The New York Review of Science Fiction

Issue 345 (January 2018) Table of Contents

• Lee Weinstein: Fiction, Heroin, and Kavan
• Brian Stableford: The True Story of Cinderella: Mademoiselle L’Heritier and the Origins of Fantasy Fiction
• Donald M. Hassler: Flying Blind
• Sandra J. Lindow: Klages and Kritzer: Expansive Carrier Bags for Galactic Suburbia
• Darrell Schweitzer: The H.G. Wells Problem
• Nader Elhefnawy: Boom and Bust and Boom Again?
• Not So Good a Gay Man by Frank M. Robinson, reviewed by Martin Morse Wooster
• Lunatic City by T. Allen Diaz and The Jupiter Game by Todd J. McCaffrey, both reviewed by David Mead
  
• The Lovecraft Squad: All Hallows Horror by John Llewellyn Probertreviewed by Peter Rawlik
• Monday Starts on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, translated by Andrew Bromfeld, with illustrations by Yevgeniy Migunov, reviewed by Michael Andre-Driussi
• Editorial: Ouch, Vile Jelly

NYRSF 345 Editorial: Ouch, Vile Jelly

I had hoped that this issue would be out the last week in January, but my plans got tossed into a cocked hat around the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday weekend when I noticed that my right eye had developed some large amentlike floaters and flashes of bright light at the edge. My ophthalmologist referred me to a specialist who spotted three small tears in the retina. This is a common condition in middle-aged nearsighted people, but it can get much worse very quickly, so she indicated that it would be the course of prudence to immediately submit to tender loving laser repair.

The Lovecraft Squad: All Hallows Horror by John Llewellyn Probert, reviewed by Peter Rawlik

New York: Pegasus Books, 2017; $25.95 hc; 336 pages

John Llewellyn Probert won the British Fantasy Award for his 2012 novella The Nine Deaths of Dr. Valentine, inspired by the works of Vincent Price, particularly The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, and Madhouse. As an homage to a particular type of film, it certified Probert’s skill at constructing and pacing longer pieces of fiction while at the same time cementing his obvious love of horror cinema. As such he seems an unobvious choice to write a Lovecraftian novel, a subgenre that is notoriously uncinematic, and yet that may exactly be the point. Given Probert’s credentials, it would be interesting to see what he would produce. Such challenges, asking a writer whose work is unrelated to the Lovecraftian oeuvre to step into the Mythos, has worked in the past. The most notable example is Colin Wilson who for better or worse took the Cthulhu Mythos in new directions with his novels The Mind Parasites (1967), The Philosopher’s Stone (1969), and The Space Vampires (1976), which introduced overt psychological and philosophical elements to the Mythos, elements that had only been hinted at previously. It is such challenges, the drive in new and interesting directions, that will not only keep the genre alive but also move it into the future. However, it must be acknowledged that such ventures are fraught with risk and that success is not guaranteed.

Not So Good a Gay Man by Frank M. Robinson, reviewed by Martin Morse Wooster

New York: Tor Books, 2017; $26.95 hc; 319 pages

I met Frank M. Robinson once. In 1979, he was a guest at Windycon, Chicago’s largest sf convention. I was a senior at Beloit College, from which Robinson had graduated in 1950. I went with other members of the Beloit Science Fiction and Fantasy Association to the con, and at one point we surrounded him and told him how proud we were that he was an alumnus.

He was quite pleased that students at Beloit remembered him, and he came across as someone who was fundamentally decent and kind.

Darrell Schweitzer: The H.G. Wells Problem

My investigations into what might well be old news to some of you began when I belatedly read H.G Wells’s The Invisible Man. Belatedly, I say, because at age 64 I had never actually done so. Sure, there are inevitably gaps in anyone’s reading, and there is a parlor game, “Humiliations,” in which you admit what famous works you have not read, and the loser is the first one to look foolish rather than merely candid. It happened that the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society’s book discussion group (useful for catching up on classics you’ve neglected) chose The Invisible Man for a topic, and although I was not actually able to attend that, I read it anyway, since, indeed, it was high time I did, and a very attractive, jacketed copy of Seven Famous Novels had been sitting on my shelves, only partially read, for decades.

Lee Weinstein: Fiction, Heroin, and Kavan

The prolific British writer Anna Kavan is best-known among science fiction readers for her final novel, Ice, published a year before her death in 1968 at age 67. Ice’s frozen post-apocalyptic world is the most explicitly science-fictional of her works, but its imagery was not new in her work. In her review of David Callard’s biography of Anna Kavan, The Case of Anna Kavan, Elizabeth Young says that

heroin was the center of [Kavan’s] existence; ... and almost all of her later work charts the process of addiction in an extraordinarily pure and crystalline form using again and again images—of cold, of ice, of forbidding landscapes, lowering castles, and forbidding watchers—in a manner that should be familiar to us from any study of the great addict writers of the Romantic period. (22–23)