A deeply thoughtful collection that muses on the nature of SF and its sub-categories, though not one without blind spots
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| Cover art by Tom Joyes |
I am not, by nature, someone uninterested in history; my degree was, after all, somewhat directed into the ancient world, and the study of the past has long captured my attention. And so it is very strange to find myself reading a book that contains reviews (a thing I love) many of which focus on histories (also a thing I like) of science fiction (a genre I greatly enjoy), and feel... disconnected from it, as was my experience with Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction, the new Briardene Books volume from long-time critic of the genre, Paul Kincaid.
Split into three sections, the volume collects his reviews of Histories, Topics and Authors, covering a broad span of work on a wide-ranging set of texts, all in Kincaid's enjoyably acerbic tone. It's not a collection to pull punches either; when Kincaid dislikes a text he is reviewing, or finds it wanting at the fundamental or surface level, he doesn't hold back in offering up his critique (and as someone with a strong ideological support for the negative review, this was extremely welcome reading). Each review digs deep into the substance of the book in question, offering a clear view both of what that text is setting out to achieve and how well it does it, and any blind spots, omissions or unusual choices made in the process, alongside interesting bits of contextual information drawn from a frankly alarmingly broad knowledge of the field.
Before I get into the musing about why I felt that disconnection, I want to emphasise—I did enjoy reading this book, at times, immensely. It came with me on a flight, and I found myself giggling despite my deep discomfort with flying, so it must have been doing some things right. But I found, as I read, increasingly there was one lens through which I was viewing the whole of the book, and so the thing that affected most deeply my reading of it both as a text entire, and in its individual components: namely, that I very often looked at the science fiction(s) being presented to me on the page, and simply did not recognise them.
I don't have a clear answer for why that is, though I have some theories. The first of which is simply one of the passage of time: the SF I grew up into and the one often portrayed on these pages have between them a gulf of years that encompassed a great deal of change. But I don't think it's just that.
Kincaid alludes in various of his essays and reviews herein to the multiplicity of science fiction—the idea that it is not a single, coherent genre (indeed, he talks about disliking that word as well) with a single, coherent history. And so my discomfort in many ways proves him precisely right—whatever my conception of science fiction was, and is, it occupies a different strand of the weft (or a different shade of the colourfield, I suppose) than the ones under discussion here. But even with that acknowledgment that these reviews and essays look only at part of the story, it is still peculiar to see so little of the parts I do recognise—chiefly, the references to the Puppies and their Hugo activities. It's not even necessarily in the specifics of what's on the page, rather sometimes in tone, or in feel. This isn't a place I find myself or my experience within, and that's just downright odd, especially as I generally think of myself as at least reasonably curious and relatively informed, up to a point. Perhaps that self-image needs some adjustment.
However, my suspicion is that alongside the time gap there's a confluence of factors that lead to the genre I grew up into bearing little resemblance to the one Kincaid references, and I rather suspect gender plays a big part in it. The fiction I grew up reading, the fiction that coloured my childhood and my perceptions well into my time at university is what I might call, for want of a better term, girl-coded. It was aimed at children, and it was particularly geared at a market of female children. It was only at university (and sometimes rather later) that I encountered things I now see taken as universals. The SFF magazines of short fiction are a particular example, because I don't think I was more than passingly familiar with the barest concept of them until the mid-2010s. So maybe I wasn't connected to fandom, or only to a more forward-looking (or possibly just gender-segregated) subsection? Except... I don't think I was. Until fairly recently, I'd have called the university SF society I was a member of extremely backwards-looking, at least when I initially joined—they didn't read or discuss, for the most part, contemporary releases in my first couple of years, and if I think back to our society library, the overwhelming sensory memories are the feel and smell of slightly mouldering, very yellowed paperbacks. I was also, when I joined, one of three women in the whole society. Bastions of the futuristic we were not.
I am also, to be blunt, not the fresh face of the youth anymore, being a whole thirty-five. But that is exactly what reading this collection makes me feel—young, and terribly, terribly ignorant. Because, despite his clear awareness of that multiplicity of SF, there feels to be a coherent subsection of it on show here that does lean heavily backwards, not just in the sense of looking at histories (which would entirely make sense, given the topic of a whole third of the book), but in the sense of approaches and conceptions of what the genre is, where it is, and even more nebulously, but perhaps most crucially, how it is discussed. This is not a way of talking about the genre that maps to the vast majority of the conversations I have, many of which with people much smarter and more knowledgeable about both genre and fandom than myself.
If you're unsure from the way I'm talking about the book whether I think this is a good or a bad thing, well... join the club. I vacillate between poles as I consider it. Because on the one hand, I feel like I'm benefiting from this thoughtful, considered and extremely thorough look back at a part of the genre that is alien to me, and that kind of thing is surely always a benefit? But then on the other, the incompleteness rankles, on a more emotional level. The inner voice that goes, "Well, where's the bit I'm in? Why doesn't that get a look in?". I think, if I try to boil it down, my opinion is that what it does is done extremely well—if you like an acerbic turn of wit, an inclination towards sass and a very analytical eye on the specifics of what a particular work is doing, this will absolutely be provided. But, like all these kinds of projects, it has a limitation, and it may come to the fore if, like me, your experience of SF doesn't match up to what is being put under the microscope. And of course, that limitation may come from a number of places; as this is a selection of pre-existing work, it is predicated on what Kincaid has previously reviewed. The selection bias can come from any point on the journey: what was offered, what was accepted, what was actually written about, what was chosen for this project particularly. I don't know, and in many ways it doesn't matter, as all I have and can assess is the text in front of me.
However, to move away from the navel-gazing before it consumes all possibility of interesting thought, we should talk a little more in depth about the content of the book:
The three sections do pretty much as they say on the tin. Histories provides Kincaid's reviews of a selection of histories of the genre, and in general he seems somewhat dubious of them at a project conception level. When talking about Adam Roberts's The History of Science Fiction, he is fairly clear in his rejection of the idea that there can be a single, canonical history of the genre, not least due to the fact that SF as a single entity cannot first be defined. To quote:
"But when your subject is science fiction, famously undefinable, a protean literature that takes on the characteristics of its observer, no history can be anything but partial."
This argument crops up again and again, with variable strengths of expression, throughout the chapter, as he grapples with various attempts by a range of authors to both pin down and explain SF and its past. He takes pains to spell out his position well too, that many of these characterisations of the genre limit themselves in their inclusions and exclusions, often on gender, race or linguistic lines. It's an argument I think is made well, and one I mostly find myself in agreement with (I too have done a big sigh and rolled my eyes at the idea that there was a single progenitor of the genre and that it was Mary Shelley). The one downside, outside of my previous discussion, with this section is something that becomes apparent as you keep reading: he is dissatisfied with approximately every single text he discusses, possibly even exasperated, and it becomes quite wearing to get to another history and... oh yep, this one's bad too. He's right and he should say it, but structuring the book with these collected together and as the first section is a little of a trial by fire; if you can weather the grumbling, you can get to the good stuff.
Which brings us around to Topics, by far my favourite of the sections. Because, by nature, the works under discussion in this section are narrower in their scopes, the tone is much lighter—the fundamental objection to the project of them is much reduced. The reviews here feel much more wide-ranging, and include possibly the most positive section in the volume, a chapter that I had to put down and stare off into space for a little while after reading because it was such a glowing paean to its subject that it felt wildly out of place. It was, of course, the Clute chapter. I should not be surprised.*
As someone without a huge depth of knowledge on what was being discussed, I also found this section the most informative about the genre that I wasn't recognising—the different texts being reviewed start to paint a picture of some key areas of import, from Marxism to utopias to Gnosticism to grammar to the prehistoric and its role in genre works that may (or may not, depending on the light) be counted as SF. Names crop up over and again, and a web starts to form of connected thoughts, schools and ideas. This is the section where I found myself wanting to pick up the books under discussion, although Kincaid is more easily inclined to declare something universally necessary for those interested in SF than I would be, an assertion I am often moved to distrust. There are no universals, not even in criticism, and certainly not in worth or value. But the works held up as vital in this way are not ones I'm familiar with, and so I cannot say for a certainty that I don't agree, only that I distrust the instinct to make such bold declarations.
That being said, the confident tone in which Kincaid feels comfortable making quite broad statements felt more apt here than in Histories, or perhaps I had just acclimatised. Likewise, I felt less sandblasted by my ignorance, more just informed, and I think that is also down to the reduction of scope. It's easy to look at a specific topic and be ignorant, and then to learn about it, whereas trying to behold the genre at large and finding it unrecognisable has something of a humbling effect. If there's a downside to it here, it is that occasionally Kincaid will confidently assert something—that X is author Y's best work, or similar—and it is unclear whether this is relaying the information presented in the book under discussion, or his own opinion thrown in. I don't particularly mind which; I am generally in favour of reviewers not feeling they have to hedge every single opinion as being just an opinion (it's a review; surely that's a given?), but it would be nice, in general, to know.
The final section brings us onto Authors, and this section is... tricky. I'll come onto the content/tone in a moment, but I want to first look at who the authors chosen are, especially in conjunction with Kincaid's assertions back in the Histories section about people looking at the genre with a closed-off scope of who fits (and who isn't included).
Of the 12 authors covered in 11 chapters, only three are female. As far as I can tell from cursory research, every single one of them is white (with a complication in that the Disch chapter talks just as much, if not more, about Delany, who is a queer black man). They hail from three countries in total: the UK (7, of which 2 from Northern Ireland), the USA (4) and Canada (1). Only three of them are living, and I'm unsure if one of those is still actively publishing. Their careers fill a gap between 1895 and the present day, though I would personally suggest most of them had their zenith... I'll say before I was born rather than pinning it to something more specific. If we're going to talk about limited scope, and especially if we're going to talk about genre being a spectrum whose constituent parts stretch back before Aldiss's claim about Mary Shelley and forward up to the present day... well, the selection here somewhat undermines that assertion. And again, I don't know the factors that led to these specific authors being selected. I don't know what biases operate on the books Kincaid has been offered over the years to review. But I have this work in front of me as itself, and as that text, at this time... I have some questions to ask about this selection, when placed alongside those earlier critiques.
So let's see how Kincaid talks about it in his own words:
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| Preface to the third section of the book, entitled Authors |
So yes, he alludes to the editorial selection issue, but then assures us that this selection is a designed one. And to take up the metaphor, if there is a figure emerging from the rock... well, it's a white, British man. That mirror being held up is indeed perhaps to the reader and to the reviewer himself.
But it's not just the demographics. When I said earlier that the way this feels is backwards-looking, this selection of authors only highlights that feeling. If this is the fascinating ecosystem we call science fiction, did it end in 2005 or so but for Margaret Atwood? And where, in Histories and Topics, that backwards glance feels more apt for the subject matter, here... here I struggle. For all the interest in each chapter of this section (plenty, let me stress), when I step back a ways and think of it holistically, I cannot stop myself from thinking about what this, as an indicative selection, says about SF. Because ultimately this book is about SF, what it is, what it isn't, and the blurred boundaries of its edges into other work. If I weren't thinking about the shape of the thing under the blanket, I wouldn't be engaging properly with the work.
To be blunt, the shape of the thing under the blanket looks exactly like the thing Kincaid has critiqued. That he has seen the problem and nonetheless himself gone on to replicate it is frustrating. Hopes dashed and all that.
Tonally, this section lies closer to Topics than Histories, and for me is the better for it. Particularly, not all the chapters are reviews—Peter Ackroyd, for instance, is covered in a short essay for an anthology about supernatural fiction writers, and this gives more leeway for the personal opinions and assertions of objectivity that are the mode in which I find myself enjoying Kincaid the most. Call it an opinionated potted biography, perhaps. Likewise the "impressionistic response" to M. John Harrison's anti-memoir.
It also made the better for many of the authors in question being people Kincaid has met—I enjoyed the brief digressions into personal anecdote a great deal, and again fit into the tone I seem to enjoy most in Kincaid's work, with added connectivity out to these figures who for me are distant and august, if I've heard of them at all.
Of the book's three, this section also generated by far the most online research and interest in discovering more. With each new author under the glass, I found myself tabs deep in discovery, and trying my best to withhold the onslaught of tbr additions. These are often authors familiar to me but now fundamentally more interesting by his discussion of them. Previously my interest in H. G. Wells was... well, not zero but hardly significant. Now? We're trending upwards, for sure. And the previous interest I had definitely had in M. John Harrison's Viriconium works has likewise been given a fair boost. When he's convinced of a work (or an author)'s worth, the value it has, whether aesthically, ideologically or contextually, is very well spelled out, and even when he's not trying, what he loves, he sells. When it's there, the enjoyment in a work is palpable, and because it exists in contrast to pretty honest and blunt critique, it is clearly authentic, making it all the more valuable.
It ended very much on a high—the section on H. G. Wells covers several works, but reiterates a point made earlier in the volume about the depth, range and contradictory nature of his character and body of work. It feels like the best of what the volume does (Clute lauds aside), capturing a person and their relevance to the body of SF, such as it is, in all their variety. This? This was the stuff I loved.
But it cannot erase what came before, nor the context in which it sits in that final section.
And so, somewhat contradictorily, my conclusion is this: In presenting only a subsection of SF, only a few colours of the field, Kincaid proves his own assertions about the nature of the genre entirely correct, and my inability to recognise them shows only how wide and deep the field ranges. But, on an aesthetic and personal level, I found it strange to read, and sometimes alienating, because, even as he acknowledges that there are many science fictions—acknowledges the absence of women, people of colour and non-Anglophone voices in frequent attempts at categorising them—the one presented in the book slowly feels as though it coheres into a single beast, one overwhelmingly white, male and British, and whose focus ranges backwards, a preoccupation I sometimes feel undermines SFF's ability to accurately assess itself, and the issues it faces in the present, except as viewed through the lens of that past. I know there is a value in history, and on the merits of that it delivers a thorough, thoughtful and fascinating insight. I learned much, developed my existing understanding more, and had a great time with the thoughts of someone with a deep feel of his part of the field and a knack of sharing it clearly. But in my inner self, I wished the mirror held up had shown at least a little of a face I recognised. Demographically, but also environmentally and contextually.
Ultimately, I may need to look backwards to understand where SF has come from to reach the point it's at now. But equally, when attempting sweeping discussions of "what it is we write about when we are writing about science fiction," that "fascinating ecosystem" cannot be understood fully if we excise the last ten years either. The present owes its debts to the past, but must also be understood on its own terms—partly shaped by the ideas and people covered in this exploration of the genre, but not wholly defined by them. This is a snapshot of what SF was rather than is, a work I find in some ways limited, but within those limitations—fascinating, thought-provoking, discussion-provoking, occasionally laugh-provoking and more.
*I have yet to grapple with Clute myself but I am beginning to understand that he operates as a sort of saintly figure, or perhaps the icon of a mystery cult, for a lot of British SFF criticism. If I start babbling about him as Dionysus reborn, you must assume that I too have been initiated.
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The Math
Highlights:
- Acerbic tone of voice, leading to occasional snicker-out-loud moments
- Huge depth and detail of information about SFF history, criticism and its discussion
- Thoughtful discussion about the nature of the genre
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
Reference: Kincaid, Paul. Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction [Briardene Books, 2025].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
