In what has become an annual tradition (anything done once is a precedent, twice a tradition), in the spirit of the December holidays season, on the evening of Tuesday 14 December 2010 (as, all over town, brass monkeys were becoming geldings), the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings Series celebrated its third “Family Night.” Featured, as last December and the one before, was the family of Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman (formally married since 2004). Also, in keeping with tradition, as last year, the guest curator was Claire Wolf Smith, who had served as the NYRSF Reading Series’ third curator. Unlike 2008 and 2009, however, the event was held at the Series’ current venue at the SoHo Gallery for Digital Art, hailed by Wolf Smith as the nicest digs the Series has been in.
Starting the festivities off, the Series’ executive curator Jim Freund, host of WBAI-FM’s Hour of the Wolf radio program on sf and fantasy, welcomed the crowd, explained the readings’ postponement to the second Tuesday of the month (due to a conflict with a memorial for literary agent Ralph Vicinanza), which, as it happened, meant being only one day away from the third Wednesday’s Fantastic Fiction Reading at the KGB Bar, and reported on his show’s new time slot. (The long-running live radio program, now broadcasts and streams every Wednesday night/Thursday morning from 1:30-3:00AM on WBAI, 99.5 FM. While he was noncommittal about the change, authors seemed to like it.) Finally, he announced the impressive upcoming line-up of readers: best-selling authors Rick Moody and Gary Shteyngart in January, and Samuel R. Delany and Andrea Hairston in February, then turned the podium over to Wolf Smith.
After alluding briefly to her last year’s recap of the Series’ history (at which she settled the question of its 20th anniversary), Wolf Smith introduced the first of the couple reading, Ellen Kushner, award-winning novelist, performer, klezmer devotee, public radio personality and (with Sherman) co-founder of the Interstitial Arts Foundation. Ellen reiterated the “Family Night” theme by reminding us that “December’s poster girls” were legally married in Massachusetts and pointing out their wedding photos displayed around the room on the SGDA’s screens, along with covers of their books, as enabled by the Gallery’s screens-instead-of-canvases exhibition format.
As she did last year (tradition!), Kushner read from an unpublished work, a short story, “The Duke of Riverside” (set to be published next year in Ellen Datlow’s Naked Cities). The humorous story, set in the eponymous disreputable section of the great city, filling in a gap between her “mannerpunk” (swashbuckling historical fantasy of manners) novels, recounted how the apparently ragged, grubby, penniless student Alec befriended the notorious swordsman Richard St Vier, and became the titular Duke—the Mad Duke—Tremontaine. A few of her books, she advertised, were for sale at the back of the room.
Following a break, Wolf Smith opened the second half of the evening by presenting Delia Sherman. Known for writing historical/folkloric/semi-comic fairy stories with a serious twist, the selection Sherman read, the framing story from her forthcoming young adult novel The Freedom Maze, well-fit that description. (Sherman disclosed that she has been working on the book, which deals with slavery, since 1987, and half-jokingly indicated that, despite its imminent publication, is “still in progress.”) Opening in 1960, in the Deep South, in what’s left of a plantation on the Louisiana bayou, it relates the adventure of an unhappy 13-year-old girl whose parents have divorced and who is living with her obstinately old-fashioned—heck, cranky, belittling, benighted, bigoted, throwback relic—grandmother. Pouring out her wish to be somewhere and someone else to a magical creature (a hobgoblin?) she meets on the bayou, she finds herself transported a century back in time to what the old biddy might consider the good old days, though we enlightened know weren’t.
The audience of just about 50 included Richard Bowes, K. Tempest Bradford, Harold Garber, Amy Goldschlager, Ron Hogan (next month’s guest curator), Nora (N.K.) Jemisin, Barbara Krasnoff, Josh Kronengold, Gordon Linzner, Jon Messinger, Lisa Padol, Pete Smith, Terence Taylor, and Genevieve Valentine. Afterward, as customary, the guests and a number of audience members adjourned to a nearby pub, Milady’s, for dinner and conversation.
Happy holidays.