The New York Review of Science Fiction

Issue 348 (August 2018) Table of Contents

• Derwin Mak: The Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome in Chinese North American Science Fiction and Fantasy
• Andy Duncan: A Different Species: Adapting to Weinbaum’s “The Adaptive Ultimate”
• Stanislaw Lem: Selected Letters to Michael Kandel, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Peter Swirski, reviewed by Michael Andre-Driussi
• Brian Stableford: Decadent Eroticism in the Occult Fantasies of Jane De La Vaudère
• Mack Hassler: Ages Rock
• Mike Barrett: Looking for the Unknown: Robert Westall’s Short Fiction
• Terry Thompson: Windows, Doubles, and “Strange Communion”: Henry James’s “Sir Edmund Orme”
• Photos
• Editorial: So Much Winning

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).

Editorial: Sent out of the Garden

Gardner Dozois died last week. He was for at least decades the most visible and most influential short fiction editor in science fiction. Had he simply edited Asimov’s for 20 years, he’d be widely remembered. Alongside that, though, he also edited around 100 volumes of short fiction, a mixture of thematic reprints and original collections, independently or with friends such as Jack Dann and George R.R. Martin. His doorstop-sized The Year’s Best Science Fiction series ran for 35 volumes, following 6 years of the more modest Best Science Fiction of the Year series that he took over from Lester Del Rey in 1977. Several instructors I know have adopted this series for their science fiction classes as snapshots of the current sf scene; though no one perspective could possibly show everything, Gardner saw and shared as much as one could ever hope.

Issue 347 (June 2018) Table of Contents

• Pierre-Paul Durastanti: An Interview with Gardner Dozois
• John Kessel: When Jane Met Mary
• Brian Stableford: Tales of the Fays: The Comtesse De Murat and the Origins of Fantasy Fiction
• Read This: recently read and recommended by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes
• David Langford: Random Reading 19: Punch, Brothers, Punch
• Victor Grech: Doctor by Doctor: Dr. Phlox in Star Trek: Enterprise
• Joe Sanders: Anthropological/Science/Fiction: Michael Bishop’s Transfigurations
• Horror Literature through History, edited by Matt Cardin, reviewed by Don Webb
• Photos
• Editorial: Sent out of the Garden

David Langford: Random Reading 19: Punch, Brothers, Punch

Genre bibliographers have tended to avoid Britain’s long-running humorous and satirical magazine Punch (1841–1992), for the excellent reason that it didn’t publish much fiction, still less science fiction. Occasional needles of sf or fantasy interest are lost in the vast and seemingly unindexed haystack generated by a century and a half of weekly publication. It was thus a slight surprise to learn from my old fan friend Roy Kettle that the magazine ran a whole season of sf stories in 1960. This emerged during his visit to a 2017 Jane Austen exhibition in Oxford, whose priceless memorabilia included a Punch spoof titled “Jane in Space” and written by—of all people—Stella Gibbons of Cold Comfort Farm fame.

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.

Issue 346 (April 2018) Table of Contents

• Sandra J. Lindow: The Dance of Nonviolent Subversion in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle
• Mark Scroggins: The Nonfiction Michael Moorcock
• The Broken Hours by Jacqueline Baker, reviewed by Pete Rawlik
• Brian Stableford: Rockets in Early French Science Fiction
• Mike Barrett: Captive Inspiration: The Supernatural Tales of A.N.L. Munby
• A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison by Nat Segaloff, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer
• Editorial: Loss

NYRSF 346 Editorial: Loss

First, I have the honor of introducing our Ursula K. Le Guin issue and Sandra Lindow’s comprehensive examination of the Library of America’s Hainish Novels and Stories omnibus, a monumental book for a monumental career.

But Le Guin was more than a monument. I never had the pleasure of meeting her, but she was deeply entangled in the sf community, an inspiration and more importantly a friend to so many, and even family to a few. Our publishers—Gavin Grant and Kelly Link—named their daughter “Ursula” out of love for Ms. Le Guin. For all of us she was a landmark; for many of us, she was an integral part of life.

We will feel her loss. Mercifully, we have all her work to guide us back to her.

A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison by Nat Segaloff, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

Framingham, Massachusetts: NESFA Press, 2017: $35.00 hc; 416 pages

Oh, look, a book about Harlan. A very entertaining, even moving book about Harlan.

If I have to explain who “Harlan” is, this book is probably not for you. If you have never read his work, you will not have the associations in your head for this book to really resonate. But if you are of a certain age and you have been reading science fiction all your life, then he has been a presence in your life even if you’ve never met him or heard him speak. If you have attended conventions and interacted with him, if only as a member of his audience, this very lively book is going to mean a great deal. It is not a regular biography, but it’s what we’ve got, and it’s full of Harlan Ellison Stories.