The New York Review of Science Fiction

Superpower Distribution (Editorial, NYRSF 326)

If all has gone well, this issue should be up at Weightless and online before the World Fantasy Convention. NYRSF will be well-represented at WFC—David Hartwell, of course, but also me, Arthur Hlavaty, Bernadette Bosky, Alex Donald, Jen Gunnels, and of course Weightless Books’s Gavin Grant and Kelly Link will all be there, along with many past, present, and future NYRSF contributors and staff. See you there, I hope!

NYRSF Issue 326 (October 2015): Table of Contents

• Photos
• Steve Carper: The Women of Gnome Press
• Audrey Taylor: “Active Time” in the Works ofPatricia A. McKillip
• Scott Vander Ploeg: On P. Andrew Miller’s In Love in Water
• Robert Eldridge: Potocki’s Saragossa Manuscript: An 1892 English Translation Discovered
• Sandra Lindow and Michael Levy: Two Views on Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman
• Fire with Fire by Charles E. Gannon, reviewed by Marilyn “Mattie” Brahen
• Corsair by James L. Cambias, reviewed by Greg L Johnson
• Saturn Run by John Sandford and Ctein, reviewed by Karen Burnham
• Brian Stableford: Speculative Technological Manipulations of Human Being in Early French romans scientifique
• Gregory Benford: Escorting The Odd
• Michael Andre-Driussi: “The New Prime” as Herald of Future Jack Vance
• Editorial: Superpower Distribution

Gregory Benford: Escorting The Odd

For decades starting in the 1970s, the University of California at Irvine asked me to be the default escort for visitors and speakers a bit out of the ordinary. This usually meant science fiction writers with a large audience, though not always. I was an sf writer, too, though with real-world credentials as a professor of physics, which some thought qualified me to mediate between the real and the imaginary.

Sandra Lindow and Michael Levy: Two Views on Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman

New York: Tor Books, 2015; $25.00 hc; 304 pages

Sandra Lindow

Carolyn Ives Gilman’s Dark Orbit is a first contact planetary romance in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling. Set in the same universe as Gilman’s previous, groundbreaking 1998 novel, Halfway Human, it describes how a crew of scientists from Capella II are sent to Iris, a newly discovered planet, expecting it to be uninhabited only to find a village of five hundred humans living in total darkness in caves underground.

Audrey Taylor: “Active Time” in the Works of Patricia A. McKillip

In this article I present the term active time, something I formulated with the works of Patricia A. McKillip specifically in mind but which might prove useful in other fantasy contexts as well.

I will be taking my examples of active time specifically from two works of McKillip, The Tower at Stony Wood (2000) and The Bards of Bone Plain (2011). Both are “classic” immersive fantasies (in Farah Mendlesohn’s rubric). This means there is no debate about where they sit; they are clearly fantasy, clearly not science fiction, and thus, like most fantasy, not usually discussed in terms of the mechanics of time.

Steve Carper: The Women of Gnome Press

Science fiction became literature in the half decade after World War II, not because of any intrinsic rise in the quality of the works, not even because rockets and atomic energy had moved from the pages of fiction to the front pages of newspapers. Science fiction became literature purely and simply because it began being offered in hard covers rather than being confined to pulp magazines.