The New York Review of Science Fiction

NYRSF 340 Editorial: The Cruelest Month

The last time I heard from Michael Levy was in mid-March. I’d sent out a round of jog letters to reviewers, and I was surprised that list included Mike, usually our fastest and most reliable reviewer. I soon got back a very short reply, apologizing and saying that things had been “horrible” for him of late and that he hadn’t had time.

I don’t know if he knew how little time he had left. Despite our amiable relationship, I wasn’t the type of friend to whom he would confide if he suspected that things were going to end very soon.

Issue 340 (December 2016) Table of Contents

John Foyster: Gregory Benford: Science Fiction and Scientist Fiction

Lee Weinstein: In Search of the Vegetable Caterpillar

Michael Andre-Driussi: Alas, Babylon and the Cuban Nukes

Andy Duncan: A Master’s Thesis, 1995

Brian Stableford: An Isle of Amour and the Human Paradise: The Futuristic Fiction of Nicolas Ségur

Victor Grech: Avatar Dances with Wolves

Donald M. Hassler: The Tangled Bank that Writers Inhabit: New Windows on Jules Verne

Wynonna Earp, Season One, reviewed by A. P. Canavan

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Editorial The Cruelest Month

NYRSF 339 Editorial: Some of Our Favorite Comics from 2016

Here, a bit late, is my survey of the comics published in 2016 likely to be of some interest to sf&f readers.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, fresh off winning the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his nonfiction memoirs and reporting, wrote his first-ever comic, Black Panther #1, which became the best-selling comic magazine of the year. T’challa, the premiere African super-science hero, celebrated his fiftieth anniversary in style. In collaboration with artists Brian Stelfreeze and Chris Sprouse, Black Panther is a complex (and complexly told), subtle examination of power, loyalty, nation, and love that rewards attention.

NYRSF 339 (November 2016) Table of Contents

• The Cornelius Quartet by Michael Moorcock, reviewed by Mark Scroggins
• Invaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature, edited by Jacob Weisman, reviewed by Joe Milicia
• Darrell Schweitzer: An Interview with Albert E. Cowdrey
• Mike Barrett: “A Story to Be Read for Its Own Sake”: The Worm Ouroboros
• Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 2, edited by Kathe Koja, reviewed by Kris Dikeman
• Brian Stableford: The Angel Asrael: S. Henry Berthoud and the French Tradition of Literary Satanism
• David V. Griffin: “Where’d You Get Those Eyes?” Creepshow, Romero & King’s Satirical Pseudo-homage
• Then: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK, 1930–1980 by Rob Hansen, reviewed by Martin Morse Wooster
• David Langford: Random Reading 17
• Gustavo Bondoni: When the Shoulders of Giants Are Missing
• Donald Mack Hassler: Mutation Sonnet
• Photos
• Editorial: Some of Our Favorite Comics from 2016

NYRSF 338 (October 2016) Table of Contents

• Leah Krippner: Ender’s Evolution: A Textual History of Ender’s Game
• Brian Stableford: Madame De Villeneuve and the Origins of the Fantasy Novel
• Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny, reviewed by Joe Sanders
• Terry Thompson: “Sleeping Under Their Privileges”: Appropriating Gulliver in H.G. Wells’s “Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland”
• “Not So Much,” Said the Cat by Michael Swanwick, reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes
• Barbara Bengels: Born of Men and Women: Science Fiction Writers Discuss Their Pasts and How They Led to Their Future Worlds
• The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill, reviewed by Michael Levy
• Editorial: Signs of Life

NYRSF 338 Editorial: Signs of Life

It’s been too long since the last issue. How ya been?

January was interrupted, pleasantly, by a long vacation—ten whole days!, the longest I’ve taken since joining the workforce 30+ years ago. We attended ConFusion, a Detroit suburban regional convention, which was extremely pleasant. The high point, of course, was Bernadette’s sixtieth birthday party, a full-on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic extravaganza. We then spent several days with family in Ann Arbor. So that was good. I came home fired up with enthusiasm for the field and for the magazine ... wait, what’s that ominous music?

NYRSF 337 (September 2016) Table of Contents

• Two Views: Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer, reviewed by Stephen Gerken
• Two Views: Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer, reviewed by Robbie Eginton
• Brian Stableford: The Science Fiction of Théo Varlet
• Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe by Andrew Fazekas, reviewed by Victor Grech
• Pawn’s Gambit and Other Stratagems by Timothy Zahn, reviewed by David Mead
• I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas, reviewed by Walter Kivet
• Mike Barrett: Beckoning Specters: The Weird Fiction of Harold Lawlor
• The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams. reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes
• Douglas A. Van Belle: Authorial Intent and the Representation of the Scientist in Science Fiction: A Discussion with Gregory Benford
• Donald M. Hassler: Two Looks at Torquato Tasso
• Photos
• Editorial: Even Though It All Went Wrong

NYRSF 337 Editorial: Even Though It All Went Wrong

They’re fooled by history.

—Geoff Ryman, “O Happy Day!”

As I write this, we are two weeks past the US presidential election and three weeks away from the Electoral College, that unloved relic of America’s colonial past, meeting to elect Donald Trump as the next president. In the two weeks since the election, Trump has: appointed an openly anti-Semitic far-right propagandist as his Chief Strategist; picked fights with the crew of Hamilton and Saturday Night Live, demanding apologies and “equal time”; mooted as National Security Advisor a man who calls Islam “a vicious cancer”; nominated as attorney general a man who helped gut public education funding in Alabama; and just in the last day as I write has declared “the president can’t have a conflict of interest” while his children, who will be managing his businesses, sit in on his meetings with foreign heads of state.

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

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Editorial: Preservation Society