We present Mark L. Blackman’s review of the monthly NYRSF Reading in New York City. 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, 6 May 2008, the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings Series featured readings by authors Kelly Link and Jennifer Stevenson, two contemporary stars of speculative fiction. The evening’s event was presented at the series’ current venue at the South Street Seaport Museum’s Melville Gallery, and curated by Jim Freund, host of WBAI-FM’s Hour of the Wolf, a weekly program on sf and fantasy.
It was an impressive turn-out. The audience of nearly 50 included Dan Braum, Carol Emshwiller, Amy Goldschlager, Liz Gorinsky, Gavin Grant (a co-editor and co-publisher of Link’s), Alaya Dawn Johnson, Barbara Krasnoff, Matthew Kressel, Ellen Kushner, Sarah Langan, Colleen Lindsay, Gordon Linzner, Betsy Mitchell (Stevenson’s editor), Sharyn November, Bob Rodriguez, Veronica Schemes, Delia Sherman, and Henry Wessels. When the readers were delayed (my friends will be proud that I didn’t make a joke about the Missing Link), Jim half-joked about drafting a reader from the audience.
The first reader was author and editor Kelly Link, whose stories and collections have won the Nebula, the James Tiptree, Jr., and the World Fantasy Awards, and been selected for favorite and best of the year lists by Time, Salon, The Village Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Capitol Times. Fighting a bout of bronchitis, Kelly read “The Cinderella Game”, a variously creepy, charming, and amusing story about the playtime of an alternately evil step-sister and step-brother. Not strictly fantasy, though alluding thematically to the titular fairy tale, it will be appearing in the anthology Troll’s Eye View, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.
Jennifer Stevenson was up next. Her first novel, Trash Sex Magic, from Small Beer Press, was twice long-listed for the Nebula Award and short-listed for the Locus best first novel award. Her current trilogy, The Brass Bed, The Velvet Chair, and The Bearskin Rug, published by Ballantine (and not, as one might suppose, IKEA), are, in a very unusual scheduling decision, coming out in consecutive months (respectively, April 2008, later this month, and June), rather than appearing approximately a year apart, to the delight of her fans. Jen read from the beginning of The Brass Bed, an erotic fantasy set in a magical Chicago, in which a consumer affairs inspector looking into a possibly fraudulent sex therapist encounters a (literally randy) sex demon. Her selection opened with a Sex and the City-ish lunch date, then jumped vigorously into the aforementioned item of furniture (the McGuffin of the novel), a passionate scene that seems doubtful to air on Jim’s radio show. Stevenson read a bit too quickly, which was more detrimental in the dialog of the first scene than in the descriptive monolog of the hot, sweaty sex (and its aftermath) scene, where a sweeping pace fit. There being time, Jen shared her enthusiasm for recreational roller derby with the gathering. (She skates with Derby Lite, a Chicagoland recreational roller derby league “for women old enough to know better,” where her nom de guerre is “Flash Hottie”.) And she offered smoking pigeon tattoos to audience members who bought copies of her books.
Afterward, as customary, the guests and a number of the audience adjourned to a nearby pub for dinner and conversation.
—Mark L. Blackman