I discovered a week ago that a book review of mine will be published in The New York Review of Science Fiction. NYRSF is a fairly serious critical journal of the field (though not stuffy, as the ironic name attests) and is well-regarded enough to be nominated for the Hugo Award just about every year. It’s a pretty good place to have a byline, since it’s made up with articles with some well-known critics in the genre. There was only one problem.
I never submitted a review to The New York Review of Science Fiction.
Oh, I wrote it all right, but the first I heard of this was when I got sent the galleys. I figured it was some kind of mistake, but it was my review all right.
I wrote it for Tangent Online. That went under last winter. Since the review was about a book released in the summer of 2007 (Man Vs. Machine, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers), I figured there wasn’t any reason to market it. So I forgot about it until I got the e-mail.
What happened was that the editor of Tangent Online sent it to NYRSF. It’s actually not like the type of review NYRSF does (Tangent printed “laundry list” reviews – a quick review of all short stories in a magazine or anthology – while NYRSF generally publishes more thoughtful critical pieces.
In any case, it should be out next month or so.