The New York Review of Science Fiction

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.

Editorial: Glorantha: Another Magical World

December 2018 was the fifty-first anniversary of the ancestor of the modern role-playing game, Dave Wesley’s Braunstein, a Napoleonic miniatures scenario which offered character-based roles for multiple players. First played in 1967, it expanded over the next three years to include scenarios set in Central America and the Wild West written by his friend Dave Arneson. Arneson then adapted the basic Braunstein idea into Black Moor, a fantasy game heavily influenced by The Lord of the Rings and based on the medieval miniatures game Chainmail by Gary Gygax. In 1974, Gygax’s new company, Tactical Studies Rules, published the first edition of Gygax and Arneson’s Dungeons & Dragons.

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.

Issue 349 Table of Contents

• Michael Swanwick: From A to Z with Gardner Dozois
• Allen M. Steele: Gardner Dozois, Ed.
• Gordon Van Gelder: Eleven of My Favorite Gardner Dozois Memories
• Joe Haldeman: Gardner Dozois: Memories
• Nancy Kress: Gardner Dozois: Eagle Eye and Big Heart
• George R.R. Martin: Goodbye, Gargy
• Michael Bishop: A Friend in Philadelphia: Gardner Dozois
• Jack Dann: Drowning in Memory
• Patty Wells: Gardner Dozois’s Patented Pickup Line
• The Centerfold
• Howard Waldrop: GARDNER
• John Kessel: Gardner Dozois
• Mike Resnick: On Gardner
• Eileen Gunn: The Quiet Gardner Dozois
• F. Brett Cox: To Gardner
• Andy Duncan: Remembering Gardner
• Sheila Williams: Gardner
• Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas: Mt. Gardner
• My Darling, My Jets of Semen: Nisi Shawl Goes On about Gardner Dozois
• Michael Bishop: “Sitting in the Sun in the Waist-High Grass”: On “The Last Day of July” by Gardner Dozois
• Darrell Schweitzer: Will the Real Gardner...?
• Henry Wessells: The Archive
• Gregory Frost: Gardner Dozois, Performance Artist
• Fran Wilde: Oh, You Know Gardner Dozois, Of Course
• Samuel R. Delany: In Philadelphia
• Gordon Van Gelder: Editorial Secrets of Gardner Dozois—Revealed!
• Editorial: Gardner, Seen from Afar

NYRSF 349 Editorial: Gardner, Seen from Afar

This issue began when Michael Swanwick e-mailed me “From A to Z with Gardner Dozios” with the comment “I presume you’ll also be putting together a Gardner-themed issue sometime soon ...”, and in that moment I knew we were. Michael was an enormous help with brainstorming and contacting contributors and this issue owes him an immeasurable debt.

I did not know Gardner nearly as well as I would have liked. I met him at conventions, mostly Worldcons, mostly in passing because he was generally being pulled in a dozen different directions at once. Even under those circumstances, his unmistakable intelligence, charm, and humor came through.

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.

NYRSF 348 Editorial: So Much Winning

This issue marks the end of volume 29 of NYRSF. In a better world, we would be celebrating the end of volume 30 (issue #1 came out in September 1988) and throwing something of a party, but our once rock-solid monthliness has eroded over the last few years. We’re still averaging more than 8 issues a year. Trust me, I’m aiming to get closer to that “every monthly like clockwork” that has eluded us of late.