The New York Review of Science Fiction

Steve Carper: Beyond “Deadline”: Three Additional WWII Atomic War Stories and the Office of Censorship

On June 28, 1943, Bryon Price, director of the United States Office of Censorship (OoC) and former executive news editor of the Associated Press, sent out a confidential note to 2,000 daily newspapers and 11,000 weeklies as well as all radio stations in the U.S. The note requested that editors prevent any articles or broadcasts from mentioning:

Production or utilization of atom smashing, atomic energy, atomic fission, atomic splitting, or any of their equivalents.

The use for military purposes of radium or radioactive materials, heavy water, high voltage discharge equipment, cyclotrons.

The following elements or any of their compounds: polonium, uranium, ytterbium, hafnium, protactinium, radium, rhenium, thorium, deuterium.

NYRSF 341 Editorial: The Time Warp

The eagle-eyed among you may well have noticed that we have skipped the cover date of this issue several months forward from the previous issue—this is June 2017, reflecting the actual publication date, as opposed to #340’s December 2016, which came out in mid-April.

Issue 341 (June 2017) Table of Contents

• Steve Carper: Beyond “Deadline”: Three Additional WWII Atomic War Stories and the Office of Censorship
• Brian Stableford: The Fantastic Fiction of Maurice Magre, Part I: Claire d’Amour
• Read This: recently read and recommended by Anne Zanoni
• Ron Drummond: Days of Rising Salt: Artistic Choice and Critical Distinction
• Mike Barrett: Tales of a Ghostly Design: The Fiction of T.G. Jackson
• The Terrorists of Irustan by Louise Marley, reviewed by Anne Leonard
• Victor Grech: Doctor by Doctor: Dr. Leonard Horatio McCoy
• Read This: recently read and recommended by Darrell Schweitzer
• Michael Andre-Driussi: Notes on “The Prophets’ Paradise” of The King in Yellow
• David Drake: Paths Through Dark Woods
• Photos
• Editorial: The Time Warp

The Terrorists of Irustan by Louise Marley, reviewed by Anne Leonard

New York: Ace Books, 1999; $13.00 tpb; 323 pages

1.

When a girl in Irustan turns eight, she puts on a veil with three layers: the drape, which hangs to her waist and frames her face, covering neck and shoulders; the verge, which covers the mouth and nose; and the rill, a light fabric which covers her entire face, barely allowing her to see. At home, woman are not required to wear the rill, but everywhere else they must. The only man who can see a woman unveiled is her husband.

This is the world of Louise Marley’s The Terrorists of Irustan, first published in 1999. It is a cousin to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; like Atwood, Marley has created a world where women live cloistered and inferior lives inside draconian theocracies. Like Offred, Marley’s protagonist Zahra is in the household of a man of power; her husband, Qadir IbSada, is the Chief Director of the ExtraSolar Corporation, which rules Irustan.

Read This: recently read and recommended by Darrell Schweitzer

Of Eggs, Chickens, and the Fall of Rome

Macrobius (or Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius) was a writer of the early fifth century ce, about whom little is known, save that he may have been a Romanized Greek from Egypt. He wrote, in Latin, the Saturnalia (available in three volumes from the Loeb Classical Library), which is part of a genre popular in late antiquity, descended from the dialogues of Plato but devolved into light reading. The Saturnalia is in the form of a lengthy imaginary dinner conversation between (mostly) real people, who were not necessarily acquainted or even alive when the book was written. It is a vast compendium of curious lore somewhat akin to the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius or The Learned Banqueters of Athenaeus, filled with discourses on the divinity of the Sun, the universal wisdom of Vergil, arcane points of grammar, and even speculations on the workings of the human digestive system.

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.

NYRSF 340 Editorial: The Cruelest Month

The last time I heard from Michael Levy was in mid-March. I’d sent out a round of jog letters to reviewers, and I was surprised that list included Mike, usually our fastest and most reliable reviewer. I soon got back a very short reply, apologizing and saying that things had been “horrible” for him of late and that he hadn’t had time.

I don’t know if he knew how little time he had left. Despite our amiable relationship, I wasn’t the type of friend to whom he would confide if he suspected that things were going to end very soon.

Issue 340 (December 2016) Table of Contents

John Foyster: Gregory Benford: Science Fiction and Scientist Fiction

Lee Weinstein: In Search of the Vegetable Caterpillar

Michael Andre-Driussi: Alas, Babylon and the Cuban Nukes

Andy Duncan: A Master’s Thesis, 1995

Brian Stableford: An Isle of Amour and the Human Paradise: The Futuristic Fiction of Nicolas Ségur

Victor Grech: Avatar Dances with Wolves

Donald M. Hassler: The Tangled Bank that Writers Inhabit: New Windows on Jules Verne

Wynonna Earp, Season One, reviewed by A. P. Canavan

Photos

Editorial The Cruelest Month

Brian Stableford: An Isle of Amour and the Human Paradise: The Futuristic Fiction of Nicolas Ségur

In a previous article in these pages (“Technology and Liberty in French Utopian Fiction,” NYRSF #334, based on the 2016 Thomas Taylor Lecture), I identified two interwoven threads in the development of French Utopian fiction in the nineteenth and early twentieth century which addressed the roles to be played in a hypothetical utopian society by advanced technology and sexual liberation. That analysis paid particular attention to a train of thought inspired by the political philosophy of Anarchism reflected in Joseph Déjacque’s L’Humanisphère, utopie anarchique (1858–61; partially tr. as “The Future World of the Humanisphere”), Paul Adam’s Lettres de Malaisie (1898; tr. as “Letters from Malaisie”), André Couvreur’s Caresco surhomme, ou le voyage en Eucrasie (1904; tr. as Caresco, Superman; or, A Voyage to Eucrasia), Gaston Danville’s Le Parfum de volupté (1905; tr. as The Perfume of Lust), Han Ryner’s Les Pacifiques (1914; tr. as “The Pacifists”) and Marcel Rouff’s Voyage au monde à l’envers (1920; tr. as Journey to the Inverted World).

Andy Duncan: A Master’s Thesis, 1995

[When Andy Duncan asked me whether NYRSF would be interested in reading the introduction to his master’s thesis, I responded yes instantly even though I had never read an MFA thesis and thus had no true idea what it encompassed. I was delighted to find so much of Andy present even in this formal document—his love for the written word, for voices, for the fantastic and the star-crossed all pour out as he lays his stories down for judgment. Enjoy.—kjm and the eds.]

Abstract

DUNCAN, ANDREW ROBERT. Our Stories Thus Far. (Under the direction of John J. Kessel.)

This is a collection of five stories both fantastical and historical. “From Alfano’s Reliquary” is a tale of skullduggery in the medieval Church of Rome. “Beluthahatchie” depicts the travels of a Depression-era blues guitarist who dies and goes not to Hell but to the next railway station past Hell. “Grand Guignol” is about backstage intrigue at the 1920s Parisian theater of gore. “Liza and the Crazy Water Man” is a romance set amid the Charlotte country-music industry of the 1930s. Finally, “The Chief Designer” is a speculative and mystical portrait of the guiding genius of the Soviet space program.

Lee Weinstein: In Search of the Vegetable Caterpillar

Back when I was a young teenager, I came across an intriguing item in Robert Ripley’s first Believe It or Not! book (1929). The text read “The pepe-aweto of the Maoris. Strangest insect on Earth. A caterpillar that turns into a plant.” It was accompanied by a drawing of a caterpillar with a long stem rising vertically from one end, with some feathery looking branches at the top. Below the drawing the text continued: “Is it an insect or a vegetable?”

As someone who was eventually to become a biology major in college, my curiosity was greatly sparked by the cartoon, but, at the time, I was a 14- or 15-year-old with little in the way of either research skills or reference materials. I did know that Ripley promoted himself as a man who could prove every statement he made, but it wasn’t until years later that I was to discover that Ripley would consider something “proven” if he could point to something in print that provided a source, whether or not that source was reliable. In this case, even though he did not cite a source, I sensed both at the time and later on that the cartoon referred to something quite real.