New SFWA Bulletin To Printer

Bulletin203_cover_front-e1393306714278The SFWA Bulletin will shortly be moving from stasis box to mail box. Issue 203 will be the first published since last May, ending a hiatus triggered by controversy over sexist art and articles in issues 199-202.

The next number is guest-edited by Tansy Rayner Roberts, winner of the 2013 Best Fan Writer Hugo, with a cover by Galen Dara, winner of the 2013 Best Fan Artist Hugo. (Perhaps I’m the only one who finds this ironic.)

Yet another red-haired babe decorates the cover, but this one is wrapped from crown to toe in Middle-Eastern silks. Anyway, popular wisdom holds you can’t tell a book by its cover – although that was probably just as true when Red Sonja was on it. Issue 203 features pieces by Sheila Finch, Richard Dansky, James Patrick Kelly, Cat Rambo, Ari Asercion, Michael Capobianco, Russell Davis, M.C.A. Hogarth, Nancy Holder and Erin Underwood, among many others, and interviews with Eileen Gunn, Adam Rakunas and 2013 Norton winner E.C. Myers

4 thoughts on “New SFWA Bulletin To Printer

  1. “The next number is guest-edited by Tansy Rayner Roberts, winner of the 2013 Best Fan Writer Hugo, with a cover by Galen Dara, winner of the 2013 Best Fan Artist Hugo. (Perhaps I’m the only one who finds this ironic.)”

    Trust me; you are not…

    Curt Phillips

  2. Just what the hell does a woman in Middle Eastern silks (on a horse yet) have to do with anything science fictional? Oh, I’m sure that someone will point out an “SF/F” rationale for it. And you can find blogs denouncing Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein for having inflicted all of their horrible, unreadable schlock on us that has fortunately since been replaced by modern, literary “SF/F”. And Locus gleefully tells us that the Cambellian revolution in SF is dead, especially as long as you can make a fast buck off of it in the bookstores’ designated “sci-fi” aisles. But aren’ t we seeing in this snapshot of the SFWA’s politically correct organ proof of the rejection of what Norman Spinrad pointed out were SF’s Enlightenment origins and values? And doesn’t this symbolize what’s gone wrong with that organization? Twenty-odd years ago, Frederick Pohl rejected arguments that the SFWA become the SFFWA, because he believed that writers of authentic science fiction – and not perhaps more commercially profitable but less meaningful fantasy – needed their own space. He was ignored, and since then SF has been invaded and abused by vampires, zombies, dragons, elves, unicorns, pseudo-medievel romances, etc., ad nauseum, and worse, the censorious neopuritan comrades of Political Correctness…….

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