The New York Review of Science Fiction

The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, and William Weaver, reviewed by John Crowley

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014; $24.00 hc; 434 pages

Italo Calvino’s work is unique in the literature of the twentieth century; it would be impertinent in this brief notice to try to characterize it, since almost anything said about The Castle of Crossed Destinies or Invisible Cities or Mister Palomar wouldn’t apply to any of the other works. In a biographical piece he wrote in 1978, Calvino addresses this multiplicity from the maker’s point of view: “Writing is such a boring and solitary occupation; if you repeat yourself an infinite sadness seizes hold of you.” Not of most writers, actually; but it may be the reason for what Calvino has called with (false) modesty “that collection of fragments that is my ouevre.”

Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution, edited by Ann VanderMeer, reviewed by Eugene Reynolds

San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2012; $15.95 tpb, 432 pages

It starts, for me, with Jules Verne. The images of steampunk are all implicit in his descriptions of the too-beautiful technology that he envisioned arising (literally: balloons, airships) all around him in the nineteenth century. Space cannons, Rococo submarines, airships (again). The illustrations of his novels play out in my mind whenever I encounter this contemporary flourishing of “retro-futurism” (as editor VanderMeer likes to term her chosen genre).

But, even more so in this third volume in a steampunk anthology series, one dedicated to revolution, one that seeks “to challenge the status quo and think about change” (11). For so did Verne, an author who gave a prescient and mildly dystopian view of Paris in the Twentieth Century (written in 1863, but not published until 1994), one who liked to write about protagonists who were nameless in the cause of revolt, such as A Family Without a Name (1889) who fought and led the 1837 Quebec Rebellion. And his most famous character is named “Nobody” (Latin: “Nemo”), a self-exiled Indian prince, regarded as “a great criminal” and “a rebel, outlawed by humanity” (Mysterious Island, 587), one man struggling against the status quo to be “reclaiming the riches of his country by driving out the foreigner and restoring its independence” (MI, 590). Sounds like a rather steamed punk to me.

Boneland by Alan Garner, read by Robert Powell, reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller

London: Fourth Estate Books, 2012; £16.99 hc; 160 pages
Redhill, Surrey: Naxos Audiobooks, 2012; £11.00; 4:56

It is difficult to avoid seeing Boneland (2012) as a valedictory text. Not only does it represent an act of closure, completing as it does a trilogy which began with Garner’s first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), but it feels too like an act of remembrance, revisiting the themes that have appeared in so many of Garner’s other novels. In particular, we meet again the gifted but troubled adolescent male, intellectually precocious but emotionally stunted, who has figured in so much of Garner’s fiction. We are also introduced once more to the landscape of Cheshire, Garner’s home county, although in Boneland Garner will venture much deeper into its mythic past than he has ever done previously. Indeed, almost everything about this novel suggests more of the same yet carried out with so much more intensity than ever before. Perhaps most significant of all, Garner finally engages directly, or as directly as I think he is ever going to, with the story that has underpinned so much of his literary practice—Gawain and the Green Knight, composed in the Northwest Mercian dialect by an unknown poet around 1400 (that is, around the time Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were first published). The Gawain-poet, and indeed Arthurian stories generally, have been a shadowy presence in all of Garner’s work, but here his work is more immediately present than it has ever been before.

Chance of Face, Change of Heart (Editorial, NYRSF 312)

In early August, the writer and editor Daniel José Older launched a petition on Change.org <www.change.org/p/the-world-fantasy-award-make-octavia-butler-the-wfa-statue-instead-of-lovecraft> to request that the World Fantasy Award administrators replace the current award statuette, a (haunting, grotesque, lovely) Gahan Wilson bust of H. P. Lovecraft, with a statuette of Octavia Butler. As of today, the petition has just short of 1400 signatures, including mine. I signed it because it identifies a serious problem; I signed it with reluctance because the proposed solution is not the right one.

NYRSF Issue 312 (August 2014): Table of Contents

• Boneland by Alan Garner, read by Robert Powell, reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller


• Michael Bishop: Philip K. Dick, Alternate-World SF, and I


• A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias, reviewed by David Mead


• Wind Angels by Leigh Kennedy, reviewed by Jenny Blackford


• Istvan Csicsery-Ronay: The Impossibility of Ian Watson’s Miracle Visitors


• Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution, edited by Ann VanderMeer, reviewed by Eugene Reynolds


• The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, and William Weaver, reviewed by John Crowley


• Darrell Schweitzer: Drilling a Core Sample: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1945


• Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone, reviewed by Greg L. Johnson


• Photos


• Editorial: Change of Face, Change of Heart