Whose Science Fiction: Recognition and its Absence in a Reading of Colourfields by Paul Kincaid

A deeply thoughtful collection that muses on the nature of SF and its sub-categories, though not one without blind spots

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:

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.

--

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

And That's It for Our First Scare Series

Boo.

Three weeks are nowhere near enough to get a good look at the vastness of classic horror. During our First Scare series at Nerds of a Feather, we've made our best effort to use the available time to fill some important gaps in our personal horror libraries. I'm going to need even more time to digest what I've learned; I still don't have fully formed thoughts about what makes horror so popular, or how the successive trends in horror have come and gone, or where the line is between the horror I can tolerate and the one I can't force myself to watch. Nevertheless, this brief round of exploration has been fruitful.

I had originally planned to include more monster movies (i.e. Attack of the Giant [Insert Species]), but the bulk of my watching activity ended up centering on the evolution of cinematic Dracula (1931, 1958, 1974 and 1979). Much like the experiment I did years ago with the different versions of Carrie, this repetitive journey through the beats of the same basic story has shown me the shifting worries of their respective societies. Most notably, inasmuch as any adaptation of Dracula allows, I could notice the female roles evolving over the decades from highly prized models of chastity to more autonomous agents in possession of their own desires. This transformation is fully ripe by the time Coppola tries his hand at making a Dracula movie in the '90s.

It's important to be aware of this history, because much of contemporary horror has to do with foregrounding women's fears. There are two parallel consequences of this trend: on one hand, it exposes the uncomfortable fact that daily life for women under patriarchy is a 24/7 horror story; on the other hand, it demands of male moviegoers the development of an added meta level of empathy. In horror there's an important difference between the aesthetic experience of being personally scared and the aesthetic experience of watching someone else be scared, and it all comes down to which character you identify with, an outcome that isn't always open to the viewer's conscious choice. In the standard horror dynamic of the chaser chasing the chased, whose perspective do you automatically adopt?

For these reasons I count myself fortunate to have been joined by two women in reviewing movies for First Scare. I found it interesting to read, in Haley's review of the movie Phantasm, about the mental jump of identifying with a boy protagonist in the '70s while writing as a woman in the 21st century. At the same time, when Ann Michelle writes about Interview with the Vampire, she opts for taking the side of the women that are mistreated all through the movie.

The unsurprising lesson here is that different stories evoke different modes of empathy. Haley finds a sense of recognition in the shared experience of a girls' sleepover in House, while Ann Michelle feels drawn to the deep interiority of the boy protagonist of The Sixth Sense. But the real merit of horror is in forcing us to understand the nonhuman perspective, as in the case of a ghost in Kill, Baby Kill or a carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors.

And then there's just the plainly bonkers.

Keep these ideas in mind when you dress up tonight. Putting on a mask is more than a cosmetic choice. It's another form of empathy, one that brings the Other's perspective not only into your mind, but into your speech and movements, and furthermore invites those watching you to participate in the same game when they interact with you.

If you'll allow me to borrow a trope from another genre for a moment, in many martial arts movies you'll hear the deepity-sounding lesson, "be the sword." Well, dear reader: tonight, when you put on your witch hats and your werewolf fangs and your fairy wings and your hero capes, I invite you to wield that uniquely human superpower of putting yourself in the Other's shoes. When you dress up to be spooky, open yourself to the gift of being spooked. Be the mask.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

New Post Series: First Scare

We'll valiantly face the terrors we've been lucky to avoid

Carve your pumpkins and don your trashiest costumes! It's the season of vampires and witches, of demons and werewolves, of haunted houses and walking corpses. It's the season when a strange impulse leads otherwise reasonable people to willingly pay for a ticket so they can sit in a dark room full of strangers to watch two hours of entrails being ripped and/or slashed and/or devoured. Come and make yourself comfortable. The dead will rise, blood will spurt like a fire hose, heads will roll.

A few months ago, Nerds of a Feather ran the First Contact series, where our team caught up with a few of the prominent classics that for whatever reason we hadn't had a chance to get to know. This time, we're repeating the experiment, but with Halloween classics: those ugly, scary, big bad monsters with which we've so far had the good fortune of not crossing paths.

Even as I prepare to push play on this rich history of frightening stories, I keep wondering why I'm doing this to myself. I'm a complete chicken when it comes to horror. To this day I still tremble at the memory of that puppet cyclops bird from the 1986 remake of Babes in Toyland, and that scene in V where the alien ate a whole mouse left permanent scars. My generation spent its budget of screams on Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers; I simply have no stomach for whatever happens in Saw or The Conjuring. In theory, I ought to be the last person to want to go through a crash course in horror.

In pragmatic terms, my main reason for doing the First Scare series is the same reason why I did First Contact: the desire to broaden my knowledge of what is out there. But also, my lifelong aversion to horror could use some challenging. Of course, I'll be doing it under controlled conditions, in the safety of my living room, preferably not at midnight. The popularity of horror has always been a mystery to me, so maybe it's time to test for myself what draws people to want to experience fear for fun.

What with taste being subjective and all, it's a possible outcome that I don't succeed at learning why so many enjoy the self-torture of watching expertly filmed stabbings and slashings and curses and exorcisms. It may very well be the case that there's a certain incommunicable something that naturally gifts you with a high tolerance for the sight of blood and rotting guts. Or the taste may be an acquired one. Hoping that it's the latter, I'm going to start at a prudent pace. I don't want to regret the experiment. The family member who without warning introduced me to Cannibal Holocaust certainly didn't have my sensibilities in mind.

Instead, I'll be watching selections from among the early classics, those that form the baseline education of the average horror fan. My fellow reviewers at Nerds of a Feather will surely be at other positions in that ladder, so they're choosing their own starting points. This is also part of the learning process; I expect horror directors to have very different things to say on the same topic before versus after the Satanic Panic, for example.

I'll also be paying attention to which specific elements of the horror aesthetic are those that frighten us. I love the Doctor Who episode "Blink," but I don't find it particularly spooky. Many years ago, I attended a public showing of a slasher movie at a community center. I went with a blind friend, and as I was narrating the movie to him, I realized how boring it was. "The killer runs after her. She runs away. She falls. She stands up. The killer runs after her. She runs away. She falls. She stands up. The killer runs after her..." On the other hand, I have a friend who tells me that the absolute most terrifying movie I've ever shown him was Idiocracy.

So... who knows. This is the rare kind of experiment where the interesting result is the one that's not replicable. As a kid, I had lots of fun with The Twilight Zone, but one episode of The Pink Panther gave me nightmares, and I waited until adulthood to watch Aliens. Now, from here to Halloween, we'll be subjecting ourselves to all forms of monstrosity and evil. I literally don't know what I'm getting into or what I should expect or what the risks are. I suppose that's the right mood for an innocent newcomer entering the horror realm.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Final thoughts from the First Contact project

Or, how we agreed to give ourselves extra homework for a month

There's a risk, for people new to speculative fiction, to stay stuck in the big classics. I've seen it manifest especially among literary types, who at a minimum have heard of Verne and Orwell and Tolkien and Asimov and Dick and Le Guin. The risk consists in becoming satisfied with the classics and therefore exploring no further. I don't warn against this scenario out of a wish to police people's joy; what I wish is to share the very best that our field has to offer, and we're fortunate to live at a time when the very best that we have is not the classics. There's no need to advise newcomers to read I, Robot when there's Murderbot.

I came up with the First Contact project to avert the opposite risk in myself. I'm reasonably familiar with what's going on right now, but I'm very behind in my knowledge of genre classics. And just as one must guard against irrational predilection for the past, one must also notice when the present is given undue weight. If I seriously intend to recommend Murderbot over I, Robot, the intellectually honest course of action is to know I, Robot and to know why I'm declaring it skippable. It's not enough to marvel at the quality of our current Rainbow Age on its own merits; I also need to understand how it improves upon bygone Gold and Silver. My love for The Expanse grows even stronger when I realize how much it's not like Flash Gordon.

Each of us at Nerds of a Feather had specific personal reasons to select the classics we've discussed over these recent weeks. Some of us went into it in the spirit of correcting a personal oversight; some of us wanted to give a new subgenre a long overdue try; some of us decided to heed the popular acclaim for a certain title; some of us stumbled upon something completely new and jumped by instinct. There were many possible posts there simply wasn't enough opportunity to write; in my case, I would have liked to sit and watch a lot more B monster movies. But I'm very satisfied with the list that resulted. I give thanks to my fellow reviewers for their curiosity and their openness to this little experiment. These are the works we've made First Contact with:

Books:

Dragonflight

Foundation

Movies:

Akira

Brazil

Flash Gordon

Labyrinth

Metropolis

Nosferatu

Porco Rosso

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

The Terminator

Westworld

Video games:

Mass Effect Andromeda

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Introducing the First Contact Project

What's it like to experience a classic for the first time?

As a very wise person once said, there's no science fiction canon. There's no mandatory reading list, no admission test to join the community of geekdom, and most fortunately, no enforcing authority in charge of declaring who is authorized to speak about works. Someone who has never seen a movie can simply decide one day to try Godzilla and then say how they felt. That's all you need.

That said, some experience with previous works will enrich the repertoire of the things you can say, and the quality of the arguments you can produce. Interstellar is a great movie, but you enjoy it more if you're familiar with 2001. Any discussion of The Matrix will be very limited without considering the ideas introduced in Blade Runner, Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell (at the very minimum). If you haven't seen Ratatouille, a subplot in Everything Everywhere All at Once is almost incomprehensible. And you may be impressed with Ready Player One if you aren't aware of how it misunderstands and betrays The Iron Giant.

So, while knowledge of the classics isn't required (unless you're an academic), it's definitely useful. This puts fans who want to discuss genre works in a curious position. Every time I write an opinion on this blog, I need to remember that I'm entering a conversation that started before me and whose terms are already established. At the same time, contributing my personal perspective depends on maintaining a degree of freshness. I guess someone could write a good dissection of the flaws of monarchy as shown in The Lion King while ignorant that its plot mirrors Hamlet. You can read Don Quixote with no previous contact with the medieval adventure novels it's parodying. But how much of value can one say about the hyper-stylized violence of Kill Bill without bringing up the context of Bruce Lee's career? Is there even any point in analyzing Madoka Magica without taking into account how its mere existence is a reaction to Sailor Moon?

First exculpatory argument: We don't know what we don't know. In Pinky and the Brain, there are jokes, and some entire episodes, that only make sense to devoted fans of black-and-white cinema. I was last month years old when I learned that A Bug's Life tells essentially the same story as Seven Samurai, which means I'll never know whether that bit of trivia would have altered my impression of A Bug's Life. I was eager to watch the first Chicken Run because it was made by the people who made Wallace and Gromit; I would have felt less excited if all I'd known was that it retold The Great Escape. And this brings me to my second exculpatory argument: One viewer's classic is another viewer's meh. I have friends who adore The Mandalorian because it does visual homages to old Westerns, and that bit of trivia makes me even less interested in watching The Mandalorian. Reading that Joker referenced Taxi Driver didn't make me want to check out Taxi Driver, and I doubt anything in it would improve my subterranean opinion of Joker.

In a less snobbish world, we should be free to choose our classics the same way we choose our current obsessions, but sometimes there's no escaping the need to learn the language one is trying to use. I detested every second of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I must admit that having added that crayon to my coloring box makes my picture of Nope more complete. An independent taste is important to have, but one must not let it mutate into incuriosity.

With all this in mind, I've summoned the nerds of our flock to try first contact with classic works with which they haven't had a chance to get acquainted, for whatever reason, until now. Over the next few weeks, we'll be reporting our raw, first impressions of stories that you may have reread or rewatched a hundred times, that have remade in their image the shape of their genres or perhaps even invented those genres.

We embark upon this experiment aware that it cannot replicate the way it felt for those original first viewers. To be a moviegoer in the 1930s and watch the premiere of a Flash Gordon serial was only possible in those specific historical circumstances. Those of us who exist on this shore of time already carry the cultural baggage of everything that was influenced by Flash Gordon and everything that happened in real life since then, which prevents the story from having the same effect and meaning for us that it had upon release. That's my third exculpatory argument: What we can expect to get from art is inescapably tied to the context of reception.

So maybe we'll discover a new passion. Maybe we'll more deeply understand a tradition we had trouble connecting with. Maybe we'll find reasons to reappraise an artist we had underestimated. At the absolute least, we'll become better informed critics, which is what you should never be shy to demand of us.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

So... let's talk about the 'Tok

The conversation about MovieTok reviews has to do with more than expertise. It has to do with the way media companies have succeeded in outsourcing their perception management

Image by Ron Lach on Pexels

Remember when everyone was excited for BookTok? At least publishers were; a wave of free publicity is always welcome, even when its credibility is marred by blatant conflicts of interest and performative consumption. And yet, there are undeniable redeeming qualities to a movement that spreads the love of the written word before millions of consumers of digital orality eager to find the exact subgenre of fiction that will match their microniche tastes. Doesn't the news complain all the time that books don't get enough respect? When was the last time your teenager browsed Zoetrope, or Lapham's Quarterly, or The Times Literary Supplement? At least in principle, we should celebrate any trend that raises mass literacy, as long as we can pretend not to notice the branded tote bags and sponsored segments.

The controversy around TikTok reviews has recently shifted venues. Last week, The New York Times published a piece on rising TikTok celebrities who comment on movies yet eschew the traditional label of critics. The author, Reggie Ugwu, doesn't explain how he picked which content creators to showcase. The selection comes off as mixed: some of the quoted reviewers routinely make posts that abound in hyperbolic praise, are happy to stay at the most superficial level of analysis, rely excessively on listicles to fill up space, recoil against the use of sophisticated layers of meaning, and prioritize the immediate sensations of the watching experience to the point that it often seems like they're not judging and rating the films but judging and rating their response to them. To the extent that film criticism is its own art form, and therefore TikTokers are, in a sense, making art (not so much a descendant of the Lindsay Ellis school of video essays, more properly an offshoot of knee-jerk reaction culture), MovieTok operates as an extreme version of an Expressionist movement, more interested in communicating the creator's feeling than in referring to the object that caused the feeling. This refusal to engage with the tough elements of narrative imposes a self-inflicted handicap on their possible contributions to film discourse, even if we count only the videos that aren't obviously ads.

Fortunately, bad habits are not universal across MovieTok. As deep as movie studios have put their hands inside this yummy cookie jar, other creators mentioned in the same article are clearly able to speak about media with the same perceptiveness, thoughtfulness, insight, subtlety, and sharpness that you'd demand from any professional critic. The short video format inevitably leads to rhetorical shortcuts, but there is quality to be found there. So Pajiba's response to Ugwu is unfairly reductive with its blanket verdict that "MovieTok Creators Are Corrupt." Even allowing for Sturgeon's Law, there is competent commentary to be found in every space and format. However, Ugwu doesn't paint a realistic picture of the issue either. Consider this baffling comparison he makes (quick, drink a cup of coffee so you can do the appropriate spit take):

"MovieTok creators are not the first in the history of film criticism to rebel against their elders. In the 1950s, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and other writers of the journal Cahiers du Cinéma disavowed the nationalism of mainstream French criticism."

I strongly suspect I'm at no risk of being called snobbish if I point out that "Highest Grossing Movie per Sport" and "2023 Movies that Need MORE Excitement" (whatever that means) don't quite match the areas where Cahiers du Cinéma prefers to set its focus. To give you a quick glimpse at the way the venerable French magazine talks about media: It finds the eponymous train network in The Underground Railroad "a glimmer of hope and a bottomless pit, phantasmagoria and nightmare;" it describes Stranger Things season 4 as "at the same time a continuation and an eternal return," where "the subversive potential of horror is undermined in favor of a binary prism;" chastises the latest Indiana Jones as "a saga that had already in its previous entry made fun of its aging hero," who is "apparently cursed to see his death endlessly postponed;" upon reviewing Oppenheimer, it identifies a fitting resonance in the origin of the word blockbuster as the name of a weapon capable of leveling city blocks, and thus a parallel between deadly radioactive sequelae and our current plague of film sequelitis; and in Barbie it finds that "the rigidity, emptiness and asepsis of the toys appear as hypostases of American Puritanism" and, even more damningly, "the didacticism of empowerment acts as an equally stifling discursive counterweight that prohibits any possibility of an event."

So, no. Definitely, no. MovieTok does have commentators who know what they're talking about, but in aggregate, it's nowhere near the ballpark, or the postal code, or the tectonic plate, or the galaxy cluster of what's going on at Cahiers du Cinéma. One of the TikTokers featured by The New York Times complains, "When you read a critic’s review, it almost sounds like a computer wrote it." That's sad to hear from someone who purports to be interested in enjoying art. Moviegoers who search in TikTok for personal flavor may want to try for a change the refreshing sincerity and unmistakable voice of Jessie Earl, or Rory Doherty, or Tim Grierson, or Sam Adams, or Tom van der Linden, or Leila Jordan, or Evan Puschak, or Darren Mooney, or Rowan Ellis, or Matthew Nando Kelly, or Jacob Oller, or David Ehrlich, or Matt Baume, or Trace Sauveur, or Georg Rockall-Schmidt, or Angelica Jade Bastién, or Thomas Flight, or Joshua Rivera, or Sage Hyden, or Michael Tucker, or Jonathan McIntosh, or Taylor J. Williams, or Lina Morgan, or Patrick Willems, or Jake Cole, or Kyle Anderson, or Isaac Feldberg, or Kaiya Shunyata, or Glenn Kenny, or A. A. Dowd, or Mikey Neumann, or Lars van der Peet, or Jack Nugent, or Maggie Mae Fish, or Chris Winkle. I mention this many names to underscore the point I'm making here: to utter the barefaced claim that film critics lack a distinctive personality, you have to be afflicted by a malignant incuriosity.

Patrick Sproull and Matt Goldberg have written more measured responses than Pajiba's, and several of the arguments they present coincide with my own stance. On one of my more cynical days, I'd daresay that TikTokers' reluctance to call themselves critics comes from a decidedly uncritical approach to films. The once wholesome "let people enjoy things" meme became so poisonous a weapon against any form of media criticism that its creator had to kill it. There truly is a serious problem going on in film criticism, but MovieTok is not that problem. If you'll allow me a brief moment of bragging, Nerds of a Feather itself is proof that knowledgeable, eloquent and fun reviewers exist outside of professional publications. So I'm not going to try to build the full, reasoned case for more respect for independent reviewers, because we've proved our worth more than enough. What interests me here is not to counter the narrative that MovieTok is any sort of threat to traditional critics. There's no monopoly on good criticism (or bad; both "serious" and "informal" media can commit crimes of embarrassing cluelessness). As for conflicts of interest, TikTokers are more open about them than alarmists allege. What I want to point out is the underlying malaise of which MovieTok is only a symptom.

A portion of fandom has mutated into a curious cultish devotion, one that doesn't only swear eternal obedience to its idols, but in exchange demands eternal obedience from them, unaware that those idols still hold the reins of the relationship, and that the favors they grant are actually an insult to the followers. The crisis of movie discourse mirrors the ongoing crisis of moviemaking: after the Snyderbros and the Fandom Menace discovered how easy it was to bully studios into risk-avoidance, we've reached a volatile state where fans and executives know exactly which buttons to push on each other. Meanwhile, in the age of ChatGPT, art is in growing danger of being standardized and converted to automated formulas. Studios figured out they can get away with insulting viewers' intelligence with mediocre sameness, empty nostalgia and pointless pandering, because fans refuse to see themselves as more than consumers. The result is that the few works that still try to make sincere art from within the Hollywood machine, such as The Last Jedi or The Matrix Resurrections, are received with undeserved hostility.

TikTok is not the enemy. Anti-intellectualism is the enemy, and the internet gives it countless chances to spread and put down roots. What critics can do to counter it is what they're already doing: speak as honestly as they can and give audiences the tools of discernment that enrich the viewing experience. And what moviegoers can do is what art has been trying to tell them all this time: Be more curious. Have more empathy. Don't be afraid of difficult ideas. And above all, don't let someone else, like an obscenely wealthy movie studio, decide what you feed to your mind.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Correction: An earlier version of this article mentioned James Somerton as one of the film reviewers worth listening to. After his extensive history of plagiarism was known, he has been removed from this article.

Microreview [video game]: ICEY by FantaBlade Network (developer)

Lukewarm

ICEY calls itself a meta game in disguise but that disguise is real thin. When the game exits the prologue, there is a narrator constantly commentating on your actions. The narrator is the meta game part of this otherwise familiar 2D action game, and one of its biggest detractors.

You play as ICEY, a clone in a tank, or maybe a cyborg, and you have to find and kill Judas. He's the bringer of the apocalypse, that wicked devil. At the start, that's it. The narrator and environment reveals more of the story, sort of.

The gameplay is simple sidescrolling action. Move to the right, mash the light or heavy attack until the enemies die, then use money to upgrade your combos or life meter. It's competent and mostly fun without getting too repetitive, but the game is rather short.

What makes ICEY unique is the Stanley Parable-esque narrator. He tells you where to go or not to go, what to do, sometimes even why you're doing it. The narrator frequently breaks the fourth wall and addresses the player directly. He talks a lot, and the game touches on a broad range of stuff from player choice to the elder gods.

Unfortunately, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It feels like there's something to it, some message, but it's all given to you in bits and pieces. None of it really adds up. Also, the voice acting on the narrator is bad. It's lifeless, and stiff. Worse, the narrator is ever present. The bad narration follows you everywhere. If you can't get over it, you're never going to enjoy the game.

Some of the ideas may have been lost in translation. The developers are Chinese, so it may make more sense if it were played in Chinese. But there's not a lot of excuses for the narrator. He's a central figure in the game and one of the least enjoyable parts. Despite these problems, I enjoyed ICEY. It's got enough weird in it that I wanted to press on to see what else it'd do, and the action is fun. But it's hard to deny that the time wouldn't be better spent on The Stanley Parable and Dust: An Elysian Tail, both of which do well the narration and action parts (respectively) of what ICEY tries to accomplish.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 a pile of interesting ideas...

Penalties: -1 that don't really come together, -1 saddled with bad voice acting

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 (still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: FantaBlade Network (developer). ICEY [X.D. Network, 2017]

Microreview [book]: All That Outer Space Allows by Ian Sales

An alternate history of science fiction...

All That Outer Space Allows is the fourth and final installment in the Apollo Quartet, Sales' series of speculative novellas--each of which rests, as the name implies, on an alternate history of the U.S. Apollo program. I'm a big fan of the series, and think Adrift of the Sea of Rains and The Eye with which the Universe Beholds Itself in particular embody a science fictional ethic that is increasingly rare in this age of "exhaustion."  I found the third installment, Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above, a bit uneven in comparison--pairing, as it does, a compelling tale of female test fighter pilots facing institutional barriers to the astronaut program to an entertaining but poorly connected narrative about deep sea exploration. So I was curious to see how (or perhaps more accurately "if") Sales would tie the series together in the penultimate volume.

All That Outer Space Allows tells the story of Virginia "Ginny" Eckhardt, the fictional wife of fictional astronaut Walden Eckhadt, and a moderately well-known science fiction author. The alternate historical conceit is that science fiction is a literary space reserved for women, and a mode of escape for housewives laboring under the sexist mores of American society in the 1960s--thus playing a similar role to romance literature in our world. The narrative begins at Edwards Air Force Base, where Walden is a test pilot trying to gain entrance to the prestigious astronaut program; after he is accepted, the couple move to Houston, where Ginny is inducted into the Astronauts' Wives Club (now subject of a network television series), thus becomes something of a public figure. The new role subjects her to intense social pressure--to be a model housewife and to thereby reflect well on the program and, hopefully, increase Walden's chances of being assigned to one of the upcoming Apollo missions. But the pressure, and Walden's increasing absence, make it increasingly difficult for Ginny to write. So she decides to learn first-hand about the Apollo program, in the hopes that this will provide the creative spark she needs to revive her writing career.

Throughout the traditional third-person narrative, Sales interjects anecdotal commentary--written in such a way as to suggest the editorializing of a historian, but which is in actuality an equally fictional narrative about "V. G. Parker" (i.e. Ginny Eckhardt) navigating the institutional sexism of SF as it actually existed in the 1960s. The main narrative and this "annotational" one come together in the story attributed to Eckhardt/Parker, "The Spaceships Men Don't See," whose "housewife heroines" and mild explorations of sexism in the astronaut program are said to provoke a negative (and realistic) response from the male readership of Galaxy. Sales presents the story within the text, a literary trope dating back to Hamlet, and which serves to literalize Ginny's frustration at how the subservient position ascribed to women shackles her dreams.  

Given this formal and thematic complexity, I think it's fair to say that All That Outer Space Allows is the most ambitious entry in the Apollo Quartet. It is also significant for its commentary on the field of science fiction. As a critic and fan writer, Sales has dedicated himself to recording the "secret" history of female-authored SF, and to bring attention to the many unrecognized, underappreciated and out-of-print female-authored SF novels published over the past century. All That Outer Space Allows is, fundamentally, an attempt to explore this history through fictional device, and it by and large succeeds. Ginny is an strong, well-realized character, and Sales does a great job evoking period and place--reflecting a meticulous level of research. There are, of course, some moments when it's clear that the author is not American--Ginny referring to the family vehicle as "the Impala" rather than "the car," as Americans would when there is only one to choose from, or the narrator referring to Ginny as having "finished her toilet"--a phrase that doesn't make sense in American colloquial English. But these are relatively infrequent; at most points one forgets that Sales is British. 

I've gone back and forth on the breaking of the fourth wall, however. Initially I found it distracting, but at some points it seemed to work beautifully. In the end, though, the cost of shattering perspective is just too high. Formally, I think I would have preferred the commentary to come in the form of footnotes, as one might find in an academic edition of a novel. That would allow the reader to choose between reading the text on its own or shifting to the notes as they come up--an arrangement that would also, I might add, incentivize re-reading. Moreover, at times the "annotational" narrative is too blunt a tool, hammering in messages that are already clear in Ginny's story. At the same time, I do appreciate the experimentation, and found both the "annotational" narrative and story-within-a-story to be worthwhile endeavors. I'm just unconvinced by the mode of presentation. 

Taken together, this marks All That Outer Space Allows as the most difficult volume of the Apollo Quartet to quantify. It is absorbing and undeniably powerful, and takes risks that I wish I encountered more frequently in the genre. But the biggest risk, at least as far as I'm concerned, doesn't quite pan out. Perhaps it's a testament to the things this novella does well that I nevertheless recommend it in the strongest possible terms.


The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for general sophistication; +1 for writing "hard" social science fiction.

Penalties: -1 for breaking perspective with in-line annotations when footnotes would have been better; -1 for making an obvious message a little too obvious.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. "Well worth your time and attention."

Read about our scoring system here.


***

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and 'nerds of a
feather, flock together' founder/administrator.
     
Reference: Sales, Ian. All That Outer Space Allows [Whippelshield Books, 2015]