The New York Review of Science Fiction

The Vow (Editorial, NYRSF 316)

Around 2001, at the conclusion of a Lunacon panel about sf film, I made my first statement of what I have come to call “The Vow”: “I will not see a science fiction film unless I’ve been assured by someone who understands science fiction that it is not stupid.”

The turn of the century was a watershed period in sf film, the first time when there might be more interesting sf films than a person might reasonably see in a single year. I point to 1999 as the precise turning point; the clearest marker of this was that the Hugo Award for Dramatic Presentation nominations for that year did not include the new Star Wars film. Even two or three years earlier, it would have been unthinkable that an sf film of such high profile wouldn’t be nominated, even if it was a juvenile piece of claptrap, simply from lack of competition. SF in film had finally reached a point of saturation, or of escape: the films were going to succeed or fail without an sf-reading audience, and it was now, I felt, incumbent on people who actually cared about science fiction to refuse to participate in its stupidificaiton.

NYRSF Issue 316 (December 2014): Table of Contents

• David E Romm: The Songs of Shockwave Radio Theater: A Journey
• Olympe Chambrionne: The Difficult Quest for Equality: Three Exemplary Episodes on the Margins of the Unhistory of Feminist and Anarchist Fantasy
• Geek Theater, edited by Jen Gunnels and Erin Underwood, reviewed by Aaron Grunfeld
• Michael Andre-Driussi: Ballard’s Debt to Hawthorne: “Prima Belladonna”
• Mike Barrett: Not for Children: The Spectral Tales of Edith Nesbit
• Unseaming by Mike Allen, reviewed by Peter Rawlik
• Echopraxia by Peter Watts, reviewed by David Mead
• Donald M. Hassler: Grace in the Marketplace: Tom Clancy and James Gunn
• Burning Paradise by Robert Charles Wilson, reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
• Screed
• Photos
• Editorial: The Vow

Unseaming by Mike Allen, reviewed by Peter Rawlik

Columbus, Ohio: Antimatter Press, 2014; $15.95 tpb; 224 pages

Mike Allen, the editor of Mythic Delirium and author of the novel Black Fire Concerto, presents Unseaming, his first collection of fourteen stories. Included as the opening piece is the Nebula Award–nominated story, “The Button Bin,” an exercise in the use of the second-person narrative. I am usually not fond of second-person narratives—they always seem so forced—but Allen effectively builds tension by placing the protagonist in an untenable situation and then leaving him with no choice. Horror is achieved through the reader’s identification with a man forced to do battle with a monster and who in the process becomes a monster himself.

Olympe Chambrionne: The Difficult Quest for Equality: Three Exemplary Episodes on the Margins of the Unhistory of Feminist and Anarchist Fantasy

As every schoolgirl knows or ought to know, the documentary history of French feminism took its first great leap forward in 1791 when the playwright Marie Gouze, who signed her literary works Olympe de Gouges, published Déclaration des droits de la femme et la citoyenne [Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizeness], in answer to the Marquis de Lafayette’s Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen [Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen], which had been adopted by the National Assembly in August 1789 as the fundamental statement of the French Revolution.

David E. Romm: The Songs of Shockwave Radio Theater: A Journey

Shockwave Radio Theater was a weekly radio program on KFAI-FM <www.kfai.org> in Minneapolis that ran from 1979 to 2007. Science fiction humor. Really, pretty much anything we wanted to do, we just did. This included music. We played all sorts of strange music, mostly science fiction and/or fantasy related but also played songs relating to our guests, of interest to curious people, or just anything we found odd. I liked to play things people hadn’t heard before, and/or were unlikely to hear in any other venue. I pandered to weird people.

Geek Theater, edited by Jen Gunnels and Erin Underwood, reviewed by Aaron Grunfeld

Marblehead, Massachusetts: Underwords Press, 2014; $24.95 tpb; 470 pages

Geek Theater cleverly inverts the campus put-down of drama students to christen a theatrical movement. According to editors Jen Gunnels (on staff here at the New York Review of Science Fiction) and Erin Underwood, science fiction and fantasy have proliferated onstage over the last decade. Their goal in compiling Geek Theater, it seems, is to bring together a diaspora of theater artists and sf/f writers into a loose community.

The freshness of the contents supports the editors’ assertion that geek theater is a contemporary phenomenon. If anything, it suggests they’re underplaying the trend’s vitality, as the fifteen scripts in Geek Theater are of remarkably recent vintage. A majority were given full productions, staged readings, or festival premieres in 2013 or 2014; the oldest (John Kessel’s Faustfeathers) is an outlier from 1994.

Two Traveller Novels: Fate of the Kinunir by Robert E. Vardeman and Shadow of the Storm by Martin J. Dougherty, reviewed by James Cambias

Far Future Enterprises, 2014; $14.99 tpb; 198/196 pages

Reviewing a book based on a beloved media property poses an interesting dilemma. Do you review it as a novel, standing on its own? Or do you review it through the lens of its franchise? In other words, regarding these two books, should the question be “are they good novels?” or “are they good Traveller novels?”

A little background. Traveller (always and forever with a double-l) is a tabletop roleplaying game written by Marc Miller in 1977. It was the first science fiction roleplaying game to get wide distribution and as such has retained its iconic position in the gaming hobby despite a rather rocky publishing history.

The Uncanny Valley, created and directed by Francesa Talenti, reviewed by Jen Gunnels

Featuring Alphonse Nicholson, Katja Hill, and puppeteer Jim Bulluck, produced through the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The Brick Theatre, Brooklyn, New York.

Gordon Craig, a director and designer working during the early 1900s, was the son of the acclaimed British actress Ellen Terry, and he was a very dangerous man. His The Art of the Theatre (1905) set the theatre world on its heels and made him as notorious as playwright Henrik Ibsen, albeit in the arena of design—typically not a terribly contentious topic. The shocking thing Craig wanted? A craftsman/artist/director who would create an artistic unity with no hierarchy of design. Everything should be seamless with a single set and no one element privileged over the other—something we pretty much take for granted today.

Darrell Schweitzer: Peter Schlemihl and Other Classics That Nobody Reads

In the famous introduction to his Seven Famous Novels (1934), H.G. Wells explains his early imaginative stories, differentiating them from the serious speculations of Jules Verne:

They belong to a class of writing which includes the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the True Histories of Lucian, Peter Schlemil [sic] and the story of Frankenstein. It includes too some admirable inventions by Mr. David Garnett, Lady into Fox for instance. They are all fantasies; they do not project a serious possibility....

It would be decades before Brian Aldiss famously identified Frankenstein as the foundation novel of science fiction, and I am not sure Wells ever accepted himself as one of the fathers of the field either.

Michael Bishop: Scalehunter: Lucius Shepard and the Dragon Griaule Sequence

A Question of Scale?

Nearly thirty years ago, I was pleased to introduce Lucius Shepard’s debut collection of his mature short fiction, The Jaguar Hunter (Arkham House, 1987). At that early point in his career, he required little or no introduction to savvy enthusiasts of fantasy and science fiction. He had already garnered a host of nominations for Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and in 1985 he had collected a John W. Campbell Award as the field’s Best New Writer.