The New York Review of Science Fiction

Two Views: Too Like the Lightningby Ada Palmerreviewed by Robbie Eginton

New York: Tor Books, 2016; $26.99 hc; 432 pages

Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.

—Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

Ada Palmer’s debut novel, Too Like the Lightning, makes a fierce yet ambivalent argument: ambivalent, because it is filtered through a mercurial, unreliable narrator and because the persuasive ideas put forth by its characters are also politically favorable to them. Palmer writes about an uncertain utopia, a moment in future history when real progress seems to have been made and further work remains to be done in a world which has evolved believably from our own. Despite its utopian attitudes, the novel is as much about how politics, power, and desire really work as it is about the virtues of her twenty-fifth-century society. Book one of a planned quartet with the second due out in early 2017, it also picks up many of the futurist and theological themes present in Palmer’s work as a composer and lyricist for the Renaissance/folk/filk a capella group Sassafrass. Her prose is engaging but rarely elegant it feels grainy and overstuffed like a tasty meat lover’s sandwich eaten on a sandy beach. Too Like the Lightning is a novel of ideas more than a novel of character, but it’s also a novel of baroque and delightful detail. I have serious emotional, philosophical, and political issues with what the book seems to be saying, and I recommend heartily that you read it: this is a brilliant, engrossing, hard-to-put down work of speculative fiction that needs desperately to be answered.

NYRSF Issue 336 Editorial: Preservation Society

Scheduling note: This is the August issue, which wraps up volume 38. Our hope was to get this issue and the following one out this month, which would leave us only a month behind schedule, but circumstances have conspired against us. The next issue should come out in early November, and the October issue in late November. The November issue will slither forth sometime between the Snozzberry Harvest Moon and Tredecimber. Keep watching the skies!

NYRSF Issue 336 (August 2016): Table of Contents

Robert Eldridge: Eden Revisited
Jeremy Adam Smith: Jewish SF and the San Francisco Bay

H.P. Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth and other Poems, read by William E. Hart with music by Graham Plowman, reviewed by Peter Rawlik

Arkwright by Allen Steele, reviewed by David Mead

Brian Stableford: The Confused Legacy of the Romantic Revolution: The Strange Fate of The Thousand-and-One Phantoms and the Unlucky Père Olifus

The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes

Otto Binder: The Life and Work of a Comic Book and Science Fiction Visionary by Bill Schelly, reviewed by D. Douglas Fratz

Summerlong by Peter Beagle, reviewed by Michael Levy

Mike Barrett: Shards of the Unknown: The Fiction of Richard F. Searight

Victor Grech: Doctor by Doctor: Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Dr. Beverley Crusher

Darrell Schweitzer: There Really Was a Fursey

Screed

Editorial: Preservation Society

Otto Binder: The Life and Work of a Comic Book and Science Fiction Visionaryby Bill Schellyreviewed by D. Douglas Fratz

Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2016; $19.95 tpb; 352 pages

Otto Binder is best known as one of the most prolific writers of comic books with over 3,000 stories written between 1938 and 1969, many of which chronicled the iconic superhero families of Captain Marvel and Superman. Many of those stories were firmly in the science fiction genre, including classic work for EC Comics, DC Comics, and others, and he began his writing career as one of the most prolific writers for the science fiction pulp magazines in the 1930s, returning often to science fiction in later decades up to his death in 1974. His most famous science fiction prose stories were the Adam Link series that began with “I, Robot” in 1939. (Many of his earliest stories were cowritten with his brother Earl and published under the joint pseudonym Eando Binder.) This comprehensive biography of Otto Binder by comic book historian Bill Schelly (with foreword by sf author Richard A. Lupoff) provides valuable information for fans and historians in the science fiction field as well as the comic book field.

The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeerreviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes

New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard; $25.00 tpb; 1160+ pages

Truth in advertising: This is a certainly a book; it is big; and it is stuffed full of science fiction.

Four years ago, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer published another book that was big. It was stuffed full of weird stories, and they called it (of all things) The Weird.

Like that book, The Big Book of Science Fiction takes an extremely broad and historical view of its topic, containing over a hundred stories by nearly as many writers (one writer has two stories and one three). And therein lies the rub: no sane reviewer would try to comment on each and every story in an anthology of this size. What one can do, then, is discuss the editors’ taste and their success in meeting their (stated or apparent) goals and perhaps add a few comments about the stories that stand out from their admittedly glittering company.

Brian Stableford: The Confused Legacy of the Romantic Revolution: The Strange Fate of The Thousand-and-One Phantoms and the Unlucky Père Olifus

On 22 February 1848 there was a revolt in Paris occasioned by an economic slump, food shortages, and attempts to clamp down on dissent by Louis-Philippe’s government. Two days later the king threw in the towel and abdicated, initially in favor of his grandson, the Comte de Paris, but that attempted compromise fell through, and the Second Republic was immediately proclaimed under the temporary presidency of the aging poet and pillar of the Romantic Movement, Alphonse de Lamartine. Several other high-profile writers associated with the Romantic Movement accepted government posts, and the Republic adopted a new national anthem with words by Alexandre Dumas, “Le Chant des Girondins,” appropriated from the dramatic version of his novel Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge (book 1846; play 1847). The music for the play was supplied by Alphonse Varney, one of Dumas’s regular collaborators, although the song’s chorus is adapted from a work by Rouget de Lisle, the composer of “La Marseillaise.”

Jeremy Adam Smith: Jewish SF and the San Francisco Bay

You can almost see the future from Jacob and Rina Weisman’s doorstep near the top of Potrero Hill.

The couple, who met on the Jewish dating site J Date, run a range of science-fiction institutions in the Bay Area—most notably Tachyon Publications, which publishes between eight to ten books per year and gets shelf space for them nationally in major chains such as Barnes & Noble. Rina runs the “SF in SF” event series (“Science fiction, San Francisco—a perfect fit”) and stages monthly film screenings and author events around the city in venues such as the Balboa Theater in the Richmond and the American Bookbinding Museum in the Financial District. Jacob focuses on Tachyon, which publishes work by Peter S. Beagle, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Jeff VanderMeer, Nalo Hopkinson, Nancy Kress, Lavie Tidhar, Michael Moorcock, Carol Emshwiller, and James Tiptree Jr., among others.

Robert Eldridge: Eden Revisited

One of the consequences of scientific progress in the nineteenth century was a broadening of the imagined temporal scope of human history. By the end of the century writers of fiction were setting more and more stories in the distant past or distant future. Formerly, the thought of using such remote settings would have simply not occurred to writers because the pace of perceptible change was so slow. What would be the point?