The New York Review of Science Fiction

Eric Leif Davin: The Facts in the Matter of Hugo Gernsback and Stanley G. Weinbaum

The idea that Hugo Gernsback paid “absolutely nothing” for Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” and the other five stories Weinbaum published in Gernsback’s Wonder Stories seems to be one of those vampire legends that will not die no matter how often a stake is driven through its heart. I am revisiting this ancient legend once again because it has raised its hoary head once again.

Mir Seidel: Tesla and Gernsback: An Untold Influence on the Birth of the Genre

The relationship between Hugo Gernsback and Nikola Tesla is hidden in plain sight in the pages of Gernsback’s early publications. Yet the influence of the older inventor on the younger publisher and writer has never been closely examined, and it can shed new light on the emergence of modern science fiction. To put it conservatively, I believe that Nikola Tesla and his inventions and ideas had a profound influence on Hugo Gernsback during the period that Gernsback felt was formative to his understanding of science fiction—the twenty years or so before he launched Amazing Stories.

David Langford: Beyond the Outposts: An Introduction

To repeat myself: Algis Budrys (1931–2008) was a noted science fiction author—his Rogue Moon in particular is an acclaimed classic—who also wrote much memorable and witty criticism of the field. His 1985 volume Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf, assembling the review columns he published in Galaxy magazine from 1965 to 1971, is one of the few single-author books about SF to be as highly regarded as the pioneer works In Search of Wonder (1956; expanded 1967, 1996) by Damon Knight, New Maps of Hell (1960) by Kingsley Amis, and The Issue at Hand (1964) and More Issues at Hand (1970) by James Blish.

Sandra J. Lindow: Crafting the Hinge in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home

Influenced by the women’s movement, Ursula K. Le Guin’s controversial 1985 carrier bag novel Always Coming Home (ACH) depicts the Kesh, a dynamic, postapocalyptic, matrilineal, matrilocal culture that balances male and female qualities as well as human and environmental demands. Aside from her poetry, it is possibly her most personal work, reflecting the Northern California ranch that was an intimate part of her childhood experience, a place where she played in the red adobe dirt with her little houses, cars, and people (756). In early 2019, ACH was republished by the Library of America (LOA) in a high-quality authorized, cloth-bound edition as part of a series that reflects Le Guin’s status as one of the most influential creative geniuses of American literature. Edited by Brian Attebery, the book includes Le Guin’s original hand-drawn maps and illustrations by Margaret Chodos-Irvine; it adds “Chronology;” “Notes;” two more chapters of Dangerous People, a novel within the novel; a poem by a Kesh poet; “Kesh Syntax,” “Some Kesh Meditations”; and “Blood Lodge songs”; plus “May’s Lion” (1983) a short story told and then retold through a Kesh perspective. Seven previously published essays provide the essential theoretical concepts that inform ACH’s construction. Of these, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” (1982) and “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986) are particularly valuable when considering Le Guin’s work as a whole. “The Making of Always Coming Home” transcribes a panel from Mythcon panel 19 on July 31, 1988, where Le Guin interacts with collaborators regarding the maps, art, and music that came with the initial publication.

Harry Martinson: The Star Song

Translator’s Introduction

The Swedish author and Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson (1904–1978) wrote only one work that can be considered sf, yet it remains his most well-known. The epic poem Aniara: En revy om människan i tid och rum (1956) has been adapted into an opera (1959), a ballet (1988), a musical (2010), a feature film (2018), and several plays. It has been translated into English twice—in 1963 as Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space by Hugh MacDiarmid and Elspeth Harley Schubert, and in 1999 as Aniara: An Epic Science Fiction Poem by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg. Set in a future marked by environmental destruction, Aniara tells the story of an evacuation from Earth to Mars gone awry: the spaceship Aniara, carrying 8,000 refugees, gets thrown off course and drifts off helplessly into the depths of space. In addition to being a critique of nuclear armament and technological civilization, Aniara contains stunning poetry that captures the incomprehensibility of the universe of modern science, including deep time and the vast distances of interstellar space.

Carlis Nixon: A Different Perspective on Maia’s Journey in The Goblin Emperor

A response to Leah Schnelbach’s “A Quiet Hero’s Journey: Processing Trauma in Fantasy” (Tor.com, 27 February 2019; <www.tor.com/2019/02/27/how-jo-waltons-among-others-and-katherine-addisons-the-goblin-emperor-tell-stories-of-trauma-and-recovery/>)

I was delighted to encounter Leah Schnelbach’s article featuring Addison’s The Goblin Emperor—a book I love. I was even more tickled to immediately recognize in her introduction a shared enjoyment of the extent to which the story is not about “those action scenes that would be in the trailer for Goblin Emperor: The Movie....” Yes, I exulted. Indeed.

But from there I was startled to find how much Schnelbach’s reactions diverged from mine. I’d like to present an alternative perspective.

Victor Grech: The Battle for New York: Disaster Movies and the Ongoing COVID-19 Onslaught

New York City ... the splendor, picturesqueness, and oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities ... costly and lofty new buildings ... the tumultuous streets, Broadway, the heavy, low, musical roar, hardly ever intermitted, even at night ... the assemblages of the citizens in their groups, conversations, trades, evening amusements ... these, I say, and the like of these, completely satisfy my senses of power, fulness, motion.

—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Introduction

In a previous paper, I outlined the events that have led to the current pandemic (Grech “Pandemics”). This essay briefly describes the propensity of science fiction authors to unleash disasters on New York City and then goes on to outline events currently unfolding in the United States in relation to COVID-19, with particular emphasis on New York City.

Victor Grech: Pandemics: Known Unknowns and Our Failure to Prevent Our Unwilling Participation in a Dystopian SF Scenario

Introduction

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.

—Albert Camus, The Plague, 1948.

COVID-19 is currently a global pandemic. A pandemic is a disease outbreak that is prevalent over a wide area, from a group of countries to the entire world. The current pandemic disease, COVID-19, is caused by a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. The global spread is following an approximately exponential curve: it took 67 days to reach the first 100,000 cases; 11 more days to reach 200,000; and just 4 more to reach 300,000 cases. This virus’s deadliness lies in its stealth, spreading silently with an incubation period of weeks. It kills slowly, weeks after infection (Chen et al., Ferguson et al.).

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.