The New York Review of Science Fiction

Kevin J. Maroney on David G. Hartwell

There’s a great deal to say about David, and a lot of it doesn’t organize tidily. Anyone who ever visited his office or his houses or his vast stacks of inexpensive paperbacks in a dealers’ room would recognize that his true native environment was the jumble, and I fear that there’s no way to avoid that when talking about him.

David Hartwell worked more jobs simultaneously than any person I’ve ever known: anthologist, editor, publisher, book collector/dealer, and educator, and I’m sure I’m missing some.

I first heard of Hartwell when I was working in a science fiction bookstore (and comics shop) in the 1980s. My impression then was that he was seen as a somewhat ridiculous figure; this would have been in the aftermath of the high-profile failure of David’s Timescape imprint for Pocket Books. Wise heads shook sadly at the idea of building an entire publishing line around works that were, for the most part, sui generis—books such as The Book of the New Sun, The Dragon Waiting, the eponymous Timescape, all brilliant and each as different from the last as could be.

Richard A. Lupoff: Remembering Frank

A couple of pages into Not so Good a Gay Man I wasn’t reading Frank Robinson’s autobiography. I was settled in an easy chair in Frank’s lovingly restored Victorian in the Castro. Frank was sprawled on the couch, a huge window behind him. It was a sunny afternoon in San Francisco.

The room was dominated by a huge TV monitor, rising from a sea of DVDs. Frank was a technophile. He was always an early adopter of high-tech devices, hence the giant screen. He’d been the first member of the local science fiction community to install a computer. Well, actually it was a dedicated word processor, one of the few that IBM ever built. It was a huge thing, straight out of a steampunk novel. But at the time it was a marvel. The rest of us were still clattering away at—at best—Selectrics.

Sandra Lindow: Nnedi Okorafor: The Book of Phoenix, the Morality of Abomination

My beginnings were in the dark. We all dwelled in the dark, mad scientist and SpeciMen alike. (6).

On her Twitter account page, Afrofuturist novelist Nnedi Okorafor includes a picture of herself atop a building with huge black wings behind her. She appears composed and confident in her ability to lift into the air. The photo is an obvious reference to The Book of Phoenix (2015), which was written as a prequel to her World Fantasy Award–winning novel, Who Fears Death (2010). Composed in first-person vignettes, The Book of Phoenix is a troubling tale that rises again and again from its own ashes. Phoenix’s story begins about eighty years from now in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan that is mostly underwater; however, it is set in a frame that occurs about two hundred years later when Sunuteel, an elderly storyteller, finds a discarded computer with an audio book that contains Phoenix’s narrative. Sunuteel’s name is significant because it implies a brightness and positivity that is absent in the dark story that Phoenix relates.

Matthew D. Connolly: Stranger in a Strange Land: Racism as Bad Science Fiction

It’s taken me years and Samuel Delany to process director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. It is undeniably absolutely horrifying. That horror leaves almost no breath for interpretation. What’s represented by this film—a block of life in the nineteenth century U.S. South, slavery, relationships of domination, exploitation—overpowers any other attempt of the viewer to make some sense of it—to interpret, pick apart, let something sit and stew. What makes the film so imposing on the senses is that it is so clearly a film made to be about reality. It’s book-ended by the kind of text that often forecloses discussion: “Based on a true story” tells us that what we are about to experience has happened to real people, and the continuance of the closing text blocks remind us that any closure offered in the film’s narrative does not extend much further into the world from which the film extracted only a slice of life. 12 Years happened, it says of itself. It also comes with a load of political weight that threatens to collapse any space for perspective the viewer hopes to get from the film.

Brian Stableford: The Perils of Prophecy 2: The Great Indifference of the World

The most ambitious work of futuristic fiction written in the eighteenth century was L’Enclos et les oiseaux [The Enclosure and the Birds] by Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne, written between January and May 1796. There was, admittedly, not a lot of competition. L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771; tr. as Memoirs of the Year 2500) by Restif’s friend Louis-Sébastien Mercier, got all the publicity then and still gets it now although its snapshot vision of the future merely consists of imagining the worst atrocities of contemporary Paris tidied up. The immortal hero of L’Enclos et les oiseaux, by contrast, witnesses the entire future history of the Earth until the planet is swallowed by the Sun hundreds of thousands of years hence. Along the way he lives through the planet’s near-collision with a comet, which causes a worldwide upheaval and supplies the world with a second moon, occasioning a burst of rapid evolution whose products include a new species of winged humans.

Michael Swanwick: “Everything Happens for a Reason”: A Conversation With Kaja and Phil Foglio

MS: You two have been working on Girl Genius for years. You put up three full-page comics on the web—written, drawn, and inked in full color—a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, week after week. So far you have thirteen compilations of the comics. Each volume is between 100 and 160 pages, with at least another 7 to go before the plot winds up.

Sandra Lindow and Michael Levy: Two Views on Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman

New York: Tor Books, 2015; $25.00 hc; 304 pages

Sandra Lindow

Carolyn Ives Gilman’s Dark Orbit is a first contact planetary romance in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling. Set in the same universe as Gilman’s previous, groundbreaking 1998 novel, Halfway Human, it describes how a crew of scientists from Capella II are sent to Iris, a newly discovered planet, expecting it to be uninhabited only to find a village of five hundred humans living in total darkness in caves underground.

Audrey Taylor: “Active Time” in the Works of Patricia A. McKillip

In this article I present the term active time, something I formulated with the works of Patricia A. McKillip specifically in mind but which might prove useful in other fantasy contexts as well.

I will be taking my examples of active time specifically from two works of McKillip, The Tower at Stony Wood (2000) and The Bards of Bone Plain (2011). Both are “classic” immersive fantasies (in Farah Mendlesohn’s rubric). This means there is no debate about where they sit; they are clearly fantasy, clearly not science fiction, and thus, like most fantasy, not usually discussed in terms of the mechanics of time.

Steve Carper: The Women of Gnome Press

Science fiction became literature in the half decade after World War II, not because of any intrinsic rise in the quality of the works, not even because rockets and atomic energy had moved from the pages of fiction to the front pages of newspapers. Science fiction became literature purely and simply because it began being offered in hard covers rather than being confined to pulp magazines.

Darrell Schweitzer: H.P. Lovecraft and the American Stonehenge: Hokum, Pseudo-archaeology, and the Imagination

America’s Stonehenge! The very name conjures up vistas of huge, standing stone circles, almost unimaginable antiquity, lost civilizations, and maybe the occasional orgiastic human sacrifice, doesn’t it?

It’s obviously supposed to.

The real deal is not quite as impressive as that, but I will have to admit that it does not entirely disappoint. And it’s got something to do with H.P. Lovecraft. What more could you ask?

Lovecraft may have known of the place, although not under that name. If he ever visited, he did so privately, since it was not open as a tourist attraction until 1958. It was called Mystery Hill originally, but, probably because there are dozens of Mystery Hills all over America, most of them places of natural optical illusions where cars seem to roll uphill, a more distinctive name was needed. “America’s Stonehenge” better evokes imaginings of a hoary past, and, incidentally, sells more tickets. Whether what we see there is authentic is one question. Whether this site, a rumor of its existence, or similar sites scattered across New England inspired Lovecraft’s fiction is, I think, the more interesting question.