The New York Review of Science Fiction

Lee Weinstein: Fiction, Heroin, and Kavan

The prolific British writer Anna Kavan is best-known among science fiction readers for her final novel, Ice, published a year before her death in 1968 at age 67. Ice’s frozen post-apocalyptic world is the most explicitly science-fictional of her works, but its imagery was not new in her work. In her review of David Callard’s biography of Anna Kavan, The Case of Anna Kavan, Elizabeth Young says that

heroin was the center of [Kavan’s] existence; ... and almost all of her later work charts the process of addiction in an extraordinarily pure and crystalline form using again and again images—of cold, of ice, of forbidding landscapes, lowering castles, and forbidding watchers—in a manner that should be familiar to us from any study of the great addict writers of the Romantic period. (22–23)

Michael Swanwick: A Few Words with Sergei Lukyanenko

Sergei Lukyanenko is one of the most popular science fiction writers in Russia. He is best known in America and throughout the world as the creator of the Night Watch/Day Watch universe, in which human beings with supernatural powers maintain an uneasy peace in the modern world. These books became famous globally after two very successful movies, Night Watch and Day Watch, were based on them. They are, however, only a small part of the total output of this prolific author.

Dave Drake: Soldiers and the Civil Government

Anyone with a background in history knows that mercenary soldiers often have a difficult relationship with the government they’re working for. Mercenaries have sometimes overthrown the employing government, but from my reading I don’t believe that’s as common as national armies mutinying to put their general on the throne. (Occasionally even against the general’s wishes; but once the subject is raised, the general has no option but to go along with the rebellion).

Sandra J. Lindow: Black to Okorafor: Entering an Intersection of Afrofuturism, Comics, and the Women’s Movement

In recent years women of color have consistently won awards for their often transgressive speculative fiction. Hugo and Nebula award winner Nnedi Okorafor is one of these nontraditional writers who have achieved success by taking African history and culture and giving it a fantastic, futuristic feminist twist. In the September/October 2017 issue of Asimov’s, sf old guard writer/critic Norman Spinrad calls her Hugo-winning novella Binti “something else again,” suggests that “nothing quite like this has ever been written and published in English” and concludes that “This would be a kind of post-modern space opera if it weren’t so serious in literary, psychological, and anthropological intent” (204). Structurally Okorafor’s stories often depart from both golden age sf and the heavy, complexly interwoven literary novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they do not come out of nowhere. (Until now, Spinrad obviously has not been paying attention to a substantial sea change that has been occurring in the genre particularly since the beginning of the twenty-first century.) Most of Okorafor’s work is well-honed YA hero journeys, often structured in a series of vignettes similar to comic books or graphic novels. (In her Wahala Zone Blog, Okorafor explains that she learned about Joseph Campbell’s hero journey from her instructor at Clarion, Steven J. Barnes [“My Report”].) Furthermore, the lives of her characters are inextricably entwined with popular culture: food, music, art, and technology. To best understand her work, it is valuable to examine its dynamic connection to the Afrofuturist movement that began after World War II.

Judith Collins: This Traveler

for Brian Aldiss

You placed in my hand
a prehistory of mind.
(Yours?
Possibly.
Mine?
Undoubtedly.)
You called it a gift,
your gentle hold
as you relinquished it
betraying your fear
of awakening its angels.
You had etched
just beneath its skin
“Long life—lots of love”
and you kissed me
(I am sure
you wish the same
for all the girls.)

But—
from your high perch
above the ruins of Monemvasia,
does your eye grow tired,
looking over our shoulders?
Do you contemplate
each single entrance,
each love fading as it ascends,
its golden sandals losing luster
in dark tunnels, wearing thin
along the rocky, zig-zag path
toward the grassland above?
Would you warn us
of dark, doughty enemies,
invaders from the sea?
(Would we hear, above
the echoes of the ruins?)

Our sweet young ghosts
we leave at water’s edge.
Let them strengthen their limbs
in rock-strewn sand.
(The climb awaits.)
They cannot imagine as yet
how much more brilliant blue
the sea from each sad height.

Brian Stableford: The Fantastic Fiction of Maurice Magre III: The Quest for the Ideal

I do not know whether there are people who escape despair, and if there are, I believe that they are not very numerous. I do not envy those people. There is in despair a bitter substance, a fecund poison, the seed of a superior virtue that one cannot find elsewhere. Everyone, sooner or later, ought to aspire to the juice of the hemlock that gives wings, the sacred belladonna. But it is necessary to be able to drink the poison and not die.

Paul Voermans: Technique of Awful: When Extremity Takes Us Past the Real

The subject of a holocaust—and the one we call The Holocaust—can I use it in fiction or does it use me? Will you object to my appropriation and should I care? In any case, when compelled to speak of such darkness, language copes, shifts, concentrates.

If it isn’t true that to “write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”1 nor that it makes it “impossible to write,” I am sure that in every tent of character we pitch within fiction, however sweet or escapist, there is in some corner, now, unimaginable death.

Victor Grech: Crime and Punishment in Star Trek: Genocide and War Crimes

Introduction

The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) from the Greek genos (family, tribe, or race) and Latin -cide (killing). Lemkin was a Pole of Jewish descent and he used this term to describe the 1915 massacres of Armenians and Assyrians. Genocide may be defined as “the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group” (Funk 1).

Gustavo Bondoni: Snapshots of the Brazilian Scene: Thoughts on Four Brazilian SF/F Books

As an Argentine science fiction writer working out of Buenos Aires, I envy writers based in large markets. I personally have the advantage that my first language, reading- and writing-wise, is and always has been English, but many of my countrymen need to learn to write in the tongue of Shakespeare or face the stark realities of publishing in Spanish.

Due to its being a tiny market, comparatively speaking, the Argentine publication process for debut or little-known writers consists of approaching a publishing house that will invariably be delighted to publish your award-winning manuscript ... as long as you foot the bill. Yog’s Law (“Money flows to the writer”) is notably absent in any serious publishing conversation here. This reality is reflected in the often uneven quality of the work published in South America: nuggets of genius have to be mined from a quantity of dross produced by people whose only meaningful qualification was that they simply had the funds to get it done at that particular moment in time.

Bernadette Bosky: On Rereading Stephen King’s Rose Madder

Though I haven’t done official research, for years I’ve thought of Rose Madder (1995) as underappreciated among King’s novels, just based on conversations with fellow academics and other friends. I can think of some reasons for it getting less attention than it deserves. It came during a very uneven period of King’s career in which it seemed that masterpieces—or at least strong works of character, social commentary, and improving writerly technique—alternated in no predictable way with ambitious disasters: for instance, Misery followed by The Tommyknockers. Above all, attention during that period focused increasingly on the Dark Tower books and the tendrils they sent out to unite the series with King’s other fiction. While Rose Madder is connected to the Dark Tower metaworld, the connection is easy to miss, unlike in Insomnia, his novel before Rose Madder. And who knows how important it is to Rose Madder’s fame that, unlike most of King’s best novels and many of his lesser works, Rose Madder has never been filmed? (A film is rumored to be in production, but this talk goes back at least to 2011.)