The New York Review of Science Fiction

The Complete Poetry and Translations of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

New York: Hippocampus Press, 2012; $75.00 hc in 3 volumes; 1284 pages

Volume One: The Abyss Triumphant

Volume Two: The Wine of Summer

Volume Three: The Flowers of Evil and Others

The way to review something as massive as The Complete Poetry and Translations by Clark Ashton Smith is to just stop and force yourself to do it. There are hundreds of poems here, many of them previously unpublished, not even counting the translations from French and Spanish poetry, and it would take years to truly master all of them. You could find yourself dipping in and discovering something new indefinitely and never get around to writing the review.

First, let me say that this paperback edition is an event of considerable importance. Inasmuch as Clark Ashton Smith, the noted Weird Tales author and colleague of H.P. Lovecraft, can be accounted a major American poet, it is impossible to exaggerate how important this edition is. It makes Smith’s poetic oeuvre available for the first time ever. Before this in 2002, Hippocampus (and the same editors) brought out a much smaller collection of the best fantastic poems of Smith, called The Last Oblivion (hopefully not a prophetic title), which on a smaller scale made Smith’s poetry available to the general reader for the first time.

Neptune’s Brood: A Space Opera by Charles Stross, reviewed by Joe Milicia

New York: Ace Books, 2013; $25.95 hc; 325 pages

The reader beginning Charles Stross’s recent novel will soon find the subtitle a bit disingenuous, or, shall we say, wryly ironic. Neptune’s Brood is indeed a space opera in that it features interstellar travel, a spread of civilization from Ancient Earth to colonies scattered up to 50 light years away in any direction, and at least one warship, not to mention pirate raids, daring escapes, and the like. But it is also a work of hard science fiction, and much of the (social) science is economics: surely no sf novel has had a plot more centrally extrapolated from banking and currency systems.

NYRSF Issue 307 (March 2014): Table of Contents

• Karen Burnham: Free Will in a Closed Universe: Greg Egan’s Orthogonal Trilogy
• Neptune’s Brood: A Space Opera by Charles Stross, reviewed by Joe Milicia
• The Vengeance of Rome: The Fourth Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet by Michael Moorcock, reviewed by Martin Morse Wooster
• The Year’s Best SF 18, edited by David G. Hartwell, reviewed by Derek Künsken
• Brian Stableford: The Romantic Prometheia: A Watershed in the Evolution of Scientific Romance
• The Complete Poetry and Translations of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer
• Nothing Stays, written by Jeanne Beckwith, directed by Teresa Langston, reviewed by Jen Gunnels
• Ghosts Know by Ramsey Campbell, reviewed by Peter Rawlik
• Michael Swanwick: Four Short Fiction and Essay Reviews
• Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe, edited by J. E. Mooney and Bill Fawcett, reviewed by Michael Andre-Driussi
• Screed
• Photos
• Editorial: Comfort and Affliction

Comfort and Affliction (Editorial, NYRSF 307)

First, some housekeeping notes.

We are still running a few days behind schedule—our goal is to get the issue into your hands by the end of the month on the cover. We missed that goal substantially with the February issue and less substantially with this, the March issue. We are working on harnessing the ever-advancing power of technology to streamline our production process and eliminate points at which we can get hung up. That said, we’re also always looking for new staff to help us portage our longboats of words across the rocky bars of reality; if you’re interested in pitching in, drop me a line, especially if you can attend the monthly Work Weekends in Westchester County, New York.

Karen Burnham: Free Will in a Closed Universe: Greg Egan’s Orthogonal Trilogy

Greg Egan’s fiction is best known for its hard sf elements: the math, the physics, the computer science, and so forth. In that sense, the recently concluded Orthogonal trilogy (consisting of The Clockwork Rocket, The Eternal Flame, and The Arrows of Time) is a culmination of a progression towards including harder and more rigorous science in his science fiction. An element of Egan’s fiction that has not garnered as much overt attention is his theme of examining free will and its limits. In that sense, the Orthogonal trilogy forms a continuation of a line of thought that has been running through his fiction for over twenty years although it is less of a culmination than a complication.

Red Giant, composed by Adam Matlock; libretto by Brian Slattery; directed by Britt Olsen-Ecker, reviewed by Jen Gunnels

produced by Rhymes With Opera, featuring Elisabeth Halliday, Bonnie Lander, and Robert Maril. South Oxford Space, Brooklyn, New York, January 2014

Interplanetary travel with its discomforts and displacement are no mystery to me, for I have traveled to Brooklyn. Some of you will laugh at this statement; some of you (probably New Yorkers) will nod sagely; some just won’t understand. So when I say, “I have traveled to Brooklyn,” that means being enclosed in a little metal tube underground and under the East River for twenty-five minutes—long enough for people to give me are-you-okay looks because I have a few issues with being underground for extended periods. What would this have to do with an opera? It illustrates both my unsuitability for space exploration and my sympathy for the characters in the opera Red Giant. Three people trapped a small spacecraft, escaping a planet about to be consumed by a dying sun, have no predetermined destination, only the hope that they might be able to find a new planet where they can start again. This is coupled, however, with the despair that such a place does not exist, or even if it did, that they will never reach it. Red Giant, produced as part of Rhymes With Opera’s 2013–2014 season, reveals that the operatic can be intimate, less ornate, more subtle. The result is Sartre’s No Exit in space.

Lockstep by Karl Schroeder, reviewed by Derek Künsken

New York: Tor Books, 2014; $26.99 hc; 352 pages

Karl Schroeder has written a new YA science opera novel that is being serialized in Analog and will be published by Tor in 2014. With this novel, he has set himself an ambitious goal. From the author’s website:

In Lockstep I’ve reinvented Space Opera, and solved the greatest outstanding problem in Hard Science Fiction writing: how to have a Star Wars–type galactic empire of thousands of worlds and alien species, all available a short flight away, without violating any of the known laws of nature. Star Wars, Star Trek, all those stories of FTL civilizations that you used to devour.... They’re all great, except for one thing: they’re impossible. Each and every one of them ... but not this one. The Lockstep Empire of 70,000 worlds could be real, which means that for the very first time in science fiction, the kind of fantasy future we always dreamed of is no longer just a fantasy, but could be ... an aspiration.

NYRSF Issue 306 (February 2014): Table of Contents

• Victor Grech: The Elicitation of Jung’s Shadow in Star Trek
• Brian Stableford: Reconfiguring the Wisdom of the Ancients: Annotated Poetry, Erasmus Darwin, and the Evolution of Scientific Romance
• Lockstep by Karl Schroeder, reviewed by Derek Künsken
• Never at Home by L. Timmel Duchamp, reviewed by Jenny Blackford
• Red Giant, composed by Adam Matlock; libretto by Brian Slattery; directed by Britt Olsen-Ecker, reviewed by Jen Gunnels
• Mike Barrett: Twombly Town and Beyond: James P Blaylock’s Elfin Fantasies
• Photos: Boskone 51
• Editorial: With a Kick

With a Kick (Editorial, NYRSF 306)

So, we’re a little late again; I should have had the issue to our crack production team at least a week before I did. A great many external forces collaborated to push me off-schedule. The weather has been national news for most of the year. The New York suburbs are still buried in feet of unmelted snow. Snow fell, followed by arctic temperatures (single digit Fahrenheit highs, subzero lows) and gale-force winds, which lead without breaks into further snow, in an unceasing cycle for six weeks. For variety, we got freezing rain, sleet, frizzle, sneer, and farkle. I fell on black ice twice in 15 minutes after one overeager morning ice storm a fortnight ago and barely made it to shelter ahead of the wolverine raiding party emboldened by their wendigo masters.

Brian Stableford: Reconfiguring the Wisdom of the Ancients: Annotated Poetry, Erasmus Darwin, and the Evolution of Scientific Romance

[This is the second part of a continuing history of the works that followed in the wake of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and lead to the emergence of the scientific romance in the late nineteenth century. The first part, covering Bacon and his immediate successors, appeared in NYRSF #305.—the eds.]

When John Dryden and Abraham Cowley, poets who became early members of the Royal Society in the late seventeenth century, employed their art to celebrate the ambitions of the institution and of scientific research in general, they both looked back to Francis Bacon for inspiration. It took some time for the Society to produce a new fount of inspiration from within its own ranks, but when it did in the form of Isaac Newton, poets both within and without the Society’s ranks were not slow to celebrate and dramatize that triumph, helping in the process to formularize and cement the myth of his genius.