In a special season-extending event, on the evening of Tuesday 7 July 2009 (Heinlein’s birthday), the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings Series featured a trio of readings from Federations, a newly published anthology of cosmos-spanning tales, original and reprinted both, of interstellar societies edited by John Joseph Adams. Presented at the NYRSF Readings’ once and future venue at the South Street Seaport Museum’s Melville Gallery, the event’s guest curator was the anthology’s editor.
Yes, the Melville Gallery. There was a last-second relocation from the Series’s current venue, the Museum’s main building at 12 Fulton Street. This development came as a complete and sudden surprise to the Series’s executive curator, Jim Freund, host of WBAI-FM’s Hour of the Wolf, a weekly program on sf and fantasy, who had promoted the event barely a day earlier as being at 12 Fulton Street, but, fortuitously, he had schlepped the necessary electronic gear to accommodate the Melville space. (Well, exodus is another venerable motif of space opera, and maybe Adams can get a future anthology out of it.) The room, alas, was on the stuffy side, and impromptu fans (at least one paper plate) fluttered, reminding us why the Series takes off for the summer.
After briefly apologizing for the confusion before the audience of nearly 45 (happily, the move apparently had not deterred anyone), Freund turned the evening over to Adams. Reading from the anthology’s introduction, Adams noted that, while the subgenre of the vast, galactic federation, empire, or interstellar alliance is most familiar to many from Star Trek and Star Wars, to which he acknowledged his own debt for interesting him in science fiction, the concept harkens back to E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation.
The first reader was Hugo-winning author Allen Steele, whose story, “The Other Side of Jordan”, was set in his “Coyoteverse”, the milieu of several novels centering on the Earth colony world of that name. Steele’s delivery was far from optimum, at times stumbling and even monotonous, further hampered by a hoarse voice (he’d recently given up smoking, a revelation which justly earned him a round of applause) and the challenge of digressing into footnotes (which he ably met). The tale itself, about the end of a love affair between a cargo handler on a spacefaring merchanter and the titular rich girl, set among a multispecies “galactic network of commerce and cultural exchange”, while occasionally ascending to heights of sense of wonder, was, on the whole, disappointing, a catalog of alien races.
After a break, next up was K. Tempest Bradford, whose breezily snarky offering, “Different Day”, was a reaction to the common premises that alien worlds have one culture/one global government and that, invariably, they “come to America first.” She cleverly posits rival alien tribes, just as mutually hostile as our contemporary nations, visiting and negotiating with other parts of the world (like Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama), though her present-day biases and digs limit the story’s shelf-life.
Genevieve Valentine, the evening’s final reader, presented the quietly gripping “Carthago Delenda Est” (“Carthage must be obliterated”, for those unfamiliar with Latin or the Punic Wars), about multiple generations of human and alien delegations assembled in space to await the arrival of an envoy from the eponymous world bringing a message of peace. (As it’s resulted already in 400 years of peace, muses Earth’s cloned ambassador, perhaps it would be better if the ship never comes.)
Federations features 23 stories from 25 writers, including, in addition to Bradford, Steele, and Valentine, Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason, Lois McMaster Bujold, Orson Scott Card, Alan Dean Foster, George R.R. Martin, Anne McCaffrey, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Alastair Reynolds, Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Silverberg, Harry Turtledove, and Catherynne M. Valente, and is available from Prime Books for $14.95. (For additional information, visit johnjosephadams.com/federations.)
Among the audience were Paul Berger, Chris Cevasco, Kris Dikeman, Barbara Krasnoff, Jon Messinger, Veronica Schanoes, Sarah Smith, and Terence Taylor. Afterward, as customary, the guests and perhaps two-thirds of the audience adjourned to a nearby pub for dinner and conversation.
Kudos to Jim Freund for a successful season!