Return of Dave Itzkoff

Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times Book Review, the SF reviewer who thinks SF sucks, is back with his second column, a review of this year's Nebula Awards Showcase. Itzkoff continues to go out of his way to annoy, for instance putting the spoiler warnings after his spoilers rather than before, just to be clever. His suggestion that few in the SF genre today can hold a candle to Anne McCaffrey gives further evidence of how little contemporary science fiction he has actually read.

Still, this column is a great improvement over Itzkoff's previous effort. At least he raises a topic worth discussing: the fascination with nostalgia in SF, a supposedly forward-looking genre. He also finds one story in the Nebula Awards anthology to praise strongly, "Embracing-the-New" by Benjamin Rosenbaum. One hopes that if Itzkoff starts to catch up on his reading, he will realize how many talented authors there are in the SF genre today and eventually develop into an adequate reviewer.