The New York Review of Science Fiction

The Changing Leaves (Editorial, NYRSF 314)

I would be horribly remiss if I did not lead off with the news that our own legendary theatre critic Jen Gunnels has done made herself a book! Geek Theater: 15 Plays by Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers, which she edited with Erin Underwood, is freshly out from Underwords Press and collects 15 play scripts including works from authors familiar to the NYRSF-reading world: Jeanne Beckwith, F. Brett Cox, Andrea Hairston, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Mac Rogers, Crystal Skillman, and many more. Go get it if you have any interest whatsoever in modern sf theatre (and you bloody well should). It’s available from the publisher at <underwordspress.com/underwords_book/geek-theater/> and from better booksellers everywhere.

NYRSF Issue 314 (October 2014): Table of Contents

• Brian Stableford: Speculative Sex: The First Gropings
• Fruma Klass: Fred Pohl—An Appreciation
• The Last Dark: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book Four, by Stephen R. Donaldson, reviewed by Michael Levy
• Assail (Novels of the Malazan Empire vol. 6) by Ian C. Esslemont, reviewed by A.P. Canavan
• Michael Andre-Driussi: Anglo-American Movies Responding to Hitler, 1936 to 1941
• Afterparty by Daryl Gregory, reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes
• Emily Hosokawa: The Evolution of the Sublime in SF: Non-Stop, The Left Hand of Darkness, and 2312
• Mariano Villareal: Science Fiction from Spain
• Beyond the Rift, by Peter Watts, reviewed by Joe Sanders
• Questionable Practices by Eileen Gunn, reviewed by Fran Wilde
• Photos
• Editorial: The Changing Leaves

Questionable Practices by Eileen Gunn, reviewed by Fran Wilde

Easthampton, Massachusetts: Small Beer Press, 2014; $16.00 tpb; 208 pages

Several excellent reviews of Eileen Gunn’s Questionable Practices—her first collection of short stories in ten years—have already called out the dangerous play that takes place among the pages. This is absolutely worth mentioning: Gunn’s stories spin ideas done up with sharp edges; they hijack pop-culture favorites and redirect the actors within; they draw for us a series of what-ifs that carry reader and characters away into the dark, there, perhaps, to breed more ideas.

The Last Dark: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book Four, by Stephen R. Donaldson, reviewed by Michael Levy

New York: Putnam Books, 2013; $35.00 hc; 557 pages

I was the perfect age when The Lord of the Rings came out, a junior or senior in high school, and I fell head over heels in love with it as have so many teens. Before Tolkien, I was basically a science fiction guy, but LOTR changed that. I remember that the Conan books also started coming out a few years later in new paperback editions, and I consumed those, too, and Lovecraft and all of the dozens of other older books that soon were being reprinted as “in the tradition of” one of the big three. The exact publication dates, I must admit, kind of swirl around in my head in a sweet, nostalgic fog, but the specific chronology doesn’t really matter. During the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s I discovered A. Merritt, Clark Ashton Smith, L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Gardner Fox, and many other fantasy writers. My inclusion of Fox in this otherwise illustrious roll call, of course, may say something about my critical standards at the time, even though by 1969 I was an English major at the University of Illinois and a member of the campus Tolkien Society. When the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series began, I bought and read every single volume, for all that some of them were kind of squirrelly (what was E. R. Eddison going on about?) or slow (did anything actually ever happen at Gormenghast?). Then the del Reys came along and more or less created the idea of modern generic high fantasy, what some have come to call, not always justly, extruded fantasy product. The Sword of Shannara and its many sequels were definitely extruded product—in memory at least they made Gardner Fox look good—but then there was this Stephen R. Donaldson fellow and his Lord Foul’s Bane. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of him.

Brian Stableford: Speculative Sex: The First Gropings

In English-language speculative fiction, the possibility of sexual intercourse as topic of speculation was more or less ruled out by prevailing standards of literary diplomacy until the 1960s, and it was a subject that required a certain amount of daring to be broached even in France. Nevertheless, the scope and the incentive were there for anyone unafraid of grasping the nettle, and a number of writers did so in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Those first attempts are worthy of attention and comparison as enterprising attempts to move into uncharted literary and philosophical territory.

Fruma Klass: Fred Pohl—An Appreciation

I first met Fred Pohl at the 1956 Worldcon, in New York City. Worldcons were still small enough then that you could meet just about everyone in the science fiction world who went to Worldcons. I was attending with my then-boyfriend Phil Klass, and there were so many of his friends and fellow writers to meet that few of them really stood out. So many important people, important at least in this little world I was entering, and so many of them behaving so strangely!

As I remember it, they were all men accompanied by their wives and/or girlfriends, except for Arthur C. Clarke, who was accompanied by his partner Mike, and Judy Merril, unaccompanied. In the course of that Worldcon, Harlan Ellison’s first marriage broke up rather spectacularly, with Aurea Keyes, Danny Keyes’s wife, getting clobbered by Charlotte Ellison’s wildly swinging handbag. Aurea had nothing to do with any of it—she just couldn’t get out of the way fast enough.