The New York Review of Science Fiction

Victor Grech: Crime and Punishment in Star Trek: Genocide and War Crimes

Introduction

The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) from the Greek genos (family, tribe, or race) and Latin -cide (killing). Lemkin was a Pole of Jewish descent and he used this term to describe the 1915 massacres of Armenians and Assyrians. Genocide may be defined as “the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group” (Funk 1).

NYRSF 343 Editorial: Plex: A Parable

I have a hobby—well, not so much a hobby as a habit. When I meet people, I punch them in the solar plexus. Well, again, “punch” isn’t the right word. Most times, it’s a just a light tap, a brush that passes quickly. Other times, if circumstances permit and the mood of the moment seems just right, I really haul off and punch. It’s my way of getting to know people, a little signature touch to assure that both I and my newfound acquaintance remember the moment.

Issue 343 (September 2017) Table of Contents

Victor Grech: Crime and Punishment in Star Trek: Genocide and War Crimes

Paul Voermans: Technique of Awful: When Extremity Takes Us Past the Real

Reality by Other Means: The Best Short Fiction of James Morrow, reviewed by Joe Sanders

Judith Collins: This Traveler

Donald M. Hassler: Old Man Musing after Nova TV, August 2017

Brian Stableford: The Fantastic Fiction of Maurice Magre III: The Quest for the Ideal

Mike Barrett: In Search of Earth: E.C. Tubb’s Dumarest Saga

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Editorial: Plex: A Parable

Judith Collins: This Traveler

for Brian Aldiss

You placed in my hand
a prehistory of mind.
(Yours?
Possibly.
Mine?
Undoubtedly.)
You called it a gift,
your gentle hold
as you relinquished it
betraying your fear
of awakening its angels.
You had etched
just beneath its skin
“Long life—lots of love”
and you kissed me
(I am sure
you wish the same
for all the girls.)

But—
from your high perch
above the ruins of Monemvasia,
does your eye grow tired,
looking over our shoulders?
Do you contemplate
each single entrance,
each love fading as it ascends,
its golden sandals losing luster
in dark tunnels, wearing thin
along the rocky, zig-zag path
toward the grassland above?
Would you warn us
of dark, doughty enemies,
invaders from the sea?
(Would we hear, above
the echoes of the ruins?)

Our sweet young ghosts
we leave at water’s edge.
Let them strengthen their limbs
in rock-strewn sand.
(The climb awaits.)
They cannot imagine as yet
how much more brilliant blue
the sea from each sad height.

Reality by Other Means: The Best Short Fiction of James Morrow, reviewed by Joe Sanders

Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2015; $30.00 hc 320 pages

It’s difficult to review James Morrow’s fiction without lapsing into a lecture about the importance of satiric literature—Candide, “A Modest Proposal,” yadayadayada—building up to an exhortation that “This Is Important and You Should Read It Because It’s Good for You!” Well, yes, you should read this book, but not out of a grim sense of duty. At his best, when he’s not overcome by outrage at our narrow-minded cruelty, Morrow argues effectively for humane tolerance. He’s thoughtful and funny.

Brian Stableford: The Fantastic Fiction of Maurice Magre III: The Quest for the Ideal

I do not know whether there are people who escape despair, and if there are, I believe that they are not very numerous. I do not envy those people. There is in despair a bitter substance, a fecund poison, the seed of a superior virtue that one cannot find elsewhere. Everyone, sooner or later, ought to aspire to the juice of the hemlock that gives wings, the sacred belladonna. But it is necessary to be able to drink the poison and not die.

Paul Voermans: Technique of Awful: When Extremity Takes Us Past the Real

The subject of a holocaust—and the one we call The Holocaust—can I use it in fiction or does it use me? Will you object to my appropriation and should I care? In any case, when compelled to speak of such darkness, language copes, shifts, concentrates.

If it isn’t true that to “write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”1 nor that it makes it “impossible to write,” I am sure that in every tent of character we pitch within fiction, however sweet or escapist, there is in some corner, now, unimaginable death.

NYRSF 342 Editorial: Best Laid

This did not end up being the July issue, as I had hoped it would be; life continues, in its various ways, to confound our plans. Our next issue should be out at the beginning of September, though, and I hope that we can return to something like our previous Rube Goldberg clockwork precision.

Issue 342 (August 2017) Table of Contents

David Swanger: “Here Are Dragons”: Charting the Depths and Borders of Fantasy

Takayuki Tatsumi: Apocrypha Now!Welcome to the Quintessence of Japanese Speculative Fiction

Terry Thompson: “In Rama”: A Slaughter of the Innocents Allusion in Frankenstein

Joe Sanders: Taking Another Look at Michael Bishop: Two Early Stories

Read This: recently read and recommended by Fran Wilde

Bernadette L. Bosky: On Rereading Stephen King’s Rose Madder

David Langford: Random Reading 18

Brian Stableford: The Fantastic Fiction of Maurice Magre, Part II: Reconstructing History

Michael Andre-Driussi: Notes for Survivors (1975)

Gustavo Bondoni: Snapshots of the Brazilian Scene: Thoughts on Four Brazilian SF/F Books

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Editorial: Best Laid

Gustavo Bondoni: Snapshots of the Brazilian Scene: Thoughts on Four Brazilian SF/F Books

As an Argentine science fiction writer working out of Buenos Aires, I envy writers based in large markets. I personally have the advantage that my first language, reading- and writing-wise, is and always has been English, but many of my countrymen need to learn to write in the tongue of Shakespeare or face the stark realities of publishing in Spanish.

Due to its being a tiny market, comparatively speaking, the Argentine publication process for debut or little-known writers consists of approaching a publishing house that will invariably be delighted to publish your award-winning manuscript ... as long as you foot the bill. Yog’s Law (“Money flows to the writer”) is notably absent in any serious publishing conversation here. This reality is reflected in the often uneven quality of the work published in South America: nuggets of genius have to be mined from a quantity of dross produced by people whose only meaningful qualification was that they simply had the funds to get it done at that particular moment in time.

Read This: recently read and recommended by Fran Wilde

A Particular Magic: Two Books from Ellen Klages

In a printed book, words can press together like a kiss or line up into a story. It’s all a matter of how the pages are folded or divided. It’s a particular bit of everyday paper magic that allows us to open up worlds.

In a similar way, Ellen Klages has combined physics and magic in not one but two books published during the turbulent spring of 2017. More than that, Passing Strange, a novella from Tor.com publishing, and Wicked Wonders, a collection of short stories from Tachyon Publications, seem at first glance to be entirely separate entities, but they, too, connect when folded properly.