The New York Review of Science Fiction

Published monthly by Dragon Press, P. O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570. $4.00 per copy.

Issue #98, October 1996

FEATURES

Samuel R. Delany: The Politics of Paraliterary Criticism: 1

Susan Eisenhour: A Subversive in Hyperspace: C. J. Cherryh's Feminist Transformation of Space Opera: 1

REVIEWS

Melissa Scott's Night Sky Mine, reviewed by Gwyneth Jones: 13

Christopher Priest's The Prestige, reviewed by Dave Langford: 15

Cthulhu 2000, edited by James Turner, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer: 15

Greg Egan's Distress, reviewed by Russell Blackford: 17

Michael Barley's Jackal Bird, reviewed by Douglas Barbour: 18

Little Deaths: An Anthology of Erotic Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow, and Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex, edited by Ellen Datlow, reviewed by Candas Jane Dorsey: 19

The Williamson Effect, edited by Roger Zelazny, reviewed by Earl Wells: 20

Michael Moorcock's Elric: Song of the Black Sword, reviewed by Howard V. Hendrix: 22

PLUS

Pix! Comix! A reading list by Jack Cady (p. 21)! And an editorial (p. 24)!

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The Shadow of the Critic

In case you missed it on the front cover or table of contents, we begin in this issue a long essay on criticism by Samuel R. Delany, one which seems to us ground-breaking and iconoclastic. Years ago, when the founders of NYRSF were still the editorial board of our predecessor, The Little Magazine, Chip Delany and I used to talk about what's wrong with reviewing and criticism in the sf field and what might be done about it. One of the things we came up with was that there ought to be a monthly magazine with high standards for reviewing and critical essays, and it was upon the basis of that that NYRSF was later founded. But in fact we talked a good bit about the politics of criticism and the political behavior of sf critics, part of it just plain gossip but most of it a serious attempt to understand the political foundations underlying the writings of various major players in this particular area of critical theory since the 1960s.

For several years in this decade, Chip has been talking about writing an essay on the present state of sf criticism for us, but then delaying under the distractions of daily life and the reissue of many of his books in trade paperback, and the continuing demands of teaching and public lectures and interviews. At first, when this present essay arrived, I didn't know that this was it, the one on sf criticism that we had been hoping for. But the groundwork is dug and set with the first section on Understanding Comics (the part in this issue) and the argument grows larger and more complex and more focused on science fiction in the latter portions, particularly on the major figures such as Brian W. Aldiss and Darko Suvin who have influenced much that is written today by other sf critics.

This is not the end of the story for us, only the newest beginning. We would like to encourage a few survey articles, and a few bibliographical articles, on topics such as sf criticism in the 1950s and 1960s (desperately in need of decent bibliographical research, since many major pieces appeared as anthology introductions and as fanzine pieces), and single writers such as James Blish (an annotated checklist of his fanzine essays and reviews is an important desideratum). I am getting together a checklist of the nearly 100 essay introductions to the Gregg Press sf series in the 1970s and early 80s, some of them quite extensive, such as Joanna Russ's essay on Mary Shelley's short fiction, or Ormond A. Seavey's scholarly investigation of Richard Adams Locke's The Moon Hoax. All of them seem to have fallen out of currency and out of the discourse of contemporary sf criticism.

If there are any volunteers out there to tackle one or another of these difficult topics, contact us via our website, or at the address listed on the contents page. There's a lot of work to be done to prevent the necessity of too much wheel reinvention and wheel spinning.

Meanwhile, we have now got a table of contents of all NYRSF issues and more up on the web, and will have more and more links shortly. But Kathryn Cramer and I are going for the first two weeks of October to the Frankfurt Book Fair and to Octocon in Dublin thereafter, so delays shoud be expected.

--David G. Hartwell & the editors
http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/index.html