The New York Review of Science Fiction

NYRSF Issue 335 Editorial: Aspiration

Si Spurrier is a comics writer I’ve been following for a few years now; in my year-end roundup for 2014, I praised his web comic, Crossed: Wish You Were Here (illustrated by Javier Barreno) and he’s done excellent work on various titles both super-hero-y and otherwise. (He also writes novels, but I alas haven’t read them.)

NYRSF Issue 335 (July 2016): Table of Contents

• Brian Stableford: The Life and Times of the Fay Ouroucoucou


• The Orphan’s Tales by Catherynne M. Valente, reviewed by Marilyn “Mattie” Brahen


• Can & Can’tankerous by Harlan Ellison, reviewed by Robert Guffey


• Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear, reviewed by Greg L. Johnson


• M. Thomas Gammarino: “New Words Were Needed”: How Modernism and Science Fiction Have More in Common Than I Might Once Have Thought


• Mike Barrett: Fearful Landscapes: The Weird Fiction of Allison V. Harding


• Mariella Scerri and Victor Grech: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine


• Central Station by Lavie Tidhar, reviewed by Michael Levy


• Using Medicine in Science Fiction: The SF Writer’s Guide to Human Biology by Henry G. Stratmann, reviewed by Christopher S. Kovacs, MD


• Supersymmetry by David Walton, reviewed by Joe Sanders


• Editorial: Aspiration

Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear, reviewed by Greg L. Johnson

New York: Tor, 2015; $25.99 hc; 350 pages

Right from the beginning, the narrator of Karen Memory informs us, in a voice that comes straight out of the Huckleberry Finn school of the vernacular, that her name is Karen Memery with an “e” and she is one of the girls at Madame Damnable’s Hotel Mon Cherie. It’s a far cry from the ranch of her childhood, but there are worse places and tougher lives in Rapid City, a nineteenth-century community in the vicinity of present-day Seattle, perched on the edge of the old frontier and the new lands and gold in Alaska.

Central Station by Lavie Tidhar, reviewed by Michael Levy

San Francisco: Tachyon Press, 2016; $15.95 tpb; 240 pages

Lavie Tidhar, an Israeli now living in London, is the author of a number of highly regarded novels, most notably the World Fantasy Award–winning Osama (2011), The Violent Century (2013), and A Man Lies Dreaming (2014). Between 2011 and 2014 he also published a series of short stories about the people who live around and beneath Central Station, a gigantic spaceport that towers over a run-down, far-future Tel Aviv. These appeared in such venues as Analog, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and various anthologies. Tidhar has now revised these stories, adding a prologue and two new chapters, to turn them into a fascinating mosaic novel. The book has a cyberpunkish feel to it in that most of the characters are augmented in various ways and definitely on the down and out, but it also lacks (quite intentionally, it should be noted) the adrenaline-driven plotting of traditional cyberpunk fiction. Rather, these stories are ruminative, obsessed with memories and what might have been. Each of the book’s ensemble cast is deeply troubled by his, her, or its past, by missed opportunities. Each character is lonely and worried about the future, hoping against hope for some sort of human connection to fill the emptiness in their souls.

Mike Barrett: Fearful Landscapes: The Weird Fiction of Allison V. Harding

Allison V. Harding was amongst the most prolific of all the contributors to Weird Tales, having had 36 stories published in its pages. However, what gives her a unique position in that periodical’s history is that they stories appeared in less than eight years; her debut had been with “The Unfriendly World” in July 1943, and she was represented in each of the next nine successive editions up to January 1945. That in itself was a remarkable record for a new author but it pales into insignificance when compared to her later achievement: between July 1946 and May 1949 her fiction was featured in an astonishing eighteen consecutive issues of the bimonthly magazine. Indeed, during the 1940s Harding reigned supreme, with her first 34 Weird Tales stories published in little more than six years. Only five issues published in that time lacked her byline.

The Orphan’s Tales by Catherynne M. Valente, reviewed by Marilyn “Mattie” Brahen

Volume 1: In the Night Garden; New York: Bantam Spectra 2006; $16.00 tpb; 483 pages
Volume 2: In the Cities of Coin and Spice; New York: Bantam Spectra 2007; $16.00 tpb; 516 pages

Catherynne Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales is a two-volume, richly imagined fairy tale, a deeply connected duology. When I began reading In the Night Garden, its plot structure boggled my mind, conjuring an image of a painting which includes a painting of itself within, which of course would have another duplicated painting within that. While the eye wouldn’t see it, the mind conceives ever tinier paintings being reproduced microscopically ad infinitum. The stories that build into In the Night Garden and its companion volume, In the Cities of Coin and Spice, have each literary painting change to tell a new tale connected both to the previous one and to the later tales to come, all interconnected like strange Russian stacking dolls but each one unique within the other and augmenting each other.