The New York Review of Science Fiction

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.

Gordon Van Gelder: Editorial Secrets of Gardner Dozois—Revealed!

(1) When I was starting out, I used to ask Gardner a lot of questions about his editorial work at Asimov’s. Gardner did not alter the ending of Howard Waldrop’s “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” He did cut a portion out of Judith Moffett’s “The Hob.” He said it didn’t advance the story.

(2) Gardner delighted in gossip about other editors. He particularly liked telling stories about Roger Elwood, like the Lunacon where Roger held a panel in which he asked trivia questions about movies and whenever anyone got a correct answer, he’d throw a Ring Ding or a Snowball or a Twinkie their way. Gardner said that Roger’s way of assembling an anthology was that he had a long table with stacks of stories on it—one stack was Effinger stories, another stack was Lafferty stories, et cetera. And when the time came to assemble an anthology, he’d simply walk around the table and take one manuscript off each stack.

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.

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).

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.

Mike Barrett: Captive Inspiration: The Supernatural Tales of A.N.L. Munby

A number of literary works have been produced by writers during periods of incarceration. These include such classics as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Other authors of “prison literature” include Oscar Wilde, Sir Walter Raleigh, Napoleon Bonaparte, Fyodor Dostoevsky, O. Henry, and E.E. Cummings, and in more recent times Martin Luther King Jr. with Letter from Birmingham City Jail, and Nelson Mandela, whose Conversations With Myself was compiled while he was imprisoned on Robben Island. One of the most remarkable of all these books was Missing Soluch by the Iranian writer Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, who, lacking pen or paper, fashioned this 400-page novel entirely in his head, copying it down from memory after his release in 1979.

Sandra J. Lindow: The Dance of Nonviolent Subversion in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle

Since the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Ursula K. Le Guin has been one of the most influential voices in science fiction. In her unflinching condemnation of binary thinking and the various prejudices that inform social culture and politics, she has changed how we read science fiction as well as how we see ourselves. Although the sf/f community has long recognized Le Guin’s genius through Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards, recently she has been receiving considerable additional recognition across the mainstream. In 2014, Le Guin was named the 27th recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In February 2017, Le Guin was voted into The American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honor society of the country’s 250 leading architects, artists, composers, and writers. Correspondingly, the canonization of her work has begun through high-quality, authoritative, clothbound editions published by the Library of America (LOA) as part of a series that celebrates America’s most influential writers. These editions are intended to last due to a painstaking print process that requires printing with the grain to keep the Smyth-sewn binding from cracking and allow the books to lie completely flat. Beginning with The Complete Orsinia (2016) and more recently a two-volume boxed set of her Hainish Novels and Stories (2017), the LOA invites readers to explore her rich, living legacy. Le Guin took an active hand in preparing the texts for these volumes. Brian Attebery, the editor, previously worked with Le Guin on the Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960–1990 (1993).

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.