The New York Review of Science Fiction

NYRSF 344 Editorial: Years End

So another year ends. We only brought out six issues over the last 12 months, but I’m happy with how they came out, and our platters are full to overflowing with material for the next few months so I have some hope that we will start to stagger back toward monthly.

Issue 344 (December 2017) Table of Contents

• Sandra J. Lindow: Black to Okorafor: Entering an Intersection of Afrofuturism, Comics, and the Women’s Movement
• Henry Wessells: Two Pieces from A Conversation larger than the Universe
• The Ghost in the Corner and Other Stories by Lord Dunsany, edited by S.T. Joshi and Martin Andersson, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer
• Brian Stableford: Locating the Future in the Past 2: X.B. Saintine’s Account of an Antediluvian Civilization
• Firewalk by Chris Roberson, reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes
• Dave Drake: Soldiers and the Civil Government
• Donald M. Hassler: Fantasy on Stalking the Brook
• Michael Swanwick: A Few Words with Sergei Lukyanenko
• Photo
• Editorial: Years End

Michael Swanwick: A Few Words with Sergei Lukyanenko

Sergei Lukyanenko is one of the most popular science fiction writers in Russia. He is best known in America and throughout the world as the creator of the Night Watch/Day Watch universe, in which human beings with supernatural powers maintain an uneasy peace in the modern world. These books became famous globally after two very successful movies, Night Watch and Day Watch, were based on them. They are, however, only a small part of the total output of this prolific author.

Dave Drake: Soldiers and the Civil Government

Anyone with a background in history knows that mercenary soldiers often have a difficult relationship with the government they’re working for. Mercenaries have sometimes overthrown the employing government, but from my reading I don’t believe that’s as common as national armies mutinying to put their general on the throne. (Occasionally even against the general’s wishes; but once the subject is raised, the general has no option but to go along with the rebellion).

Sandra J. Lindow: Black to Okorafor: Entering an Intersection of Afrofuturism, Comics, and the Women’s Movement

In recent years women of color have consistently won awards for their often transgressive speculative fiction. Hugo and Nebula award winner Nnedi Okorafor is one of these nontraditional writers who have achieved success by taking African history and culture and giving it a fantastic, futuristic feminist twist. In the September/October 2017 issue of Asimov’s, sf old guard writer/critic Norman Spinrad calls her Hugo-winning novella Binti “something else again,” suggests that “nothing quite like this has ever been written and published in English” and concludes that “This would be a kind of post-modern space opera if it weren’t so serious in literary, psychological, and anthropological intent” (204). Structurally Okorafor’s stories often depart from both golden age sf and the heavy, complexly interwoven literary novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they do not come out of nowhere. (Until now, Spinrad obviously has not been paying attention to a substantial sea change that has been occurring in the genre particularly since the beginning of the twenty-first century.) Most of Okorafor’s work is well-honed YA hero journeys, often structured in a series of vignettes similar to comic books or graphic novels. (In her Wahala Zone Blog, Okorafor explains that she learned about Joseph Campbell’s hero journey from her instructor at Clarion, Steven J. Barnes [“My Report”].) Furthermore, the lives of her characters are inextricably entwined with popular culture: food, music, art, and technology. To best understand her work, it is valuable to examine its dynamic connection to the Afrofuturist movement that began after World War II.