The New York Review of Science Fiction

Into the Fantastic (Editorial, NYRSF 318)

Welcome to our Special Epic Fantasy issue (or, more likely, welcome back from, given that this is the last thing in the issue). Stephen R. Donaldson and Steven Erikson have been saying for years, at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts and many other places, that there is a lamentable gulf between the artistic and cultural ascent of epic fantasy and the critical attention given to them. As a (basically) lifelong reader of epic fantasy, I’m delighted to help advance the critical discourse to whatever degree we can. This issue has been percolating for a while, and special thanks go to Jen Gunnels for coordinating it.

NYRSF Issue 318 (February 2015): Table of Contents

• Stephen R. Donaldson: Epic Fantasy: Necessary Literature
• Samuel R. Delany: A, B, C, Three Early Science Fiction Novels: A Foreword
• A.P. Canavan: “Let’s hunt some orc!”: Reevaluating the Monstrosity of Orcs
• Requiem in La Paz by Jonna Gjevre, reviewed by Michael Levy
• Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, reviewed by Karen Burnham
• Ian C. Esslemont: Violence in Epics Ancient and Fantastic: A Primer
• Brian Staveley: The Trouble with Orgasm: Unsatisfying Endings
• Olympe Chambrionne: The Hollow in Balzac’s Cane: Another Instance of Interesting Unhistory
• Hidden Folk by Eleanor Arnason, reviewed by Sandra Lindow
• Jean-Daniel Brèque: The Dragon Griaule/Beautiful Blood: A Timeline of the French Publication
• Photos
• Editorial: Into the Fantastic

Requiem in La Paz by Jonna Gjevre, reviewed by Michael Levy

Denver, Colorado: Wooden Stake Press, 2014; $12.95 tpb; 256 pages

Okay, cards on the table. The author of Requiem in La Paz is a former colleague of mine, and I read an early draft of the book in manuscript. My name appears on the Acknowledgements page. So why am I reviewing a novel about which it might seem hard for me to be objective? Well, the answer is that I believe that readers of NYRSF will appreciate this small press novel and need to be introduced to it. After 40 years as a book reviewer, I think I’ve learned how to separate the personal from the professional. If I didn’t honestly like Requiem in La Paz, I wouldn’t review it, and the fact that the author is a friend doesn’t mean that I won’t point out its occasional shortcomings.

Hidden Folk by Eleanor Arnason, reviewed by Sandra Lindow

Boston: Many Worlds Press, 2014; $24.00 hc; 192 pages

Winner of the Tiptree and Mythopoeic awards for her novel, A Woman of the Iron People (1991), Eleanor Arnason has become one of the most highly respected writers in the field of speculative fiction. She has been a finalist for the Sturgeon, Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Known for her fearless exploration of societal norms and values, her fiction takes readers far away in time and space only to bring them face to face with their own, too-comfortable political biases and heteronormative expectations.

A.P. Canavan: “Let’s hunt some orc!”: Reevaluating the Monstrosity of Orcs

With the exception of dragons, one of the most recognizable monsters of genre fantasy is the humble orc. Orcs, commonly found in hordes (which I believe is the ™ term), are the readily identifiable, disposable foot soldiers of every evil wizard’s or Dark Lord’s army, and they are the ever-useful opponents for would-be heroes in training. But given the trend of modern genre fantasy to move away from moral polarities to more complicated relativistic positions, can we still treat and react to orcs in the same way? Is it time to reevaluate orcs and as a result the texts in which they appear? Can we now view orcs as the victims of the self-proclaimed heroes? With some notable exceptions, such as Mary Gentle’s Grunts (1992) and Stan Nicholls’s Orcs novels (1999–present), the treatment of orcs has remained fairly consistent ever since Tolkien popularized them as the enemies of the hero.

Stephen R. Donaldson: Epic Fantasy: Necessary Literature

“Fantasy is the most intelligent, precise, and accurate means of arriving at the truth.”

—S. P. Somtow

Thirty-five years ago, I was on television in front of a live studio audience when the interviewer turned to me and asked without preamble, “So tell me, Mr. Donaldson. What is fantasy?”

At that time, fortunately, I had an answer. Now I have several. For the purposes of this essay, however, my subject is “epic fantasy.” So I’ll forego some of my favorite answers (e.g., fantasy is humankind’s best survival tool) and stick to those that are most immediately germane.

Dan’l Danehy-Oakes: Dhalgren at 40

When Dhalgren came out, I was about seventeen. I had lived essentially all my life in very very veryveryvery very white, middle-class suburban towns. Homogeneous to the max—in fact, homogenous like milk (as Anna Russell put it). And science fiction was pretty much like that, too: the heroes were (essentially) all white Americans, if not literally, then in their attitudes and concerns.

The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell, reviewed by Greg L. Johnson

New York: Tor Books, 2014; $26.99 hc; 401 pages

It’s the twenty-first century, and London is a steaming mess of social unrest and political corruption. The resulting stress has the police simultaneously gearing up for the possibility of violence in the streets and threatening to strike. Then comes a series of murders under mysterious circumstances—the victims were all in enclosed spaces, and the only other people present couldn’t have committed the crimes—that lead investigators with a sense of history to only one conclusion. It’s Jack the Ripper.

All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park, reviewed by John Crowley

New York: Tor Books, 2014; $25.99 hc; 272 pages

I very much hope that Paul Park’s new novel, All Those Vanished Engines, will appear in paperback, so that the praise I was planning to lavish on it (and will lavish on it) might be deployed on the back or front of it—though I can’t say how many new readers it will draw to the book. I apologize also to the readers of this journal for being so behindhand with my review, which I promised for long ago. I actually lost the book for quite a while, after having read (actually reread) about half of it in preparation for this notice. It seemed impossible to go on if I couldn’t find the book to quote from, whose pages I could flip through and note my markings of passages, my exclamation points and queries (often appearing together).

2014 in Comics for F/SF Readers (Editorial, NYRSF 317)

Anyone who has been trapped with me in a discussion of comics knows that I read far, far too many of them—nearly 1300 of them in 2014 alone. You might also know that I feel that comics readers and prose f/sf readers don’t communicate with each other enough, or well, so I’m taking it on myself to highlight some of the best comics from last year that would be of interest to f/sf readers. American comic books are still dominated by superheroes, but I’m going to mostly look past the vast majority of those and concentrate on fantasy and science fiction in other genres. (I’ll make some exceptions when warranted.)