The New York Review of Science Fiction

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

Issue #99, November 1996

FEATURES

Samuel R. Delany: The Politics of Paraliterary Criticism (part 2): 1

Nancy Lambert: Now Wait for Last Year: A Review of LA-Con III, August 29 to September 2, 1996: 5

Miguel Angel Fernández-Delgado: A Brief History of Continuity and Change in Mexican Science Fiction: 18

REVIEWS

William Gibson's Idoru, reviewed by Ariel Haméon: 1

Shariann Lewitt's Memento Mori, reviewed by Michael M. Levy: 7

Alexander Jablokov's River of Dust, reviewed by Andy Duncan: 12

Jonathan Lethem's Amnesia Moon and The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye, reviewed by Sarah Smith: 13

Naomi Mitchison's Solution Three, reviewed by Stephanie A. Smith: 14

Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove's The Two Georges, reviewed by Philip E. Smith: 15

Emily Devenport's Eggheads, reviewed by Gwyneth Jones: 16

Martha Well's City of Bones, reviewed by Brian C. Wilson: 19

Jack McDevitt's Ancient Shores, reviewed by Paul Preuss: 21

John deChancie's Innerverse, reviewed by Greg L. Johnson: 23

PLUS

A Read This by Phyllis Eisenstein (p. 17), Screed (p. 23), an Erratum (p. 23), and an editorial (p. 24).

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Reviewers Guidelines

Now we are 99, and sometimes a bit punchy from the effort. We have evolved in subtle ways, yet remain the same magazine we set out to produce, monthly, in 1988. One of our first goals was to raise the level of reviewing in the sf field, since we felt that it had fallen low. But now, years later, when we looked at our own writers guidelines (that form sent out to prospective writers for the magazine) we discovered that it said a lot about how to submit but not enough about how to write the kind of review we wish to encourage.

When we founded the NYRSF, we devoted a lot of discussion to the form of the ideal review and presented our ideas at many science fiction conventions on panels. One day, then-editor Greg Cox, master of metaphor, invented the example of the Samurai Vampire subgenre novel. It was so compressed, clear, and to the point that it became our standard summary description.

The rest would have been history had it ever been preserved. Nothing ever again will match the spontaneity (and gestures) of Greg Cox's original live delivery on stage. But as instruction to later generations of reviewers, we have prevailed upon him to write down the bare schema of his magnificent system and present it here under the rubric:

AGAIN, SAMURAI VAMPIRES

The difference between a quickie review ("thumbs up!") and genuine criticism is often a sense of context.

Take the latest samurai vampire novel, for instance. A good NYRSF review should do more than simply report the reviewer's gut reaction to this particular book. It should place it in the context of the author's other work, and of the work of others today, and in the past in this esteemed and popular category. Indeed it should place this individual novel within the larger context of samurai vampire fiction as a whole. Where does this book fit in the grand history of the saumrai vampire novel? How does it compare against the great samurai vampire novels of the past? What are the essential virtues, expectations, and/or limitations of the entire samurai vampire genre? And does this novel imply whither goest the samurai vampire novel?

This sort of context can make a good review all the more informative and illuminating.

And at the NYRSF, we still want our reviewers to aspire to this goal. Commonly when we edit a review we ask the writer for more context. And we recommend these considerations to all reviewers everywhere.

We want to thank Greg Cox for this moment of enlightenment.

--David G. Hartwell & the Editors