brothers appeared in the prestigious Russian biography series Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh lyudey (Lives of Notable People). The series has been publishing continually since 1933, and it considers itself to be the successor to a predecessor of the same name that ran from 1890 to 1907. If I am correctly deciphering its numbering, the Strugatsky volume is number 1531 of the combined series and 1331 in the new series.

The volume in question, Brat’ya Strugatskiye (The Strugatsky Brothers) by Dmiriy Volodikhin and Gennadiy Prashkevich, has a number of quirks. Some relate to its intended readership. Considering the series in which it was issued and the general fame of the Strugatskys, one would expect the volume to be addressed to the general reader, but instead it presumes considerable familiarity with the sf genre. It uses fanspeak without definition: konvent (“con,” “sf convention”), fehn (“sf fan”), meynstrim and obshchiy potok (respectively a borrowing and a loan translation of “mainstream”). It expects the mere surname “Campbell” to be recognized as a reference to John W. Campbell, Jr. (264). In places, at least to American ears, the word choice even suggests that the target audience consists of comic-book fans: understandably needing synonyms for the phrase “the Strugatsky brothers,” what Volodikhin and Prashkevich come up with are zvezdnyy duet and zvezdnyy tandem (“the stellar duo” and “the stellar tandem”).

New Paths and Restorations (Editorial, NYRSF 301)

Well, that’s different. We’ve been working on the new design for several months and I’m very happy with how it looks and reads, although I would expect some small tweaks and twiddles over the next few months. Much, much kudos to Avram Grumer for his inspired work on this. Let us know what you think.

David and I had first discussed revamping the magazine in a larger typeface, oh gosh at least a decade ago, but the increase in printing and especially postage costs made it financially impractical to the point of impossibility. Now we have no postage costs, so we can pass the eyeball-savings on to you! Our print-on-demand copies will see no price increase in cost—going from 48 pages to 64 adds about 25 cents to our raw cost, and the POD copies are less of a revenue center and more of a favor for those who really like saddle-bound magazines.

I’m also happy to announce that we are on stable enough financial footing that we can resume paying our contributors in actual cash money! From the founding of the magazine, we have felt it our duty to repay our contributors for the honor they do us by contributing, but the combination of the decline of paper magazines and the miserable economic conditions (that continue, almost unnoted, today) brought our subscriber base, and our revenues, down to the point where we could only offer payment in copies. But the aforementioned savings on paper and postage has returned us to true semiprozinedom.

(One of the underreported effects of economic downturns is the permanent damage they do. Magazines lose subscribers; stores lose customers; nonprofits lose backers; endowments lose value. When their steady but not rock-solid support is exhausted, institutions if they’re lucky contract and otherwise disappear.)

On a cheerier note, hey—we’re paying again, and we can always use more articles. Essays, reviews, random thoughts, musings, personal essays of your relationship with the materials or culture of science fiction, fantasy, horror, or the just plain quirky—we offer a fine audience deeply engaged with the field.

And speaking of the audience: the response to our birthday giveaway last month was enormously gratifying. You-all have downloaded the issue more than 8000 times. Let me just say that again, because I’m gobsmacked: 8000 times. The well-wishing we’ve received has been a comfort in the cold Autumn nights.

Thank you, all of you. And thus begins the second quarter-century!

—Kevin J. Maroney

and the editors

NYRSF Issue 301 (September 2013): Table of Contents

• Thomas F. Bertonneau — Contact, Communion, and the Marriage of Minds: Olaf Stapledon in Context


• Terry Thompson — “The Country of the Blind”: H. G. Wells’s Homage to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”


• Alexander Popoff — Alien Invasion and The Independence Day Myth


• Weirder Shadows over Innsmouth, edited by Stephen Jones, reviewed by Peter Rawlik


• Big Mama Stories by Eleanor Arnason, reviewed by Michael Levy


• Mark Rich — The Transformations of Speculative Poetry: On Wiscon Panels in 2008 and 2013
• Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, edited by Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich, reviewed by Joe Milicia


• Don Webb — The Past Speaks in Many Accents


• Editorial: New Paths and Restorations


• Photos from LoneStarCon 3