The New York Review of Science Fiction

Odds and Sods (Editorial, NYRSF 321)

I’m happy to say that we’re basically back on schedule with this issue. Depending on how quickly Weightless Books can process our files, you might even see this in May. Now that we’re running quasi-smoothly on the issue production front, I can turn my attention back to some longer-standing matters. We ran into several font-related complications with our print-on-demand issues through Lulu that I hope are now resolved. Back in October of last year, we submitted a couple of issues to Draft2Digital for distribution through other booksellers such as iBooks and Barnes & Noble, but for various reasons they were rejected; we are going to get that straightened out as well.

NYRSF Issue 321 (May 2015): Table of Contents

• Christopher S. Kovacs: Eye of Storm
• Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? ... and Other Questions from the Astronomers’ In-box at the Vatican Observatory by Guy Consolmagno, S.J. and Paul Mueller, S.J., reviewed by Patrick McGuire
• Time’s Fool and Other Stories by Grant Carrington and Annapolis to Andromeda by Grant Carrington, reviewed by D. Douglas Fratz
• Watch This: recently viewed and recommended by Michael Andre-Driussi
• Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory, reviewed by Michael Levy
• The Heritage of Heinlein: A Critical Reading of the Fiction by Thomas D. Clareson and Joe Sanders, reviewed by Russell Blackford
• Mike Barrett: Literate Fears: The Ghostly Fiction of Edith Wharton
• Olympe Chambrionne: The “Sons” of the Zanglodon
• Liminality in Fantastic Fiction: A Poststructuralist Approach by Sándor Klapcsik, reviewed by A.P. Canavan
• Editorial: Odds and Sods

The Heritage of Heinlein: A Critical Reading of the Fiction by Thomas D. Clareson and Joe Sanders, reviewed by Russell Blackford

Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Press, 2014; $45.00 tpb; 221 pages

The Heritage of Heinlein is mainly the work of Joe Sanders, though revered scholar Thomas D. Clareson produced drafts of the first three chapters (about a quarter of the text) before his death in 1993. These chapters cover Heinlein’s long-unpublished For Us, The Living, written in 1938 but not finally issued in print until 2003, and his early fiction through to the mid-1940s. Sanders completed the project, which involved editing Clareson’s work and writing chapters to cover Heinlein’s oeuvre from the Scribner juveniles (1947–1958) to the 1980s. Despite this unusual history, The Heritage of Heinlein appears seamless.

Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? ... and Other Questions from the Astronomers’ In-box at the Vatican Observatory by Guy Consolmagno, S.J. and Paul Mueller, S.J., reviewed by Patrick McGuire

New York: Image, 2014; $25.00 hc; 304 pages

Would You Baptize? is a work of nonfiction, neither science fiction nor directly about science fiction. Nevertheless, its topic and approach will, I think, make it interesting to many sf readers. The theme of the book is “what it’s like when science encounters faith on friendly, mutually respectful terms” (1). The book is aimed at a broader audience than Catholics or even religious believers in general, and for illustration it frequently makes use of sf stories and movies.

Christopher S. Kovacs: Eye of Storm

Eye of Cat is arguably the most carefully crafted and executed of Roger Zelazny’s novels. At the same time, it may be the most misunderstood, reviled, and incorrectly promoted of all his works.

I spent several years editing and annotating Zelazny’s short fiction and poetry and researching and writing a biography, the results of which (combined with the efforts of my coeditors Dave Grubbs and NYRSF’s own Ann Crimmins) became the six volumes of The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny (NESFA Press, 2009). When those books appeared, Zelazny fans approached me and also e-mailed NESFA Press directly to eagerly inquire if there were any plans to republish Zelazny’s novels with the same care and diligence. But a surprising number also declared that NESFA Press should absolutely not reprint “that damned awful novel with all the poetry, the Indian, and the one-eyed alien cat.” Even more blunt comments can be found on Goodreads and other discussion groups, such as “unfortunately, the bits with Cat in them are a minority in the book. I liked his motives, but it was lost in bullshit about Singer’s dumb spirit journey where he battles himself.” And yet there are some readers who steadfastly declare that Eye of Cat is their favorite Zelazny novel!

Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!, by Harry Harrison, reviewed by Martin Morse Wooster

New York: Tor Books, 2014; $26.99 hc; 338 pages

Assemble all the autobiographies and biographies of science fiction writers, and you’ll fill a thick shelf. But there’s always room for more. Perhaps the most significant autobiography published in 2014 was Harry Harrison’s.

Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! (subtitled “It Seemed Like a Good Idea At The Time”) is an incomplete work. Harrison, who died in 2012, wrote a continuous narrative covering 12the first 50 years of his life; the remainder of the book consists of essays on various topics that Harrison would have integrated into the book had he lived longer. It is a sprightly look at one of sf’s most popular adventure writers.

Ken MacLeod and Sherryl Vint: Uplifted Future? Animals, Biotechnology, and Science Fictio

The emergent fields of animal studies and posthumanism have provoked a radical rethinking of the boundary between the human and the animal in recent philosophy and in the humanities more generally. As these discourses have come to question the adequacy of the liberal humanist theory of the Subject, the boundary between human and animal has become destabilized, now recognized as based simply on the assertion of an absolute gap between the two, rather than on the study of animals to examine minutely what, if anything, distinguished the two. At one end of this spectrum, we find Donna Haraway’s polemic pronouncement in “A Cyborg Manifesto”:

David V. Griffin: There and There and There and There and There and There and Back Again

The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937; revised 1951 and 1966).

The Hobbit film trilogy: An Unexpected Journey (2012); The Desolation of Smaug (2013); The Battle of Five Armies (2014). Directed by Peter Jackson.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”: That’s certainly an inauspicious beginning for a literary series that would eventually include one of the twentieth century’s best-known fantasy epics, even if the tale did, as its author J.R.R. Tolkien admitted, “grow in the telling.”

The Hobbit was published in 1937 and awarded a prize from The New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. I first read it when I was 7 years old, and it was the first book I remember reading without any pictures in it. To say I loved it would be an understatement—in many ways it was my first literary experience, along with the Alice and Oz books (none of which were as obviously “novels”). Bilbo Baggins (half a Took) would appear on the face of it an unlikely protagonist for a children’s novel, being a stout snob in his late fifties or thereabouts and inclined to a mild-mannered but clear disapproval of unexpected visitors—but I was entranced by his story and his growing role in it, by the way that this unimaginative and sensible person managed, convincingly and without too much butter, to get the best of a half-dozen terrors of increasing complexity and size. The mutton-gobbling trolls, the goblins of the Misty Mountains, Gollum (“I don’t know where he came from or who or what he was”), the giant spiders, the wood elves (ostensibly not villains but you could have fooled me), the dragon—it was an ever-swelling bestiary of increasingly unpleasant things from under the bed, and Bilbo’s generally commonsensical approach to dealing with them was a revelation.