The New York Review of Science Fiction

“Here Are Dragons”: Charting the Depths and Borders of Fantasy

1. Legends of Maps

Once upon a time, mapmakers who came to the edge of their knowledge did not leave the terra incognita beyond simply blank; instead, they filled the empty quarters with images of lions and monsters and at least once, on a 1504 globe made of conjoined halves of ostrich eggs, the inscription “Hic sunt dracones,” or in English, “Here are dragons” (Livingston 2002)1. A literary cartographer, trying to survey the genres that spread across the landscape of story and coming upon the one called fantasy, might well be tempted to throw up their hands over a terrain so confused, various and wild, and simply say, along with the antique globe, “Here are dragons.”

Steve Carper: Beyond “Deadline”: Three Additional WWII Atomic War Stories and the Office of Censorship

On June 28, 1943, Bryon Price, director of the United States Office of Censorship (OoC) and former executive news editor of the Associated Press, sent out a confidential note to 2,000 daily newspapers and 11,000 weeklies as well as all radio stations in the U.S. The note requested that editors prevent any articles or broadcasts from mentioning:

Production or utilization of atom smashing, atomic energy, atomic fission, atomic splitting, or any of their equivalents.

The use for military purposes of radium or radioactive materials, heavy water, high voltage discharge equipment, cyclotrons.

The following elements or any of their compounds: polonium, uranium, ytterbium, hafnium, protactinium, radium, rhenium, thorium, deuterium.

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

In a previous article in these pages (“Technology and Liberty in French Utopian Fiction,” NYRSF #334, based on the 2016 Thomas Taylor Lecture), I identified two interwoven threads in the development of French Utopian fiction in the nineteenth and early twentieth century which addressed the roles to be played in a hypothetical utopian society by advanced technology and sexual liberation. That analysis paid particular attention to a train of thought inspired by the political philosophy of Anarchism reflected in Joseph Déjacque’s L’Humanisphère, utopie anarchique (1858–61; partially tr. as “The Future World of the Humanisphere”), Paul Adam’s Lettres de Malaisie (1898; tr. as “Letters from Malaisie”), André Couvreur’s Caresco surhomme, ou le voyage en Eucrasie (1904; tr. as Caresco, Superman; or, A Voyage to Eucrasia), Gaston Danville’s Le Parfum de volupté (1905; tr. as The Perfume of Lust), Han Ryner’s Les Pacifiques (1914; tr. as “The Pacifists”) and Marcel Rouff’s Voyage au monde à l’envers (1920; tr. as Journey to the Inverted World).

Andy Duncan: A Master’s Thesis, 1995

[When Andy Duncan asked me whether NYRSF would be interested in reading the introduction to his master’s thesis, I responded yes instantly even though I had never read an MFA thesis and thus had no true idea what it encompassed. I was delighted to find so much of Andy present even in this formal document—his love for the written word, for voices, for the fantastic and the star-crossed all pour out as he lays his stories down for judgment. Enjoy.—kjm and the eds.]

Abstract

DUNCAN, ANDREW ROBERT. Our Stories Thus Far. (Under the direction of John J. Kessel.)

This is a collection of five stories both fantastical and historical. “From Alfano’s Reliquary” is a tale of skullduggery in the medieval Church of Rome. “Beluthahatchie” depicts the travels of a Depression-era blues guitarist who dies and goes not to Hell but to the next railway station past Hell. “Grand Guignol” is about backstage intrigue at the 1920s Parisian theater of gore. “Liza and the Crazy Water Man” is a romance set amid the Charlotte country-music industry of the 1930s. Finally, “The Chief Designer” is a speculative and mystical portrait of the guiding genius of the Soviet space program.

Lee Weinstein: In Search of the Vegetable Caterpillar

Back when I was a young teenager, I came across an intriguing item in Robert Ripley’s first Believe It or Not! book (1929). The text read “The pepe-aweto of the Maoris. Strangest insect on Earth. A caterpillar that turns into a plant.” It was accompanied by a drawing of a caterpillar with a long stem rising vertically from one end, with some feathery looking branches at the top. Below the drawing the text continued: “Is it an insect or a vegetable?”

As someone who was eventually to become a biology major in college, my curiosity was greatly sparked by the cartoon, but, at the time, I was a 14- or 15-year-old with little in the way of either research skills or reference materials. I did know that Ripley promoted himself as a man who could prove every statement he made, but it wasn’t until years later that I was to discover that Ripley would consider something “proven” if he could point to something in print that provided a source, whether or not that source was reliable. In this case, even though he did not cite a source, I sensed both at the time and later on that the cartoon referred to something quite real.

David V. Griffin: “Where’d You Get Those Eyes?” Creepshow, Romero & King’s Satirical Pseudo-homage

Creepshow (1982) Directed by George A. Romero; screenplay by Stephen King; starring Hal Holbrook, Adrienne Barbeau, Ed Harris, E.G. Marshall, Carrie Nye, Leslie Nielsen, and Ted Danson.

It’s not often that a decade is summed up in advance by a single film and even less so that the film in question is in fact an ostensible homage to an even earlier decade. Yet that’s exactly what happened with George A. Romero and Stephen King’s Creepshow (1982), one of the deftest and most savagely adroit horror satires to hit the screens after the ’70s. It wasn’t the first time that the two men had worked together—King and his wife Tabitha had made cameo appearances in Romero’s Knightriders the previous year as spectators at an Arthurian motorcycle joust (don’t ask)—but it was King’s first filmed screenplay and one of the times where a director and a writer’s joint sensibility seem to be in near-perfect sync.

Gustavo Bondoni: When the Shoulders of Giants Are Missing

It’s a truism in the literary world that each new piece of writing published owes its existence to thousands of years of literary tradition. Everything is influenced by and to a certain degree shaped by what came before. Even the avant garde, in attempting to break free of the shackles of the past, gives a nod to everything from Gilgamesh to Leopold Bloom. Nothing truly exists in a vacuum, and we are all standing on the shoulders of giants—the great literary minds that paved our way.

Mike Barrett: “A Story to Be Read for Its Own Sake”: The Worm Ouroboros

It was the epic three-volume novel The Lord of the Rings that set the scene for what was to eventually become the enormous popularity of a genre that barely existed prior to the mid-1960s. However, as I mentioned in my article “Rites of Passage in Neustria” (NYRSF 323), heroic fantasy had its origins somewhat earlier, and one of the very first novels of its kind was The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison in 1922, a book that introduced violent action and dark sorcery to fantasy, features that came to define much of the field.

Brian Stableford: Madame De Villeneuve and the Origins of the Fantasy Novel

The first concerted attempt to define and characterize a genre of fantasy fiction was made by Charles-Joseph Mayer between 1785 and 1789 when he published the 41 exemplary volumes of Le Cabinet des fées, ou Collection choisie des contes de fées et autres contes merveilleux [The Cabinet of the Fairies, or, Selected Collection of Fairy Tales and Other Marvelous Tales] in parallel with Charles Garnier’s Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions et romans cabalistiques [Imaginary Voyages, Dreams, Visions, and Cabalistic Fiction]. The latter is now regarded as most significant for the volumes containing imaginary voyages that can be affiliated in retrospect to the nascent genre of roman scientifique [scientific fiction] but, as the full title illustrates, it contains a good deal of material that would nowadays be considered to belong to the fantasy genre, and some of the items, such as Madame Roumier-Robert’s “Les Ondins, conte moral” (1768; tr. as “The Water-Sprites”) would have been perfectly at home in Mayer’s collection. It was, however, Mayer’s assembly that identified the two principal strands of the genre of the merveilleux as the mock folktales that became fashionable in the literary salons of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in association with the court of Louis XIV and tales written in imitation of Antoine Galland’s collection of Les Mille-et-une nuits (1707–19), which claimed to be translations of Arabian folklore, although many of the inclusions are drastically rewritten from the original manuscripts or wholly invented by Galland.

Brian Stableford: The Confused Legacy of the Romantic Revolution: The Strange Fate of The Thousand-and-One Phantoms and the Unlucky Père Olifus

On 22 February 1848 there was a revolt in Paris occasioned by an economic slump, food shortages, and attempts to clamp down on dissent by Louis-Philippe’s government. Two days later the king threw in the towel and abdicated, initially in favor of his grandson, the Comte de Paris, but that attempted compromise fell through, and the Second Republic was immediately proclaimed under the temporary presidency of the aging poet and pillar of the Romantic Movement, Alphonse de Lamartine. Several other high-profile writers associated with the Romantic Movement accepted government posts, and the Republic adopted a new national anthem with words by Alexandre Dumas, “Le Chant des Girondins,” appropriated from the dramatic version of his novel Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge (book 1846; play 1847). The music for the play was supplied by Alphonse Varney, one of Dumas’s regular collaborators, although the song’s chorus is adapted from a work by Rouget de Lisle, the composer of “La Marseillaise.”