The New York Review of Science Fiction

Read This: recently read and recommended by Anne Zanoni

The Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner:
The Thief, Greenwillow Books, 1996
The Queen of Attolia, Greenwillow Books, 2000
The King of Attolia, Greenwillow Books, 2006
A Conspiracy of Kings, Greenwillow Books, 2010
“Thief!”, Disney Adventures, August 2000 (prequel short story)

I fell in love with this series in 2013. By “fell in love” I mean I slammed headlong into the series, became an utter fangirl, and never looked back. From my blog (25 June 2013):

I have read The Thief itself twice already, and the ending at least six times, probably more. (I initially got it from the library perhaps four weeks ago.) I read The Queen of Attolia once but skimmed through it again multiple times. And reread the ending several times. Because.

Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 2, edited by Kathe Koja, reviewed by Kris Dikeman

Pickering, Canada: Undertow Press, 2015; $18.99 tpb; 328 pages

I begin with a confession: I can’t offer a very specific definition of what Weird Fiction is. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s threshold test has always been good enough for me: I know it when I see it. But circumstances change. Having skated by on this flimsy old chestnut for years, one day, the editor of a prestigious science fiction newsletter holds a weaponized iguana to your head and tells you to stop futzing around.

Invaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature, edited by Jacob Weisman, reviewed by Joe Milicia

San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2016; $16.95 tpb; 384 pages

The first thing to say about Invaders is that it’s a good collection of sf and borderline-sf short stories. I’d argue that all but a couple of the 22 are quite worth reading: a nice percentage. The stories are recent or nearly so, with copyright dates 1990 to 2015, except for one by Max Apple published in 1975.

"Not So Much,” Said the Cat by Michael Swanwick, reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes

San Francisco: Tachyon Publications; $15.95 tpb/$9.99 ebook; 285 pages

Michael Swanwick has been around a while now, and has racked up his share of major awards. It seems to go without saying that he’s a pretty good writer. So I’ll go a little further: on the basis of this collection, he is a short story writer on the order of Theodore Sturgeon, Shirley Jackson, and Roger Zelazny. Not that he’s much like any of them, but he’s become that good.

Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny, reviewed by Joe Sanders

Chicago: Chicago Review, 2016; $15.99 tpb; 207 pages

There’s always been something enigmatic about Roger Zelazny and his writing.

Even though Roger was always pleasant, he still somehow radiated a sense of cool distance, emotional reserve. If you check out the obituary essays in Locus, you’ll note how many people responded to his exciting fiction but how relatively little they had to say about Roger as a person. At the last ICFA he attended, Roger invited several people to a special dinner at the conference hotel’s gourmet restaurant. I accepted it simply as an exceptionally nice, friendly gesture; however, my wife, a sharply observant social worker, told me later, “Joe, I think Roger’s dying.” She was right. After his death, one of Roger’s oldest friends was hurt about how he’d been deceived: Roger had assured him that everything was fine, that he was cured of cancer. Evidently he found it easier to die than to be known as Dying Roger Zelazny.

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adamsreviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes

San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2016; $15.95 tpb/$9.99 ebook; 285 pages

The concept of this series is interesting but a bit confused.

The series editor (Adams) reads thousands of short sf/f stories each year and picks eighty of them—forty sf, forty fantasy. Then he gives them, stripped of identification, to the year’s guest editor (Fowler), who picks ten sf and ten fantasy stories, and that’s the book.

The first part I find confusing is the “American” criterion: the stories have to be in English, by an American or Canadian writer, published in a nationally distributed American or Canadian publication. Which excludes (reasonably, I suppose ... ) Francophone Canadian fiction—but also seems to exclude (say) an American’s story published in a British magazine such as Interzone, which seems problematic. If that’s the case, then why not a Briton’s story published in an American magazine? The criteria seem artificially narrow. (And one might quibble, given the North American focus, about whether Hawai’ian fiction should be allowed....)

Two Views: Too Like the Lightningby Ada Palmerreviewed by Stephen Gerken

New York: Tor Books, 2016; $26.99 hc; 432 pages

Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning begins in the middle as if A Clockwork Orange opened when Alex has committed his mayhem after he has been captured and defanged and returned to the street, there to render defenseless service to his droogs. This novel’s Alex is Mycroft Canner, a forcibly reformed reprobate whose philosophical convictions precipitated his youthful commission of the most infamous crimes of his generation. As part of his ongoing restitution to society, he narrates his personal history of several days that reshaped his times.

Two Views: Too Like the Lightningby Ada Palmerreviewed by Robbie Eginton

New York: Tor Books, 2016; $26.99 hc; 432 pages

Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances.

—Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

Ada Palmer’s debut novel, Too Like the Lightning, makes a fierce yet ambivalent argument: ambivalent, because it is filtered through a mercurial, unreliable narrator and because the persuasive ideas put forth by its characters are also politically favorable to them. Palmer writes about an uncertain utopia, a moment in future history when real progress seems to have been made and further work remains to be done in a world which has evolved believably from our own. Despite its utopian attitudes, the novel is as much about how politics, power, and desire really work as it is about the virtues of her twenty-fifth-century society. Book one of a planned quartet with the second due out in early 2017, it also picks up many of the futurist and theological themes present in Palmer’s work as a composer and lyricist for the Renaissance/folk/filk a capella group Sassafrass. Her prose is engaging but rarely elegant it feels grainy and overstuffed like a tasty meat lover’s sandwich eaten on a sandy beach. Too Like the Lightning is a novel of ideas more than a novel of character, but it’s also a novel of baroque and delightful detail. I have serious emotional, philosophical, and political issues with what the book seems to be saying, and I recommend heartily that you read it: this is a brilliant, engrossing, hard-to-put down work of speculative fiction that needs desperately to be answered.

Otto Binder: The Life and Work of a Comic Book and Science Fiction Visionaryby Bill Schellyreviewed by D. Douglas Fratz

Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2016; $19.95 tpb; 352 pages

Otto Binder is best known as one of the most prolific writers of comic books with over 3,000 stories written between 1938 and 1969, many of which chronicled the iconic superhero families of Captain Marvel and Superman. Many of those stories were firmly in the science fiction genre, including classic work for EC Comics, DC Comics, and others, and he began his writing career as one of the most prolific writers for the science fiction pulp magazines in the 1930s, returning often to science fiction in later decades up to his death in 1974. His most famous science fiction prose stories were the Adam Link series that began with “I, Robot” in 1939. (Many of his earliest stories were cowritten with his brother Earl and published under the joint pseudonym Eando Binder.) This comprehensive biography of Otto Binder by comic book historian Bill Schelly (with foreword by sf author Richard A. Lupoff) provides valuable information for fans and historians in the science fiction field as well as the comic book field.

The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeerreviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes

New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard; $25.00 tpb; 1160+ pages

Truth in advertising: This is a certainly a book; it is big; and it is stuffed full of science fiction.

Four years ago, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer published another book that was big. It was stuffed full of weird stories, and they called it (of all things) The Weird.

Like that book, The Big Book of Science Fiction takes an extremely broad and historical view of its topic, containing over a hundred stories by nearly as many writers (one writer has two stories and one three). And therein lies the rub: no sane reviewer would try to comment on each and every story in an anthology of this size. What one can do, then, is discuss the editors’ taste and their success in meeting their (stated or apparent) goals and perhaps add a few comments about the stories that stand out from their admittedly glittering company.