The New York Review of Science Fiction

NYRSF Issue 331 (March 2016): Table of Contents

• Saul-Paul Sirag: Was Kirk Allen Kiko Harrison? Annotations for “The Jet Propelled Couch”
• Sidebar: Known Pictures of Kiko Harrison
• Sidebar: When Could Kiko Harrison Have Been Lindner’s Patient?
• Saul-Paul Sirag: Francis Burton “Kiko” Harrison and Dora Maxwell Harrison: A Timeline
• My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir by Chris Offutt, reviewed by Arthur D. Hlavaty
• Michael Andre-Driussi: Spike & Sofia: Their War (in Three Movies)
• J.R.R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth by Daniel Grotta, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer
• Our Lady of the Ice by Cassandra Rose Clarke, reviewed by Michael Levy
• David V. Griffin: It’s Only Forever: David Bowie, Science Fiction Superstar
• Christopher Cokinos: A Darker Force: Cédric Delsaux’s Dark Lens
• Mike Barrett: Sumachs and Serpents: The Fiction of Ulric Daubeny
• David Langford: Random Reading 16
• Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire, reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes
• Donald Mack Hassler: A Small Struggle with Madness Mountains after Lovecraft
• Screed
• Photos
• Editorial: Returned

NYRSF Issue 331 Editorial: Returned

 

Well, we’re back.

We didn’t intend to take a break after the Hartwell Memorial issue, which was complete in February (though released in mid-March). But I underestimated how much David’s death would hover over the magazine, leading me into a cycle of guilt-avoidance where any time I tried to sit down to do the work of finishing this issue, my brain found every possible excuse to not get anything done. But we’re here now with what I think is a simply terrific issue.

I don’t know that I’m completely out of that cycle yet, but I will do everything I can to fill the gap and return the magazine to its monthly schedule.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire, reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes

New York: Tor Books; $17.99 tpb; 173 pages

 

Seanan McGuire has quite possibly achieved the greatest success of the current generation of urban fantasists. Her October Day and InCryptid novels sell like things that sell really well. Yet, somehow, I have read only one book by her in the past, a standalone—largely because of a fear of getting hooked on Yet Another Series. They take time, they do.

My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir by Chris Offutt, reviewed by Arthur D. Hlavaty

New York: Atria Books 2016; $26.00 hc; 272 pages

 

Good Grief, It’s Daddy!

SF and porn have always been brothers. They are both low-rent pop genres, traditionally (and erroneously) assumed to be for men. Even the names are similarly open to question with a certain amount of evaluation smuggled into the terminology: “Speculative fiction” makes literary claims, “sci-fi” is more populist, and “sf” is somewhat neutral. There are even more terms, most of them even more evaluative, for the sexually oriented stuff, and “porn” may be the closest to a neutral one. We read erotic realism; you read porn; they read filth. There is even a two-letter abbreviation: DBs (Dirty Books).

David V. Griffin: It’s Only Forever: David Bowie, Science Fiction Superstar

 

In the 1966 short film, The Image, written and directed by Michael Armstrong, a young man (Michael Bryne) finishes a study for a portrait of a youth of about 16. The boy is depicted with an expression of longing on his face and his arms outstretched as if to embrace—or clutch—the viewer. No sooner does the artist step back to contemplate his work than the boy himself appears and wordlessly approaches him, gliding across rooms and hallways, a figure clearly not of this world.

Saul-Paul Sirag: Was Kirk Allen Kiko Harrison? Annotations for “The Jet Propelled Couch"

 

“The Jet Propelled Couch” by Robert Lindner was published in two parts in Harper’s Magazine in Dec. 1954 <bit.ly/jet-prop1> and Jan. 1955 <bit.ly/jet-prop2>. It was republished, lightly revised, as the last chapter of Lindner’s The Fifty Minute Hour: a Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1955; the page citations to which these annotations refer are to the version in The Fifty Minute Hour). It is a case study of Lindner’s patient “Kirk Allen,” whose obsession with a constructed science-fiction universe was interfering with his work. Over the years, several attempts have been made to determine Kirk Allen’s real identity through the layers of misdirection that Lindner introduced to anonymize his client. The leading candidate was Paul Linebarger (better known to the world of science fiction as Cordwainer Smith); another was a physicist named John Carter. Here we present a new theory.—the eds.