The New York Review of Science Fiction

Richard A. Lupoff: Remembering Frank

A couple of pages into Not so Good a Gay Man I wasn’t reading Frank Robinson’s autobiography. I was settled in an easy chair in Frank’s lovingly restored Victorian in the Castro. Frank was sprawled on the couch, a huge window behind him. It was a sunny afternoon in San Francisco.

The room was dominated by a huge TV monitor, rising from a sea of DVDs. Frank was a technophile. He was always an early adopter of high-tech devices, hence the giant screen. He’d been the first member of the local science fiction community to install a computer. Well, actually it was a dedicated word processor, one of the few that IBM ever built. It was a huge thing, straight out of a steampunk novel. But at the time it was a marvel. The rest of us were still clattering away at—at best—Selectrics.

Sandra Lindow: Nnedi Okorafor: The Book of Phoenix, the Morality of Abomination

My beginnings were in the dark. We all dwelled in the dark, mad scientist and SpeciMen alike. (6).

On her Twitter account page, Afrofuturist novelist Nnedi Okorafor includes a picture of herself atop a building with huge black wings behind her. She appears composed and confident in her ability to lift into the air. The photo is an obvious reference to The Book of Phoenix (2015), which was written as a prequel to her World Fantasy Award–winning novel, Who Fears Death (2010). Composed in first-person vignettes, The Book of Phoenix is a troubling tale that rises again and again from its own ashes. Phoenix’s story begins about eighty years from now in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan that is mostly underwater; however, it is set in a frame that occurs about two hundred years later when Sunuteel, an elderly storyteller, finds a discarded computer with an audio book that contains Phoenix’s narrative. Sunuteel’s name is significant because it implies a brightness and positivity that is absent in the dark story that Phoenix relates.

NYRSF Issue 329 (January 2016): Table of Contents

Brian Stableford: Fantastic Reactions to the 1789 Revolution

Sandra Lindow: Nnedi Okorafor: The Book of Phoenix, the Morality of Abomination

Read This: recently read and recommended by Michael Bishop

Richard A. Lupoff: Remembering Frank

Dave Drake: Unintended Consequences

The Blood of Angels by Johanna Sinisalo, translated by Lola Rogers, reviewed by Gwyneth Jones

The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi, translated from the Chinese by Darryl Sterk, reviewed by Michael Andre-Driussi

Mike Barrett: Ghostly Denizens & Eerie Harbingers: The Spectral Stories of Mrs. J.H. Riddell

Awaiting Strange Gods: Weird and Lovecraftian Fictions by Darrell Schweitzer, reviewed by Peter Rawlik

Matthew D. Connolly: Stranger in a Strange Land: Racism as Bad Science Fiction

Lee Weinstein: In Search of a Four-Eyed Man

Photos

Editorial: This Broken Year

The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi, translated from the Chinese by Darryl Sterk, reviewed by Michael Andre-Driussi

This Taiwanese novel is a slipstream tale about a slow-rolling ecological disaster, a floating island of garbage heading for Taiwan, and how it affects Alice Shih, a suicidal writer in Taiwan, and Atile’i, an islander who washes up on shore when the islands collide. Mysterious Atile’i is not the subject alluded to in the title, nor is he native to the garbage isle; he was only resting there after being exiled from his natural Polynesian home. In fact, his experience on the garbage island is a reversed “Robinson Crusoe” sort of thing, being about a nontechnological man trying to survive in an environment entirely made of technological artifacts.

Matthew D. Connolly: Stranger in a Strange Land: Racism as Bad Science Fiction

It’s taken me years and Samuel Delany to process director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. It is undeniably absolutely horrifying. That horror leaves almost no breath for interpretation. What’s represented by this film—a block of life in the nineteenth century U.S. South, slavery, relationships of domination, exploitation—overpowers any other attempt of the viewer to make some sense of it—to interpret, pick apart, let something sit and stew. What makes the film so imposing on the senses is that it is so clearly a film made to be about reality. It’s book-ended by the kind of text that often forecloses discussion: “Based on a true story” tells us that what we are about to experience has happened to real people, and the continuance of the closing text blocks remind us that any closure offered in the film’s narrative does not extend much further into the world from which the film extracted only a slice of life. 12 Years happened, it says of itself. It also comes with a load of political weight that threatens to collapse any space for perspective the viewer hopes to get from the film.

NYRSF Issue 329 Editorial: This Broken Year

This is the January 2016 issue. I was somewhat looking forward to taking a little bow for reaching my 20th anniversary on the NYRSF staff, but then January happened.

The body blow was David Hartwell dying suddenly. On January 19, David was performing a completely routine task—carrying a barristers bookshelf down a flight of stairs in one of the two buildings he shared in Westport, New York, with Kathryn Cramer and his family. He owned a lot of bookcases; those many lovely barristers shelves were a visual highlight of the living room at Stately Hartwell Manor in Pleasantville for decades.

He fell, and a blood vessel burst in his brain; the order is unknowable and doesn’t matter. He never regained consciousness, was never going to regain consciousness, and then he was gone.

The kindness and knowledge David carried around cannot be replaced.