The New York Review of Science Fiction

Issue 350 Table of Contents

• Michael Bishop: Afterword to The Sacerdotal Owl and Three Other Long Tales: A Long Tale Cut Short?
  
• Michael Swanwick: Two Terrors and the Myth of Solitude
• Ron Drummond: On the Reach of Her Words
• Dave Drake: How It Was Back Then
• Donald M. Hassler: Special Creation
• What Is Anything? Memoirs of a Life in Lovecraft by S.T. Joshi, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer
• Michael Andre-Driussi: Jack Vance, Man of Mystery
• Brian Stableford: The Unabolished Fays: Some Successors of the Comtesse De Murat
• Victor Grech: Star Trek: Voyager—a Homeric Odyssey
• Photos
• Editorial: Glorantha: Another Magical World

Ron Drummond: On the Reach of Her Words

We are all hugely blessed to have had Ursula K. Le Guin with us for so long. Her work and example deserve to linger long in our cultural memory, and will, should that memory itself long continue. My biggest worry is that it won’t. Ensuring that it can and will, and in good health, is, in my view, the very work that she greatly advanced and that we all must carry on—a work that must never end, as once ended it is unlikely ever to begin again, here on Earth or anywhere in its immediate vicinity.

—social media post, 24 January 2018

Brian Stableford: The Unabolished Fays: Some Successors of the Comtesse De Murat

In a previous article in this series (“Tales of the Fays: The Comtesse De Murat and the Origins of Fantasy,” NYRSF #347), I offered a brief sketch of the work done in the genre of contes de fées [defined there for operational purposes as “tales of fays”] by the Comtesse de Murat, claiming that it was the most influential work done in the genre by any of its five originators in terms of its influence on subsequent writers who attempted to carry it further, even though it was never as popular with other readers as the work of Baronne d’Aulnoy.

Editorial: Glorantha: Another Magical World

December 2018 was the fifty-first anniversary of the ancestor of the modern role-playing game, Dave Wesley’s Braunstein, a Napoleonic miniatures scenario which offered character-based roles for multiple players. First played in 1967, it expanded over the next three years to include scenarios set in Central America and the Wild West written by his friend Dave Arneson. Arneson then adapted the basic Braunstein idea into Black Moor, a fantasy game heavily influenced by The Lord of the Rings and based on the medieval miniatures game Chainmail by Gary Gygax. In 1974, Gygax’s new company, Tactical Studies Rules, published the first edition of Gygax and Arneson’s Dungeons & Dragons.

Michael Swanwick: Two Terrors and the Myth of Solitude

The myths we tell ourselves and each other about our favorite authors are, as a rule, misleading at best. It is a near-universal belief that Philip K. Dick was half-mad and possibly a high-functioning psychotic. Yet editors who worked with the man have told me that he was unfailingly rational. Similarly, it is commonly agreed that R.A. Lafferty was unlike any other writer, and this is pretty much true. But the truth can be exaggerated. He was not the solitary, literarily isolated genius, completely untouched by the work of others, that we have been making him out to be in the years since his death.