Issue 2 - Ashley, Chabon, Christakos, McKee

EDITORIAL:
Welcome to the second issue of Fruitless Recursion.  I must say that while I've been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the pieces I have received this far for the journal, I think that I can comfortably say that this is our best issue yet (and seeing as it's only our second official one, that's at the very least a step in the right direction).  I'm particularly happy with the way that this issue illustrates the variety of possible ways in which a critic can approach his or her subject material and how the different critical perspectives of each review has cast new light on not only the texts being reviewed, but also the ultimate subject matter; genre itself.  That is indeed a fruitful recursion.

 For example, Paul Kincaid's review of Mike Ashley's Gateways to Forever takes what is really quite a dry and lengthy work of empirical field work and turns it into a great review that touches upon the hazards and limitations of a 'dispassionate' or even 'objective' approach to the history of science fiction.  Even when you are dealing with the history of SF magazines, is it possible to simply gather the facts and leave the analysis up to others? 

In a similar vein, Niall Harrison's review of Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends takes a closer look at the subtleties of Chabon's attitudes towards genre.  When Chabon began championing genre in a way that eventually lead him to picking up this year's Hugo award for The Yiddish Policeman's Union, many saw this as an established author returning to his first love with considerable success but, as Niall suggests, while Chabon may indeed love genre, his interest in it may not be the kind of interest that turns him permanently into a genre author. 

Gabriel McKee's The Gospel According the Science Fiction is put out by a publisher who specialises in Christian texts, but Alvaro Zinos-Amaro's examination of the book treats McKee's christianity as just another critical lens through which to examine SF and, just as one can enjoy Marxist or psychoanalytical SF criticism without buying into either of those ideas, Alvaro considers what a Christian world view can bring to SF even if one is not a Christian. 

The final piece is my review of NGChristakos' journal Studies in Modern Horror.  Given that this is a collection of pieces by different authors, I decided to examine the entire series from the stand-point of the editorial vision laid out in the first issue.  I think that my review demonstrates some of the difficulties involved in adopting a strong but rather narrow editorial voice.

Thank you all for reading.

- Jonathan McCalmont
(Editor)

THIS ISSUE'S PIECES:

• Paul Kincaid's review of Mike Ashley's Gateways to Forever: The Story of Science Fiction Magazines from 1970 to 1980.
• Alvaro Zinos-Amaro's review of Gabriel McKee's The Gospel According to Science Fiction: From the Twilight Zone to the Final Frontier.
• Niall Harrison's review of Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends.
• Jonathan McCalmont's review of Studies in Modern Horror, edited by NGChristakos.

INTERESTING LINKS:

• Chabon's Maps and Legends reviewed by Mark Kamine at the New York Times.  See also Andrew Wheeler at ComixMix.
• Kincaid's What it is We do When We Read Science Fiction is reviewed by Steven H Silver at The SF Site.
• Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy and Weese's Feminist Narrative and the Supernatural  are both reviewed by Georges T. Dodds at The SF Site.
• Russ' The Country You Have Never Seen is reviewed by Karen Burnham at Spiral Galaxy Reviewing Laboratory.
• Broderick's Year Million is reviewed by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro at Strange Horizons.