The New York Review of Science Fiction

An Evening with William Shatner Asterisk reviewed by Jen Gunnels

Conceptualized and directed by Phil Soltanoff. Written by Joe Diebes. System Designer Rob Ramirez.

Produced by PS122 and the New Ohio Theatre. Featuring William Shatner* and Mari Akita. New Ohio Theatre, Manhattan.




When the people of ancient Greece wanted to know their future, they consulted oracles—the most popular being that at Delphi. To whom shall we turn, we of twenty-first century New York?

William Shatner as Captain Kirk, of course.

This pretty much describes Phil Soltanoff and Joe Diebes’s An Evening with William Shatner Asterisk at the New Ohio Theatre in New York. And yet.... I find myself at a loss to explain the humor and odd profundity of an evening being lectured on the future of Art and Science by William Shatner as Captain Kirk—philosophy delicately layered with a phyllo of cultural meme and masterful media editing. Captain Kirk lectures from the future, an online class from Starfleet Academy in Federation Aesthetics. The performance was brilliant, and yet moments left me wondering why they didn’t trust their oracle to capture the audience for the length of the performance. This lapse, however, did not detract from the compelling nature of the material or the way in which it was created.

Ian Campbell “Still a Better Love Story than Twilight”: Abbas and Bahjatt’s HWJN, the Saudi State, and Sexual Politics

In April 2013, Ibraheem Abbas and Yasser Bahjatt published through their own publishing company, Yatakhalayoon, their sf/romance novel HWJN. Its simultaneous publication in English and its coauthors’ enthusiastic promotion of the book led to its Arabic edition becoming a best-seller in their native Saudi Arabia. (A Twitter user posted a picture of the catalog of Jarir Bookstore, Saudi Arabia’s largest, for November/December 2013, wherein HWJN was listed as the number 3 best-seller <t.co/VQesIfMRia>.) Its English edition developed some traction as well, especially after Bahjatt appeared at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio in August 2013, netting among other things a positive Amazon review for HWJN from author Gregory Benford, who said, “This is cultural communication well done” <www.amazon.com/review/R2CSTJNH7NISDJ>.

NYRSF Issue 305 (January 2014): Table of Contents

• Brian Stableford: Prometheus, the Sphinx, and Salomon’s House: Symbolism and Social Propaganda in Francis Bacon’s Prophetic Books
• Ian Campbell: “Still a Better Love Story than Twilight”: Abbas and Bahjatt’s HWJN, the Saudi State, and Sexual Politics
• Dreams of Fear: Poetry of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by S. T. Joshi and Steven J. Mariconda, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer
• The Assaults of Chaos: A Novel about H.P. Lovecraft by S.T. Joshi, reviewed by Don Webb
• Terry Thompson: “With a Drawn Sword”: Evoking Poe’s “William Wilson” in Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner”
• An Evening with William Shatner Asterisk, reviewed by Jen Gunnels
• Twenty-First Century Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, reviewed by Damien Broderick
• Donald M. Hassler: The Little Big Book from James Gunn: Real SF and a Huge Body of Work
• Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore by Lance Parkin, reviewed by Joe Sanders
• Editorial: Voices Welcome

Voices Welcome (Editorial, NYRSF 305)

In her recent comedy special We Are Miracles, Sarah Silverman says, “Stop telling girls they can be anything they want when they grow up. I think it’s a mistake, not because they can’t, but because it would’ve never occurred to them they couldn’t.”

I love this joke, even though I recognize the flaw right at the heart of it. Girls need to be told they “can be anything” because all the social, economic, and political structures of the world are arrayed to tell them the precise opposite.

Brian Stableford Prometheus, the Sphinx, and Salomon’s House: Symbolism and Social Propaganda in Francis Bacon’s Prophetic Books

Moritz Kauffmann stated in Utopias; or, Schemes of Social Improvement from Sir Thomas More to Karl Marx (1879) that Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis “embodies Bacon’s visions of the future, and is remarkable not only as a philosophical speculation or scientific romance, but as being the outcome of sane reflection, containing but few, if any, of those chimerical extravagancies to be found in other Utopias. In the description of the conditions of mankind here, we have nothing but the practical results he anticipated from a practical and diligent study of nature according to his own principles.”

NYRSF Issue 304 (December 2013): Table of Contents

• Bernadette Lynn Bosky: Are There Bad Guys and Good Guys?: The Benandanti and Goddess Worshippers in Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon
• Bernadette L. Bosky: Female Rage
• Alice Mills and Jane Mummery: Reading the World as Book, the Book as World: Funke and Grossman’s Book-world Fantasies
• David Drake: Art, History, and Unplanned Side Effects
• Patrick L. McGuire: The Strugatskys’ Traditional Science Fiction Revisited, Part 3
• Screed: Letters of Comment
• Editorial: Looking Forward to Looking Backwards

Looking Forward to Looking Backwards (Editorial, NYRSF 304)

So we come to the end of another calendar year. Another amazing year: 12 solid issues, another ~300,000 words of f&sf critique, all delivered more or less on time. We have our new layout, easier on the eyes; and an estimated 10,000 people downloaded our free 25th anniversary issue, which still croggles my imagination.

Bernadette Lynn Bosky Are There Bad Guys and Good Guys?: The Benandanti and Goddess Worshippers in Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon

This study began several years ago at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) during a discussion of Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon, a novel that presents a showdown between two supernatural groups: female acolytes of a long-dormant and very dark moon goddess and the Benandanti, an eons-old group of politically powerful alpha-males who set themselves against the waking of the moon. In that conversation, a friend referred to the Benandanti as “the good guys.” Nor is that friend alone. Most reviewers tend to see the Benandanti as the good guys, at least by default. An online review by eRIK states, “A young woman ends up teaming with a lesser-of-two-evils group to stop a powerful witch from devouring the world.” Candas Jane Dorsey writes, “Although we see [the Benandanti] performing the same kind of grisly rituals and manipulating the lives of men and women as well as the histories of countries and eras, in the end they come out as more-than-marginally the Good Guys” (15).