The New York Review of Science Fiction

NYRSF Issue 328 (December 2015): Table of Contents

• The Search for E.T. Bell, also known as John Taine by Constance Reid, reviewed by Patrick L. McGuire
• 21st Century Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, reviewed by John Clute
• Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft by Don Webb, reviewed by Peter Rawlik
• Over the Tightrope by Asif Ismael, reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes
• Brian Stableford: The Perils of Prophecy 2: The Great Indifference of the World
• Photos
• Editorial: Entropy and Order

Entropy and Order (Editorial, NYRSF 328)

A short editorial this time. The issue is a few days behind schedule (once again), even though (once again) I had a plan to get everything fixed and out the door by December 31. Instead, a swirling vortex of entropy descended on the house, bringing with it repeated plumbers’ visits, multiple car repairs, and treatment for an elderly pet in failing health. (Rats are wonderful pets, bright and soft and loving, but their lifespans are bitterly, comically short.)

Brian Stableford: The Perils of Prophecy 2: The Great Indifference of the World

The most ambitious work of futuristic fiction written in the eighteenth century was L’Enclos et les oiseaux [The Enclosure and the Birds] by Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne, written between January and May 1796. There was, admittedly, not a lot of competition. L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771; tr. as Memoirs of the Year 2500) by Restif’s friend Louis-Sébastien Mercier, got all the publicity then and still gets it now although its snapshot vision of the future merely consists of imagining the worst atrocities of contemporary Paris tidied up. The immortal hero of L’Enclos et les oiseaux, by contrast, witnesses the entire future history of the Earth until the planet is swallowed by the Sun hundreds of thousands of years hence. Along the way he lives through the planet’s near-collision with a comet, which causes a worldwide upheaval and supplies the world with a second moon, occasioning a burst of rapid evolution whose products include a new species of winged humans.

Over the Tightrope by Asif Ismael, reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes

J.R. Sarmoun; $13.99 tpb; 340 pages

While the goal may be to equip the driver to martyr himself at a moment’s notice, one wonders about traffic safety in this environment. Jokes about the Ford Pinto come to mind.

In this terrifying milieu, Ismaeel meets Tarzan, a homeless snack vendor and bomb maker, who leads him to Pir Pullsiraat, who provided the ticket and cash. Pullsiraat is the tightrope bridge over Jahannum, which each believer must cross, and Pir means guide. True to his name, Pir Pullsiraat sends Ismaeel—in the company of Chaacha Khidr and on a bicycle—across the tightrope to experience Hell and the borders of Paradise for himself.

21st Century Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, reviewed by John Clute

New York: Tor Books, 2013; $34.99 hc/$21.99 tpb; 572 pages

We are confronted by the title of this big book. We do not know what to think. It is not likely that for David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden the title they have attached to their anthology of reprinted stories simply designates work published this century. 21st Century Science Fiction means way more than that to them, we reckon, on guard; a title like this, graven in stone, tells us that the 34 tales assembled here must be intended in some sense to represent like commandments the state of science fiction in this century; in which case, if sf is properly to be understood as a form uniquely shaped both to describe and instruct the world, 21st Century Science Fiction should be a lesson to us.