The New York Review of Science Fiction

Andy Duncan: A Different Species: Adapting to Weinbaum’s “The Adaptive Ultimate”

“The Adaptive Ultimate,” a short story by Stanley G. Weinbaum, was first published in the November 1935 issue of Astounding Stories. A young biochemist, Dan Scott, researching fruit-fly adaptability, believes he has discovered a sort of cure-all serum. Itching to try it on a human subject, he pleads his case to the esteemed surgeon Dr. Herman Bach of Grand Mercy Hospital. Bach finds Scott a charity case, a woman named Kyra Zelas, who is mere hours from dying of tuberculosis. Injected with Scott’s adaptability serum, Zelas is cured. But that’s not all. The skinny woman from the streets becomes the glamorous title character, the “adaptive ultimate,” the most adaptable human being who ever lived. Her appearance changes, chameleon-like, depending on whether it’s day or night, whether she’s indoors or out; it changes, even, depending on whom she’s talking to, for Zelas aims to please. She’s virtually impervious to poisons or wounds, being so adaptable that she can heal herself immediately. And since one sign of human adaptability is the ability to change one’s environment, Zelas sets out to change her surroundings for maximum evolutionary benefit, stopping short of nothing to get her way. She lies, steals, even murders, and becomes one of the most powerful people in Washington, DC—the consort of a Cabinet secretary, John Callan—en route to her eventual goal of world domination. Meanwhile, Scott has fallen in love with her, perhaps for the usual reasons and perhaps because Zelas simply has adapted so well to his presence that he can’t help himself. Zelas claims to love him, too, but this might be the adaptability talking. At any rate, Scott can’t bring himself to kill Zelas, however world-threatening she may be. Instead, he and Bach put Zelas to sleep with carbon dioxide gas—since not even a highly adaptable creature, Scott explains, can live off its own waste products—and then Bach operates on her pineal gland to curtail her adaptive powers. The story ends with the operation an apparent success, as the unconscious Zelas, no longer glamorous, now looks as bedraggled as she did when brought to the hospital; to Scott, however, nothing has changed. “‘How beautiful she is!’ he whispered.... To his eyes, colored by love, she was still Kyra the magnificent” (Weinbaum 74).

Derwin Mak: The Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome in Chinese North American Science Fiction and Fantasy

Introduction to the Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome

The perpetual foreigner syndrome is the stereotyping of members of ethnic minorities as foreigners or “the other,” regardless of their actual citizenship or birthplace, by the “white” or dominant society of North America (United States and Canada). Asian Americans and Asian Canadians, including the Chinese, are especially prone to the perpetual foreigner syndrome. Frank Wu writes that almost all Chinese Americans, when asked where they were born, if they reply with a place in the United States, will almost always be asked, “Where are you really from?” (79)1.

NYRSF 348 Editorial: So Much Winning

This issue marks the end of volume 29 of NYRSF. In a better world, we would be celebrating the end of volume 30 (issue #1 came out in September 1988) and throwing something of a party, but our once rock-solid monthliness has eroded over the last few years. We’re still averaging more than 8 issues a year. Trust me, I’m aiming to get closer to that “every monthly like clockwork” that has eluded us of late.

Issue 348 (August 2018) Table of Contents

• Derwin Mak: The Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome in Chinese North American Science Fiction and Fantasy
• Andy Duncan: A Different Species: Adapting to Weinbaum’s “The Adaptive Ultimate”
• Stanislaw Lem: Selected Letters to Michael Kandel, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Peter Swirski, reviewed by Michael Andre-Driussi
• Brian Stableford: Decadent Eroticism in the Occult Fantasies of Jane De La Vaudère
• Mack Hassler: Ages Rock
• Mike Barrett: Looking for the Unknown: Robert Westall’s Short Fiction
• Terry Thompson: Windows, Doubles, and “Strange Communion”: Henry James’s “Sir Edmund Orme”
• Photos
• Editorial: So Much Winning

Mike Barrett: Looking for the Unknown: Robert Westall’s Short Fiction

Robert Westall (1929–1993) was an English writer who made a considerable name for himself with many novels aimed at a teenage audience. A measure of his success is demonstrated by the number of awards which he received during his lifetime, starting with his very first book, The Machine Gunners, in 1975, which won the prestigious Carnegie Award for best young adult fiction, as did his 1982 work, The Scarecrows. Interestingly, no author has ever won the Carnegie Award more than twice, but Westall was runner-up two other years, for The Devil on the Road (1979) and Futuretrack Five (1983), as well as being “Highly Commended” for The Kingdom by the Sea (1990) and Gulf (1992). Among his other awards were the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize for Blitzcat (1989), the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize for The Kingdom by the Sea, and the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night Award for the novelette “The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral” (1991).

Editorial: Sent out of the Garden

Gardner Dozois died last week. He was for at least decades the most visible and most influential short fiction editor in science fiction. Had he simply edited Asimov’s for 20 years, he’d be widely remembered. Alongside that, though, he also edited around 100 volumes of short fiction, a mixture of thematic reprints and original collections, independently or with friends such as Jack Dann and George R.R. Martin. His doorstop-sized The Year’s Best Science Fiction series ran for 35 volumes, following 6 years of the more modest Best Science Fiction of the Year series that he took over from Lester Del Rey in 1977. Several instructors I know have adopted this series for their science fiction classes as snapshots of the current sf scene; though no one perspective could possibly show everything, Gardner saw and shared as much as one could ever hope.

Issue 347 (June 2018) Table of Contents

• Pierre-Paul Durastanti: An Interview with Gardner Dozois
• John Kessel: When Jane Met Mary
• Brian Stableford: Tales of the Fays: The Comtesse De Murat and the Origins of Fantasy Fiction
• Read This: recently read and recommended by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes
• David Langford: Random Reading 19: Punch, Brothers, Punch
• Victor Grech: Doctor by Doctor: Dr. Phlox in Star Trek: Enterprise
• Joe Sanders: Anthropological/Science/Fiction: Michael Bishop’s Transfigurations
• Horror Literature through History, edited by Matt Cardin, reviewed by Don Webb
• Photos
• Editorial: Sent out of the Garden

David Langford: Random Reading 19: Punch, Brothers, Punch

Genre bibliographers have tended to avoid Britain’s long-running humorous and satirical magazine Punch (1841–1992), for the excellent reason that it didn’t publish much fiction, still less science fiction. Occasional needles of sf or fantasy interest are lost in the vast and seemingly unindexed haystack generated by a century and a half of weekly publication. It was thus a slight surprise to learn from my old fan friend Roy Kettle that the magazine ran a whole season of sf stories in 1960. This emerged during his visit to a 2017 Jane Austen exhibition in Oxford, whose priceless memorabilia included a Punch spoof titled “Jane in Space” and written by—of all people—Stella Gibbons of Cold Comfort Farm fame.

Brian Stableford: Tales of the Fays: The Comtesse De Murat and the Origins of Fantasy Fiction

In an earlier article in this series [“The True Story of Cinderella,” NYRSF 345], I sketched the origins of the French genre of contes de fées in the pioneering work of Mademoiselle L’Héritier and its prehistory in the salons associated with Louis XIV’s court and the work of Mademoiselle de Scudéry, L’Héritier’s mentor and protector. In that article I suggested that contes de fées could be more accurately translated as “tales of enchantment” than the conventional rendering of “fairy tales,” the word fée being derived from féerie [enchantment]. There is, however, an argument to be made for a narrower definition as “tales of fays” on the grounds that what the genre’s originators meant by fée was something more idiosyncratic and more distinctive than merely an agent of enchantment.

Pierre-Paul Durastanti: An Interview with Gardner Dozois

[This interview was conducted by e-mail in March and June 2000. It was originally published in translation in the magazine Bifrost but has never appeared in English.—the eds.]

Pierre-Paul Durastanti: Gardner, can you first introduce yourself to our French readers?

Gardner Dozois: I was born in 1947 in Salem, Massachusetts. My paternal grandfather had moved down from Québec, in Canada, to work in the mills in Manchester, New Hampshire. My father was also a factory worker and was always disappointed that I hadn’t followed him into that line of work. But my life was “ruined” by sf instead! <g>

PPD: So your name is French.

GD: Yes, Dozois is a French name, and we’re of mixed French-Scots blood, from the Québec area, although my mother was Irish and Dutch. Dozois is a very rare name in the U.S., but is somewhat more common in Québec. There’s a fairly large French-Canadian population in the part of New England where I grew up, where we used to fill the lowest rung on the social ladder. We didn’t have many actual black people where I grew up, so French-Canadians were sort of the black people of New England: looked down on, referred to as “Frogs,” got to do all the shit jobs nobody else wanted, and so forth.