The New York Review of Science Fiction

NYRSF Issue 334 Editorial: Slipping

Once again we’ve slipped back in the schedule a bit, which is down on me—I’ve had the issue 90 percent finished since before the latest Work Weekend but I just couldn’t get it together to pull it across the finish line. Part of that delay was due to being blocked on this editorial, ironically.

We’re running low on material for upcoming issues. Part of this is that I’ve found it very difficult to send out review copies. Over the last few years, assigning books to reviewers was one of the few things David Hartwell regularly took a hand in, and I’m sure that on some barely conscious level I was flinching away from working on it. But we’ve got a big batch of books heading out the door now—good books! Books that should be reviewed!—and I have faith that they’ll come back as happy insightful reviews.

NYRSF Issue 334 (June 2016): Table of Contents

• Victor Grech and Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley: Words are Here on Top: Diplomacy in Star Trek


• Brian Stableford: Technology and Liberty in French Utopian Fiction


• Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald, reviewed by Russell Blackford


• My Real Children by Jo Walton, reviewed by Eugene Reynolds


• Willful Child by Steven Erikson, reviewed by A.P. Canavan


• Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction, edited by John Joseph Adams, reviewed by Martin Morse Wooster


• Editorial: Slipping

Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction, edited by John Joseph Adams, reviewed by Martin Morse Wooster

New York: Saga Press, 2015; $16.99 tpb; 565 pages

What are the best ways for science-fiction writers to deal with politics?

That’s the question that every author of “climate fiction”—near-future stories set in a world where global warming has devastated the planet—has to face. The 26 items in this anthology provide valuable lessons for writers wishing to set stories on the ravaged Earth one generation from now. In its expansive survey of the field, Loosed Upon the World gives us examples of both models to follow and those to avoid.

My Real Children by Jo Walton, reviewed by Eugene Reynolds

New York: Tor Books, 2014; $25.99 hc; 320 pages

The snake of Uncertainty starts to take up residence in the epistemological Garden when Immanuel Kant ponders the unknowability of “the thing in itself” (Ding an sich), splitting away the crisp “objective” Truth from our more vague “subjective” understanding of a world that is mediated by our perception. Try as we might, no St. Patrick has arisen to banish the snake from Science or from Literature. Which is just as well, since the scaly devil has produced a number of new paradigms for us, ranging from Freudian psychoanalysis (with its split between conscious and unconscious) and Jungian archetypes (universal Truths mediated through common if individualized cultural patterns and symbols), to quantum mechanics in the duality of particle/wave and the superposition of quantum states, keeping the cat in the box both dead/alive until proven otherwise. Literature went for the creative uses of Uncertainty, too, fashioning the Modernist movement out of all the lovely, seething, Freudian and Jungian stews, casting large shadows of irrationality across the formerly restrictive realm of the Romantic (wherein only developed “sensitive” neurasthenics could be emotionally accessible) and making what was remote and elite now common and demotic (if still requiring a good education to decipher all the allusive symbols and mythic references).

Brian Stableford: Technology and Liberty in French Utopian Fiction

[This article is a version of the eleventh Thomas Taylor Lecture, delivered at the Prometheus Trust’s Annual Conference in June 2016. Although it overlaps some of the previous articles in this series, I hope that it contains enough new material, and a sufficiently original narrative, to be of interest.]

Before commencing an analysis of this kind, it is useful to draw attention to certain technical elaborations of the term utopia, which was initially coined by Thomas More to mean “no place.” Because of the way in which was generalized it was often construed as if it were spelled with an initial “e,” signifying “a better place,” and that is the narrower fashion in which it is employed in this paper, together with two significant modifications, one being “euchronian,” referring to better times, or futuristic hypothetical societies, and the other being “dystopian,” referring to worse places or times.