Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
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Welcome to our twenty-eighth year. We’re behind schedule again (helped in no small part by a leaking water heater and other household mishaps). I have some hope that the October issue will be closer to on-time, though it will be tough to hit it exactly; however, the November issue should get us back on track even with the World Fantasy Convention at the beginning of the month, because the Thanksgiving weekend will give me uninterrupted time to work on the magazine. Here’s hoping.
New York: Tor Books, 2015, $26.99 hc; 304 pages
“Lightweight” is not the same thing as negligible, okay?
With that in mind, let’s consider Michael Swanwick’s latest novel, Chasing the Phoenix. As Swanwick commented in a recent Coode Street podcast, the Darger and Surplus stories began not with an idea but an image, a foppishly dressed man meeting a bipedal, vocal, and equally foppishly dressed dog. Aubrey Darger is the man; Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux, who graciously allows himself to be called simply Sir Plus (thus “Surplus”), is the dog. They meet in an unsettled, propitious time for scoundrels. Humanity had achieved Utopia with electronic tools, but it recognized the risk of being replaced by its machines and tried to stamp them out. But many AIs still survive, insanely hating all biological life and anxious to destroy it whenever possible. Besides a general regression to the political landscape of the nineteenth century, the landscape is dotted with survivals of Utopian technology—as seen in the genetically tweaked Surplus himself. Surely such a pair of clever rogues can profitably exploit the many possibilities open to them....
Continue reading "Chasing the Phoenix by Michael Swanwick, reviewed by Joe Sanders" »
America’s Stonehenge! The very name conjures up vistas of huge, standing stone circles, almost unimaginable antiquity, lost civilizations, and maybe the occasional orgiastic human sacrifice, doesn’t it?
It’s obviously supposed to.
The real deal is not quite as impressive as that, but I will have to admit that it does not entirely disappoint. And it’s got something to do with H.P. Lovecraft. What more could you ask?
Lovecraft may have known of the place, although not under that name. If he ever visited, he did so privately, since it was not open as a tourist attraction until 1958. It was called Mystery Hill originally, but, probably because there are dozens of Mystery Hills all over America, most of them places of natural optical illusions where cars seem to roll uphill, a more distinctive name was needed. “America’s Stonehenge” better evokes imaginings of a hoary past, and, incidentally, sells more tickets. Whether what we see there is authentic is one question. Whether this site, a rumor of its existence, or similar sites scattered across New England inspired Lovecraft’s fiction is, I think, the more interesting question.
Although, as I have previously noted in these pages, feminist politics did not take its first giant stride forward in France until the publication of Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights ofWomen, issued in association with the Revolution of 1789—which got its author sent to the guillotine during the Terror—the sentiments contained therein had been stirring for some time in the works of numerous female novelists. Most such novelists, of course, produced “naturalistic fiction” in which settings and storylines pretended to depict the world as it was; while frequently protesting against its iniquities, there was not much scope in their plots for speculating about how things might be different. There were, however, two genres of fiction produced in the early eighteenth century with noticeable frequency that offered ready opportunity for the imagination of alternative states of being: utopian satire and “fakeloristic” fantasy largely inspired by the popularity of Antoine Galland’s Mille-et-une nuits.
With this issue we complete our twenty-seventh full year of publication and our third full year post-paper. It would not be possible without the hard work of all of the delightful people listed on the masthead and the (also delightful and hardworking) people at Weightless Books, and they all deserve more thanks that I am capable of giving them. I hope you-all appreciate what they do.
We have migrated the Work Weekends out of the ancestral home of Stately Hartwell Manor into the more cityish Valentine’s Castle with relatively little incident, and I have to say I am delighted to have cut out the 3-5 hours of driving entailed. Also, man is it so much nicer to have air conditioning for the summer Weekends.
Continue reading "Once More Around the Sun (Editorial, NYRSF 324)" »
Oakland, California: PM Press, 2015; $15.95 tpb; 341 pages
This “highly curated” collection of feminist speculative fiction definitely bears the VanderMeer stamp: not only choosing their stories from every genre of the fantastic, including horror and fantasy” but offering a greater preponderance of the surreal and the richly grotesque than one might expect in an anthology on this theme. Of the surreal element, my favorite has to be Ann Richter’s “The Sleep of Plants,” an understatedly elegant escape story, translated from the French, though I also liked Rachel Swirsky’s “Detours on the Way to Nothing” and admit to having a soft spot for Eileen Gunn’s sly fable of corporate climbers, eagerly ditching their humanity just to get a corner office, “Stable Strategies For Middle Management.” In the grotesque contingent, I liked Karin Tidbeck’s “Aunts.” This study of stultifying, matriarchal domesticity, replicating itself through the generations, is compelling: gruesome, relentless, and glutinously horrific, but never less than sharply political.
The modern marketing category of “fantasy” emerged and thrived with remarkable suddenness in the early 1970s under the initial inspiration of the steadily accumulating US paperback editions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in 1965, some time after their original hardcover publication in 1954-55. It is arguable that no other event in publishing history ever had as much impact on the pattern of future publishing and reader demand than the ballooning success of those paperback editions, which eventually provoked a flood of imitations and variants, including such runaway best-sellers as Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara (1977) and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (begun 1977), sufficient to formulate and shape a highly successful marketing label within little more than a decade. The label in question is still thriving fifty years later, having expanded successfully into other media, most spectacularly television, which plays host to A Game of Thrones (begun 2011) adapted from George R. R. Martin’s novel sequence, A Song of Ice and Fire (begun 1996).
Continue reading " Brian Stableford: The Origins of Epic Fantasy" »
(for Hugh Silverman)
A quick look at the Wikipedia entry for “science fiction”—though admittedly hardly a definitive source for such information—reveals approximately nineteen “subgenres” of science fiction, depending on how one counts. (The “subgenres” listed include: cyberpunk, time travel, alternate history, military sf, superhuman, apocalyptic and postapocalyptic, space opera, space western, social science fiction, and, under the category of “other subgenres,” climate fiction, anthropological sf, kaiju, biopunk, dieselpunk, steampunk, comic sf, feminist sf, science fiction opera, and science fiction poetry, though the relegation of some of these categories to “subgenre” is puzzling.) On the other hand, Worlds without End, a site dedicated to science fiction, fantasy, and horror, lists some thirty-eight subgenres. (Additional entries are alien invasion, artificial intelligence, colonization, dying Earth, utopia/dystopia, first contact, nanotechnology, robots/androids, singularity, slipstream, hard sf, soft sf, theological, virtual reality, near future, and mundane sf.) While the Wikipedia entry does include discussion of some sf descended from cyberpunk, it excludes some others; furthermore, it misses altogether the developments in near-future science fiction (e.g., recent William Gibson and the “mundane sf” movement, including Ted Chiang, Gwyneth Jones, Maureen McHugh, and Geoff Ryman; cf. Calvin 2014). While the Worlds without End site does include several of the ever-proliferating cyberpunk descendents, and while it does include the turn toward near-future sf, it significantly omits one of the most recent, even if quite ephemeral, fields: “post-punk sf.”