Once again, Mark L. Blackman attended the monthly NYRSF Readings in New York City, and submitted this write-up. Thanks, Mark. (And once again, we encourage other event-goers to write them up for SFScope. Simply e-mail your impressions to editor at sfscope dot com.)
On the evening of Tuesday 1 April 2008, the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings Series featured readings by authors J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. April Fool’s! That was a little (very little) joke from Jim Freund, host of WBAI-FM’s Hour of the Wolf, a weekly program on sf and fantasy, and the Series’s executive curator.
In actuality, the evening’s readers, presented at the NYRSF Readings’ venue at the South Street Seaport Museum’s Melville Gallery by guest curator (and curator emeritus) Amy Goldschlager, were authors Elizabeth Glover and Andy Duncan. And while neither is as notoriously reclusive as Salinger or Pynchon, they were more delightfully humorous and entertaining to the audience of nearly 30, which included writers Richard Bowes and Barbara Krasnoff, and Ellen Datlow. (Aha! This wasn’t the NYRSF Readings Series, but the KGB Fantastic Fiction Reading Series! April Fool’s!)
It may seem curious to refer to the humor of the two readings in view of the coincidence that both offerings partook of the diabolic, turning the evening from April Fool’s Day into April Demon’s Day, but hearty laughter was heard frequently from the crowd (a reminder that the genres of horror and humor have mixed nicely since even before Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein’s Monster and long before the Reaper reaped).
Glover’s engineering background was apparent in her story “MetaPhysics”, an amusing blend of fantasy and science fact that appeared in the August 2007 issue of Realms of Fantasy, in which a demon merrily engaged in dragging a soul off to Hell finds out if faith in Newton’s Laws may be as effective in warding off minions of the Devil as an intonation in Latin of the Pater Noster.
Duncan, a World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner and Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker Award nominee, read from “A Diorama of the Infernal Regions, or the Devil’s Ninth Question”, a story of his that was recently published in Wizards, a star-studded anthology edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. Set in post-bellum riverfront Tennessee, the initially gently charming tale was given added dimension by Duncan’s own, genuine Southern drawl. (The Devil, of course, was no stranger to the Mississippi’s famed humorist Mark Twain.) But this was the family show; read the story for the rest of it.
Afterward, as customary, the guests and a number of the audience adjourned to a nearby pub for dinner and conversation (and where Glover, in the process of moving out of New York, used her mutant ability—or perhaps her saber skills—to make sure that no one stiffed on the bill).
——Mark L. Blackman
Jim Freund writes that, while the audience was smaller (25-30 people) “we had a very high pro-to-fan ratio. Other writer/editors in the audience included Andrea Kail, Matthew Kressel, David Barr Kirtley, John Joseph Adams, and Douglas Cohen.