The New York Review of Science Fiction

NYRSF Issue 355 Table of Contents

• Mark Scroggins: Wheldrakean Lineages: Michael Moorcock and Algernon Charles Swinburne
• Mir Seidel: Tesla and Gernsback: An Untold Influence on the Birth of the Genre
• Eric Leif Davin: The Facts in the Matter of Hugo Gernsback and Stanley G. Weinbaum
• The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn, reviewed by Damien Broderick
• Jonathan Hay: The Posthuman Trajectory of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Universe
• Read This: recently read and recommended by Donald M. Hassler
• Terry Thompson: An Outpost of “Technology and Empire”: H.G. Wells’s “In the Avu Observatory”
• Michael Swanwick: Singular Interviews: Henry Wessells
• The Lady from the Black Lagoon by Mallory O’Meara, reviewed by Pete Rawlik
• Gustavo Bondoni: Ellison’s Love Letter to Bradbury: “He Who Grew Up Reading Sherlock Holmes”
• Ron Drummond: as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch
• Editorial: Getting Past

NYRSF Issue 355 Editorial: Getting Past

Okay, it’s been a little while again. While the pandemic is not gone, here it is waning. Thanks to the efforts of local politicians, the New York government opened a region-specific vaccination site in lower Westchester which helped cut through the logistical nightmare of the early days of the vaccine rollout; as a result, our household has been vaccinated since late March. One point I make periodically is that the shape of the future is a political question, not (just) an engineering one, let alone a “science” one. Over the last year that’s become more and more obviously true of the future of the covid-19 pandemic specifically. The creation of the vaccines was a scientific miracle—especially of mrna vaccines, new technology in its first field test.

NYRSF Issue 356 Table of Contents

• Sandra J. Lindow: Crafting the Hinge in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home
• American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe, reviewed by Joe Milicia
• Michael Swanwick: Singular Interviews: Greer Gilman
• To Rouse Leviathan by Matt Cardin, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer
• Jonathan Crowe: Maps in Science Fiction
• The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again and Settling the World: Selected Stories 1969–2020 by M. John Harrison, reviewed by Rob Latham
• David Langford: Beyond the Outposts: An Introduction
• Editorial: What Year Is It, Anyway?

NYRSF 353 Editorial: Vexed by Pestilence

My last editorial signed off with:

As I write this, there are now six known cases of Covid-19 in New Rochelle, about five miles from my house. I came home from work early today with a cough and apparent fever, but it seems that the fever was an inaccurate reading from an old thermometer and the cough was just a slightly amplified version of my usual allergy symptoms. So it’s back to work for me tomorrow, washing my hands every time I think of it. Take care of yourselves and we’ll see you in April.

Issue 353 Table of Contents

• Victor Grech: Pandemics: Known Unknowns and Our Failure to Prevent Our Unwilling Participation in a Dystopian SF Scenario, in Two Parts
• Harry Martinson: The Star Song
• Carlis Nixon: A Different Perspective on Maia’s Journey in The Goblin Emperor
• Mike Barrett: Unearthly Encounters: The Weird Fiction of Bernard Capes
• Joe Sanders: The Hearse on the Borderland: Kate Wilhelm’s “Mystery” Fiction
• Read This: recently read and recommended by Lee Weinstein
• Brian Stableford: Farewell to the Fays
• Editorial: Vexed by Pestilence

NYRSF Issue 352 Editorial: Opens Up One Eager Eye

Well, that was a while, wasn’t it?

Around the time our last issue came out in April of last year, my day-job company announced that it was purchasing another firm. My work involves supporting a stock trading desk, and we acquired a smaller trading firm to move our trading operations onto the smaller company’s proprietary technology. This was the largest professional project I’ve ever been involved in; the number of people involved in just the aspects that directly affected me was several times the number of people who worked for Crossover Technologies/Unplugged Games, the computer game company tht employed me through the 1990s. The main project lasted six months, from the end of March to the middle of September, with long days and few breaks. I was off balance and worn out for the entire time. When that project was done there was a great backlog of household tasks that carried me into the next big work project....

Issue 352 Table of Contents

• Ian Campbell: Double Estrangement and Developments in Arabic SF: ’Aḥmad Sa‘dāwi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad
• Joan Gordon: The Ghostly Archive of Gene Wolfe’s “Memorare”
• Get in Trouble by Kelly Link, reviewed by Joe Sanders
• Moderan by David R. Bunch, reviewed by Dan’l Danehy-Oakes
• David Langford: Introduction to New Maps: More Uncollected John Sladek
• Zen Amen: A Collection of Abecedarians by Michael Kriesel, reviewed by Sandra Lindow
• Brian Stableford: The Science Fiction of Paul Gsell
• Donald M. Hassler: Survival of the Fittest in Sonnet Form
• Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart: A Novel of First Contact by Steven Erikson, reviewed by John Clute
• Clark Ashton Smith: The Emperor of Dreams, a film by Darren Coelho Spring, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer
• Editorial: Opens Up One Eager Eye

NYRSF Issue 351 Editorial: Losses and Setbacks

Gene Wolfe died back in April. I don’t think it’s a secret that Wolfe was one of our favorite writers—my own and also NYRSF’s. Wolfe’s work, elusive and allusive and bursting with creativity, is the white fountain at the center of the substantial science fiction that this magazine was founded to celebrate.

Issue 351 Table of Contents

Camille Butera: “The Dismal Fantasy of the Cold Vacuity”: Lovecraft, Lewis, and Science Fiction as a Means of Processing the Great War

Skye Cervone: Fostering Responsibility: Human/Animal Relationships in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries

Twelve Tomorrows 2018, edited by Wade Roush, reviewed by John Clute

The Asylum of Dr. Caligari by James Morrowreviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

Nader Elhefnawy: Of Science Fiction and Forecasting

Terry Thompson: “An Umbrella, Broken”: du Maurier, “The Birds,” and the Chamberlain Years

Donald M. Hassler: Joan Slonczewski’s The Highest Frontier, Preceded by Tentatively Seeded Genre Implications, After Suvin

Mack Hassler: Easter 2018

Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age, edited by Everett Hamner, reviewed by Damien Broderick

Gregory Benford: Losing Lennon

Photos

Editorial: Losses and Setbacks

Issue 350 Table of Contents

• Michael Bishop: Afterword to The Sacerdotal Owl and Three Other Long Tales: A Long Tale Cut Short?
  
• Michael Swanwick: Two Terrors and the Myth of Solitude
• Ron Drummond: On the Reach of Her Words
• Dave Drake: How It Was Back Then
• Donald M. Hassler: Special Creation
• What Is Anything? Memoirs of a Life in Lovecraft by S.T. Joshi, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer
• Michael Andre-Driussi: Jack Vance, Man of Mystery
• Brian Stableford: The Unabolished Fays: Some Successors of the Comtesse De Murat
• Victor Grech: Star Trek: Voyager—a Homeric Odyssey
• Photos
• Editorial: Glorantha: Another Magical World