The Imaginary Singular Project: A Review of Trace Elements by Jo Walton and Ada Palmer

 A view on SFF that gets a little too tangled in its own specific perspective

Back in April last year, I reviewed Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid. While I had a lot to get to grips with in my reading of it, one of the things I uncomplicatedly appreciated was its stance on the "project" of science fiction, the idea of the singular whole of the thing. Or, specifically, the absence of such a monolith. Kincaid constantly comes back to the idea of the multiplicity of the genre, and that multiplicity, the titular colourfield, is important. And I concur; every person's path into the genre - both genres, because this applies just as truly to Fantasy - and their context, their reading habits, their tastes, their friends' tastes, their location in the world, all of it, feeds into what SFF looks like for them. We are all of us overlapping genre sets, growing and shifting through time.

I came back to this thought often while reading Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy (hereafter simply Trace Elements) by Jo Walton and Ada Palmer. Like Kincaid, their volume is drawn from a selection of previously published pieces from different venues (though augmented with some new essays for this publication). But, unlike Kincaid, this variety is not particularly reflected in the way they approach genre. I have two overarching thoughts, upon completion of the book, and the first is a sort of estrangement from the science fiction that they seem to be implying throughout the work exists as a singular, coherent beast. It is at once familiar and unfamiliar to me, and, more importantly, as the second thought, never tackled up front. I'll get into a lot more meat of discussing the content, but truly, the core of my argument is that the whole of this thing, this product of years of reading and writing about SFF, sits atop a pile of assumptions that implied to me a singular way of performing a genre I wholeheartedly believe is anything but single. When that implication is conveyed, as it is here, with casual authority, with easy certainty, and never once given pause or thought or the interrogation it needs as a foundational assumption of this type of work... nothing built upon it can stand quite aright either.

To step back slightly, Trace Elements is a collection of essays, predominantly drawn from their previous work in a number of venues of genre discussion, like Reactor (tor.com as was), Strange Horizons and more. These are supplemented with some essays new for the piece, along with some of the authors' poetry. The essays cover a broad swathe of topics, but they all circle around foundational questions about the nature, value, purpose and process of science fiction and fantasy, with some side quests into associated topics along the way, as well as some more personal pieces about the authors and their life experiences. It's a fairly wide-ranging set of subject matter, and one that is divided up into sections, starting at the front with the more big, general pieces and then progressing into the more specific, niche or intimate towards the end.

As per the title, these are conversations on the project of science fiction and fantasy. Who are those conversations with, though? Between the authors, certainly, but many of these pieces were published individually, by only one of them, in another place not intended for collection in this book. Who were they addressing, in those pieces then? And to what extent was it a true conversation, with the understanding of a response, possible disagreement, the collective development of an evolving understanding? I find this important too, when considering the tone of the piece. The majority of the essays are written in a declarative, definitive tone of voice, and convey a sense of certainty about the subject matter. The author(s) have the answer, and they'll tell it to you. There is very little hedging to be found here, not much doubt, and rarely a pause to talk through assumptions as though they are personal ones, things which could be matters of opinion, or only one of a variety of options on how to look at things. This is a common tone to find in pop non-fiction, so I'm not surprised to find it here, but I do think, when collecting your work under the label of conversation, it is something that ought to be questioned. Some of these posts were in venues that had open comment sections, but some were not. The new pieces, crafted only for a book, have no such openness. The other half of the conversation has been removed (unlike Walton's previous work drawn from her posts, in which some of the comments in response are retained, preserving that sense of back and forth), or never opened in the first place. What is a conversation without its other half? A lecture. But a lecture can still leave an open space for an imagined interlocutor, someone to ask the right questions, know and not know the right pieces of information, and for whom the premises must be clarified or grappled with, but no such interlocutor lives here either.

If this is a conversation, then, it's a conversation with oneself, in a quiet room. With an imagined audience whose agreement is certain. They hold the right premises, they occupy the same position, in the SFFnal ecosphere, but lack the knowledge that the authors can provide. That's a very specific audience indeed.

This is, for me, exemplified by the use nearly-universally in the book of "we". Not "I", and certainly not a pseudo-academic passive (something that Palmer gets into in one of the personal essays in fact, talking about the absence of the first person in academic writing). Now, this is a book by two authors, so naturally any appeal to personal experiences will default to the plural. But it seems, at times, more than that. There's the we of the personal, yes, but the pieces often, to my mind, strayed into the we of the crowd, the group that draws the reader in and says, you are with us on this point, we are a community of one mind. It's a perfectly normal writing tactic for creating that kind of shared sense of understanding. But it is a flawed one when the reader doesn't agree, and doesn't occupy that same position (as I often did not). Any tool that crafts community in that way naturally imposes a border that excludes everyone else. And, lest you think I'm pinning an awful lot on a pronoun that could simply be a reflection of a multi-authored book, I did go hunt down some of the original blog posts that fed into it and did, indeed, find the plural-of-community lurking there too. For example, this piece from 2010 in Reactor by Jo Walton, from which the following while talking about techniques for worldbuilding (which is included in the book reworked somewhat, though still with the crowd-we):

Because there’s a lot of information to get across and you don’t want to stop the story more than you can help, we have techniques for doing it. We have signals for what you can take for granted, we have signals for what’s important. We’re used to seeing people’s names and placenames and product-names as information. We know what needs to be explained and what doesn’t. In exactly the same way as Trollope didn’t explain that a hansom cab was a horse-drawn vehicle for hire on the streets of London that would take you about the city but not out into the countryside, and Byatt doesn’t explain that the Northern Line is an underground railroad running north south through London and dug in the early twentieth century, SF characters casually hail pedicabs and ornithopters and tip when they get out.

She slips between I and we (and occasional third person) throughout the essay, but when the plural comes up there are conclusions to be drawn from it who the audience is expected to be, and how they interact with fiction - "we" here are frequent SFF readers who have the genre-reading protocols she expects of them. Which is fine, singly. That is probably a very reasonable assumption. But those reasonable assumptions keep on piling up, until eventually there is a quite specific intersection of the person who fits into all of those "we". They have a specific background of reading, a specific history with genre, a specific set of touchstone books they have read, and a specific set of opinions about genre more broadly. Every slice of that cuts out another chunk of the potential audience from that community of we. I say this, of course, because I certainly felt myself not a part of it.

It doesn't help, structurally, that the opening essays (new for the volume) are by far the most didactic and positional, the ones most likely to include or exclude on opinion. The authors lay down some groundwork in "Integral to the Plot: the Author-Reader Contract" and "The Science Fiction Conversation: Imprint SF" which set the scene for what they envision genre to be, which is then bolstered by "Genre Pacing and Protocols, or What Is Genre?" which draws from Walton's linked essay above and 2018 Goodreads posts. These opening, generalising sections were where, predominantly, they lost me. It became clear that the SFF they envisaged was from a certain place (majority US), a certain time (a fairly wide span that peters out slightly before I came into the majority of my adult reading) and a certain opinion ("imprint SFF" is a distinct thing with a singular identity, whose authors' relationship with the existing corpus of work can be intuited by the reader and their relationship with it judged accordingly), none of which I occupy. And it's not that I need to see myself in this kind of work, but that the work speaks as if I am, throwing up a distorted mirror when I'd have been perfectly happy with a window into somewhere else. It's those assumptions again.

But not just assumptions. There are moments where the text comes out and does, in fact, dismiss positions outside of its own. One example stood out most to me, when discussing the history of SF publishing, and the difference between the markets in different countries. They write:

Canny British writers who understood the realities of the US market wrote short books, but less savvy ones wrote books at whatever length and had them published in Britain, but they could not break the US market. Christopher Priest and Keith Roberts had US hardcover releases of their 1970s science fiction books, but not paperbacks.

Now, I never met Christopher Priest, but my understanding of his character from those who have, from his writing and the stories about him... does not, let us say, particularly support this dismissal of his awareness of the field. There's no sense, in this little aside, that perhaps there might exist authors who, for whatever their own reasons, could value something more than breaking the US market. Maybe they felt the length they published at was more critical than the sales they might garner in another market. Maybe they just didn't care. I don't know. But I'm open to the possibility that people can have approached something in different ways, with their opinions shaped by their own particular perspectives. They may well have been just as savvy as anyone trying to break the US market, but with entirely different priorities. The writing here, as throughout the book, excludes such possibilities. Alternative approaches are simply "less savvy".

When the authors progress of out the general and into the specific, things do improve. The highpoint, for me, of the volume are Ada Palmer's essays about writing with chronic pain, and the following section "Writing/Realizing Disability + Power". These essays are deeply personal, bedded into her own experience of her work and her life, and are incredibly moving for that intimacy. They acknowledge throughout the uniqueness of the perspective being given, and that uniqueness is its value. No one else could write about this as Palmer does. Likewise, Walton's piece on how her first book was published. They both shine because they are so intensely from and about the perspective of their authors. 

There are also chapters that delve into specific topics, though I found flaws that rhymed with my overarching concerns in these too. It is difficult, in a single chapter, to capture the whole of, for instance, Japanese fiction norms post WW2, or the scope of genre romance or the history of publishing across the whole of time. Generalisations naturally arise. Those generalisations are given mixed treatment, sometimes highlighted (though only briefly, in the main) and sometimes skimmed over as authoritative. The one I found most frustrating is a chapter that begins in broad terms about translated fiction that talks about the difference between Japanese SFF and horror and western perspectives and assumptions. Both "western" and "Anglophone" are used as terms in the opening, but the essay proceeds to limit itself only to comparisons with the US, and to talking about fiction in terms of US, Christian-influenced ideas about Providence. The comparison is still interesting, still useful, and I still learnt plenty from it. But by conflating Anglophone/Western and the US, it tells on itself. Had Palmer written "US" throughout, I would not have batted an eye. But she did not. She speaks in authoritative, general tones and I, in reading, have my mind caught on "but this isn't general". And that knowledge when I do spot the holes and issues makes me wary of the chapters where my knowledge is insufficient to do likewise. I don't know enough about genre romance to judge whether the piece by Jo Walton is 100% accurate in its sweeping claims or not, but because I can spot holes and assumptions elsewhere, I cannot help but think there must be some lurking here too. And so those skips over complexity undermine the whole. I find I cannot trust the casual authority of the authors, because they seem unable to acknowledge specificity when needed.

There is a sense, throughout the whole piece, that there are clear answers available in all things genre. We can make a single story out of the history of anime, we can make a single truth in how to read genre, in who writes it and how. Leaving aside my own feelings on this ("bollocks" is the word I used frequently in my notes), this is undermined even by the text itself. Walton and Palmer at various points cite authors as examples of people who do and do not write from within genre or knowing genre (Ishiguro was the one who stands out), only to later put the same author in a different pot. Of course, these essays are drawn from two authors writing across a wide span of time, maybe they changed their minds? Or differed in opinion? But I don't know. No notice is ever drawn to these discrepencies, and, well... they collected all this for a single work. People are going to sit down and read it cover to cover. They're going to spot them. The text marks out that the pieces have been edited and changed to become this single work... I feel like that effort needed to continue into taking about of things like this. Individually small, but with large implications when taken into account alongside the sweeping claims about genre.

And then, as my final criticism, because I have made such a focus on highlighting the specific and the personal - my own specific and personal. I was, when this book was announced, very excited to read it. I have come to find I really enjoy non-fiction on speculative subjects, and this seemed a potentially substantial entry into the genre, not least because of its enthusiastic marketing which declared:

Now, in Trace Elements, Walton and Palmer have come together to write a book-length and supremely entertaining look at modern science fiction and fantasy, at how our genre is written and how it is read, that will join nonfiction works like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night, Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, and Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud on the short shelf of titles essential to all readers of our genre.

While one can never hold an author to account for effulgent marketing copy over which they have no control, it is the context through which I came to this book, that was to be "essential to all readers of our genre". And I am disappointed by how very small that "all" seems to be understood to be, how specific is "our", throughout the work. I am not in them. I don't have the right opinions (and the possibility of alternative takes seems to be consistently precluded by the way the authors discuss their topics); I haven't read the right things; I am not in the right place. I find the book, for the most part, to be casually, unthinkingly exclusionary of people who do not fit into a rather traditionally-shaped mould of what an SFF reader might be - updated to move past the limitations of gender, race and sexuality of the truly old-school, but preserving a certain sort of understanding of the shape of the genre that I do not think holds true any longer, nor has for much of my own lifetime. 

For a work which includes a chapter - taken from a 2021 essay by Palmer in Uncanny magazine - on the necessity of expanding our empathy sphere, I find it strangely lacking in awareness of quite how far that sphere needs to be extended.

My experience with the book was predominantly one of argument. I took eleven pages of notes as I read, wanting to mark my disagreement with this or that statement, this or that assumption. There was no space assumed for conversation, but I made my own one anyway, because it made me cross. Had there been a comment section, I would undoubtedly be in it with questions.

And so, my conclusion is that this work is interesting in conception, but flawed in execution. Through lack of interrogation of assumptions and position, Walton and Palmer make sweeping statements that snag on the complexity of reality, that represent only a single view of the many that make up SFF today while never quite acknowledging that truth. If it is a conversation on the project of science fiction and fantasy, the project has its tightly drawn boundaries, and the conversation assumes only a certain sort of interlocutor.

I am, of course, not asking for the authors to step away from their selves, the space and place they occupy in the genre ecosystem. No one can. But I think it is critical, when talking in the sort of general, authoritative tones that they take in this volume to be ever conscious of it. To know that your own view is a shimmering, ephemeral thing, intangible to anyone else who seeks to grasp it, but also a vital one. Work like this is intensely valuable when it acknowledges its vantage point, and ties itself to its own specifics and positionality. There is nothing more useful than being able to see the world - whatever world - through the eyes of someone standing somewhere you have not, and cannot. But its value is severely undermined when universality is assumed, and specificity is never interrogated. No single one of us can say we have a clear grasp of the whole of the thing, when it comes to genre, because I firmly believe there is no single whole of the thing. 

The unquestioned universality to which both authors speak throughout this volume dooms it to incompleteness. In a time of ever-blurring genre boundaries, ever-shifting sub-genres and a growing scope of what it might mean to be a fan of SFF, it is vital to grapple with what science fiction, and whose, you are talking about, and to remember that there are always others out there, across the porous, increasingly traversible borders into the wider vista. 

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The Math

Highlights: 

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10

Reference: Ada Palmer, Jo Walton, Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy, [Tor Books, 2026].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Book Review: Humans a Monstrous History

A book that looks at the history of monsters in human society and civilization, and comes to insightful conclusions about their role in the narrative of our culture

Monster.

Let’s start this review of Humans: A Monstrous History by not with the book itself, but the dictionary. What does the dictionary say a monster is? Here are some of the definitions:

• one unusually large for its kind
• an animal or plant of abnormal form or structure
• one who deviates from normal or acceptable behavior or character
• a threatening force
• something monstrous

And where does the word come from? What is the word’s etymology?

Middle English monstre, from Anglo-French, from Latin monstrum "omen, monster" from monēre "to warn."

The word monster, as you can see, is freighted with meaning, multiple meanings, and always has been. Thus monsters have always been with us, and this is one of the arguments in Surekha Davies’s book Humans: A Monstrous History.

I don’t normally lead off with the cover of a book, especially not a nonfiction one. But this is an exception that deserves further discussion. Look at the book image again. That shiny oval in the center is meant to invoke a mirror, with a suite of silhouettes of various monstrous forms as its. The author, right on the cover, is presenting her point of view and her concluding argument in visual form. We are the monstrous, or more accurately, a world where we can see all of us as monsters means that no one is monstrous.

To get to that final concluding argument, and working that thesis is the whole premise and mission of the book.

Davies takes us on a history of monsters, or as the jacket says, a history through them. This is really a look at how monsters have been seen and siloed and othered throughout human history. Although she does have some side discussions about other societies now and again, especially to contrast with the Western tradition, her study is mainly in that Western mold and that Western perspective. That doesn’t meant it’s all familiar; the author goes all the way back to Herodotus and forward through history. Gerald of Wales, a Norman/Welsh noble, looked down upon the English race as an abject sort, showing that racism can have unexpected axes, but has always been present in some way or another. There are always people to monstrify. There is always an out-group, it seems, and Davies has some good discussion about the role of others and their monstrification in society. There is a lot of discussion of people such as Antonietta Gonsalvus, the daughter of a “wild man” of the Canary Islands, and similarly afflicted with Ambras Syndrome, and thus hairy all over, including the face. Davies makes the point that, since such people seem to blur the boundaries between animals and humans, existing in that monster space, they are disquieting precisely because they make hard and fast lines impossible.

Monsters really are a way to put up a mirror to ourselves. In the process, Davies goes a lot into race and how groups have been sawed off of the norm. The Spanish colonial system of caste in North America, for instance, shows not only how people are divided and subdivided again as being more or less human (that is, Castilian White), but Davies also goes into how some of those boundaries and castes were far more porous than advertised. This just goes to her point that the identity of a monster is in the end often just a social convention or decision. Monsters and monsterhood can be situational, in time and space. A discussion of persecutions of Jews, up to the Holocaust, comes in as well.

So in that context, the most provocative group that Davies discusses in terms of monsterhood is women. I confess I had never thought of women in quite this way, but Davies lays out the case for the monstrification of women quite plainly. “Monstrous births,” both real and fake, are just part of this otherization of women and classification of them as monsters throughout history. This book made me think of the gorgon Medusa in a new light. This book is so rich with examples but it also provoked me and made me think of others she did not include in her thesis. Honestly, to list and discuss every example would have been impossible. Davies is selective. There is one "monster" I think she should have included, which I mention below when we get to the more science fictional aspects of the work.

This ties into a discussion of trans people and how they are being monstrified right now as of the time of the writing of the book and this review.

What this has to do with science fiction and thus this review space is, well, plenty. Science fiction, as the author points out, has dealt with the monstrous since its very beginnings in Frankenstein, with the titular character’s creation. And science fiction was an early proponent of embracing monsters. Monsters like Dracula, Caliban, King Kong and plenty of antecedents before the modern day. When the author gets to the modern-day depictions and ideas of what monsters are, her science fiction generally leans a lot on Star Trek. Data comes in for discussion, especially the episode “Measure of a Man,” which is all about the humanity (or non-humanity) of the android. Since we have already seen the whole idea of the not-quite-human as being a definition of monster before, the fact that Data is not quite human literally makes him potentially a monster in this context, to the author’s eyes. And for that alone, there are those who would seek to control him. Davies also makes an interesting point about Lore, Data’s double. In some ways he is very much more human than Data —he lies, uses contractions, mimics human speech and behavior more effectively than Data— and thus is very much more uncanny valley in the process. Lore is much more of a monster than Data ever is.

Davies goes on to talk about some other SFF properties, from Men in Black to, particularly, District 9 and how the plight of the protagonist, Wikus, and his slow transformation, his monstrification, makes him an outcast and distrusted in real time. It is a case study for the processes that she has described throughout the book. Battlestar Galactica, with its Cylons that can pass for humans and even interbreed with humans, particularly come in as well. Although she doesn't mention it, it is telling that many of the female Cylon "monsters" are very much concerned with motherhood while the male Cylons are not interested in fatherhood. Also consider that the most memorable of the Cylon infiltrators are female: Sixes and Eights.

However, I think she missed a trick in not discussing Spock. She does mention Star Trek: The Original Series in the context of the gender and race makeup of the bridge crew, and makes some points about monsters and boundaries in the process. But Spock is even more like Data in the sense of being a potential monster: he is half human, for one thing, which ties into earlier discussions in the book about the boundaries of humanity (Kirk’s words about Spock upon his death in Wrath of Khan come to mind). But the point is, even if Davies doesn’t discuss him, Spock and his transgressive nature, and on the bridge at that, as first officer to Kirk, fit in entirely with Davies’s thesis and is another data point in her favor.

The book ends with our present and looking toward the future. She points a finger at the new kinds of monstrifcation, including poverty, the use of LLMs and AI, and the anti-trans and anti-DEI campaigns. She concludes that, by having us embrace and see the people being called monsters right next door, the ones right within us, we can take steps to make this a more just and equitable society. If we are all monsters, none of us are.

With sound arguments, excellent and entertaining writing, and a fascinating dive into history, myth, and literature and art, Humans: A Monstrous History accomplishes Davies’s goal of presenting her thesis and ideas that the way to a more equitable world is for us to embrace the others. To embrace the monsters that are in fact us (remember, once again, the cover of the book). Monsters are warnings, just like the etymology states—warnings of what happens when we exclude and make the monster outcast.

--

Highlights:

• Excellent and crisply written and accessible
• Deep dive into history, culture, and science fictional aspects of monsters in human society
• Strong central theme and thesis
• Provokes thought and consideration of even more examples and ideas than in the book, extending the conversation and thought for the reader

Reference: Davies, Surekha. Humans: A Monstrous History [University of California Press, 2025].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

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

A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

The most charming, entertaining cold blanket to ever rain death on my joyful dream of space settlement

Cover design by Stephanie Ross; Cover art by Zach Weinersmith

Before Kelly and Zach Weinersmith released what would become a Hugo Award-winning Best Related Work, most people¹ only know of them through Zach Weinersmith’s webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. I’ve been an avid fan of SMBC for years, charmed and impressed by its clever willingness to combine deep discussions of philosophy, robotics, mathematics, economics, religion, literature and linguistics with some pretty crude humor. And sex.² So I was naturally curious to see what would come out of a writing duo composed of Zach Weinersmith and the woman who was willing to live with him, Kelly Weinersmith.

And the answer is a darn good book! A City on Mars is a discussion of the scientific, ethical, and legal obstacles that stand in the way of actually building settlements on other planets, asteroids, moons, or space stations. Since reality is no fun, the Weinersmiths bear the unenviable task of breaking the news to us that, honestly, space settlement is probably not going to be feasible for a very, very long time. They don’t like it any more than we do. They say so in the introduction: they started out wanting to write this book buoyed by the enthusiasm engendered of burgeoning space tech industries. We’re so close! they thought. What are those last steps before we have a city on Mars?

And then they did the research, and discovered the full extent of the depressing Well Actually. And because they are killjoys (or perhaps because they already had the book deal), they decided to kill our joy too. But because they are not complete monsters, they do it delightfully, with sympathy and wit and a kindhearted touch that crushes all our hopes into stardust no less thoroughly for all the gentleness of their approach.

The book is organized according to the types of obstacles that need to be overcome. First, the Weinersmiths discuss the known biological complications of weeks or months in zero gravity, combined with the unknown—but, extrapolating from zero-g, probably non-trivial!—biological complications of long-term or permanent life in low gravity. There is an appropriate degree of poop-centered discussion, and due diligence given to the procreative act in space. Proposed technological ameliorations of various degrees of wackiness are laid out, of which a representative sample include 'sucking pants' (to encourage fluids to circulate more freely through the lower half of the body) and the 'snuggle tunnel' (to counteract Newton's third law, which complicates thrusting motions in zero-g). The broad takeaway is that, for a self-sustaining city with natural population growth (i.e., more births than deaths/departures), we would need to be able to gestate, birth, and raise children in lower-than-earth gravity; and given the known complications of reduced gravity on healthier-than-average, trained, consenting adults, it would be wildly unethical to impose such conditions on children.

Next, there is a discussion of where such a space settlement might be situated, with considerations not just of Mars, but also the moon, and space stations. We get some really fascinating discussions of the technology that would be needed to make such settlements airtight, including meditations on the convenience of lava tunnels and warnings about the dangers of regolith dust (very pointy particles). The broad takeaway here is that it would be so wildly expensive that there is no possible way that any degree of mining or resource exploitation from asteroids or planets could make it economically viable. Just because raw materials might be available in situ doesn’t mean they can be easily transformed into the resources needed to build and maintain a settlement, and transporting them back to Earth as an economic export isn’t any better. As the Weinersmiths put it, ‘It does you no good to know the asteroids are worth $700 trillion if it costs $700 trillion and ten cents to get them to market. After all, if you’re willing to just ignore the cost of acquisition, you’re really better off digging on Earth. Earth contains about 10^23 tons of iron. If we assume a value of $100 a ton, that’s roughly a bajillion zillion hojillion dollars’ worth of iron.’³

After a brief discussion of not-entirely-unsuccessful attempts at creating self-sustaining miniature biomes on Earth (in brief, the participants were not dead at the end of it), the Weinersmiths then move on to the less sciencey but equally important consideration of law. How does the philosophy of ownership work in space? (Latin figures here, as does John Locke.) How does public vs. private control work? How does international legal jurisdiction work? What laws are already in place? Are they adequate to govern settlements, and what would it take to change them? I found this absolutely fascinating—not least because so much of the discussion of space settlement focuses on the STEM-related challenges, while the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Jeff Goldblum turn out to have some important contributions.

The book concludes with an unnerving discussion that fans The Expanse are already familiar with: the ease of destroying a planet by chucking rocks at it from space. In brief: it’s very easy, and the more settlements in space we have—and especially the more contentious those settlement politics get (see: Humanities and Social Sciences)—the likelier it is to happen.

It’s rather a bleak picture. Space settlement is not going to solve any of the problems we have on Earth—not economic, not political, not philosophical. (There is no evidence that living in space grants any real novel perspective on life; post-space astronauts are as nutso as the rest of us. Also, they always lie on their psych exams.) And certainly it won't be any kind of solution to climate problems. Any environment off Earth is going to be wildly worse to live in than the most horrible worst-case climate disaster we can imagine here. The Weinersmiths propose a very revealing litmus test: if you run around outside naked for ten minutes, will you be alive at the end of it? On Earth, no matter how climate-changed, the answer will usually be yes. Anywhere else, the answer will most definitely be no.

However, the book is so charmingly written that I didn’t feel bad taking my medicine. Zach Weinersmith contributes lots of entertaining illustrations, and both Weinersmiths have absolutely nailed the right tone here: Look, they say. We’re like you. We’re not experts (or, at least, Zach isn’t; Kelly Weinersmith is a member of the faculty in biosciences at Rice University), but we’re pretty smart, and we’re super interested in this. And we spent a lot of time doing the research and talking to the experts and going to the conferences and reading the histories, reports, and other primary sources. We know all the bits and bobs of space trivia that caught your attention in the first place, and we can tell you what actually happened, not just that Twitter thread that you shared.⁴ And we really, really wanted the answer to be more encouraging. But it’s just not. It sucks, dude. Sorry.

Yes, it does suck. But if someone had to shatter my dreams, I couldn’t have asked for them to be shattered more nicely. A very well-deserved Hugo.

1 Fine, okay, me! I’m most people! For the duration of this review I hold absolute power over words herein and the meanings thereof, and I so decree that my opinions of the world are, for the next 1200 words or so, shared by the majority of the rest of humanity.^↩
2 There is an awful lot of sex in SMBC, which I'm acutely aware of every time I consider whether some brilliantly erudite commentary on type vs. token phoneme frequency is appropriate to put on my office door.^↩
3 When I shared this gem of expository wit with my spouse, he responded severely, ‘That’s not the right number. It’s $10^25.’ My spouse is a mathematics teacher, and highly allergic to flights of fancy that neglect the basic tenets of scientific notation.^↩
4 The one about the 100 tampons being sent up with the first female astronaut? That wasn’t NASA dudes being clueless about menstruation. A female astronaut/doctor, Dr Rhea Seddon, was involved in making the decision. And the decision settled on 100 tampons because NASA’s approach to supplies was ‘take the absolute maximum amount you can imagine needing under any circumstances, double it, and then add 50%.’ Which is, y’know, not a terrible idea!^↩

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 9/10, very high quality/standout in its category

• Buzzkill
  
• Killjoy
  
• Dream-crusher
• Full of fascinating facts about the challenges across sciences and humanities preventing us from settling space
• Cute illustrations
  

Reference: Weinersmith, Kelly and Weinersmith, Zach. A City on Mars [Particular Books, 2023].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

Review: The Lion House: The Coming of a King by Christopher de Bellaigue

A study of Suleyman the Magnificent from oblique angles.

Suleyman the Magnificent is one of the most interesting and fascinatingly charismatic rulers in all of world history. If you know anything about the Ottoman Empire and it’s history, and can name a ruler, it’s probably Suleyman. The decadent opulent court, the brilliant mind, tactician and leader, the threat to Europe.

His story is told in The Lion House: The Coming of a King, by Christopher de Bellaigue

A straight up biography of him would be hard, and has been done before. What Christopher de Bellaigue does in this book, though, is a far more tricky sort of biography and study of the man. The author takes a road far less travelled in bringing us the world of the great Sultan. We meet Suleyman and get to know him throughout the book by looking at a selection of individuals across the region who have connections to him and his world.

So, the book does not open in Istanbul, as you might expect, or anywhere within the Ottoman Empire at all. Instead, the story starts in Venice, in April of 1522, with a briefing on the doings of the Ottomans, and in short order, the election of a Doge. We will continually go back to Venice in the course of the narrative, but the stories of individuals interacting with the Ottomans and Suleyman will range from Venice, to Hungary, to, of course, within Istanbul itself.

In this way, their stories, and their interactions with Suleyman, sometimes directly, and sometimes only obliquely, together, are meant for us to construct a narrative of the man at the center. Do we get fully in his head at any point? No. Do we get to see in full much of who Suleyman was, and what he did and his impact as a political actor? Again, no.

The book really turns out to be Suleyman as a “battlefield”, a chess piece (the King, naturally) on a chessboard between two of the primary point of view characters. Alvise Gritti is the son of the Doge of Venice elected in the first act, as previously mentioned. He is a bastard child, mistrusted for being a ‘Latin’, and yet for all of that, his ambition, charisma and skill puts him high in the councils of the Sultan. It’s a precarious perch to be sure, because the highest person in those councils, second only to the Sultan himself, is the Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha. Ibrahim Pasha has an intimate, and very personal relationship with the Sultan, and recognizes the danger that Gritti represents to his own power and authority. And so, even though we get other points of view, their tangled machinations against each other fill much of this book.

What this means, and given the time frame, is that we get a necessarily narrow and focused look at the Sultan himself through this conflict, through these characters and their conflict. Within that and around that, though, we get a vivid and amazing wealth of detail on the court of the Sultan, the frontier in Hungary, the halls of power in Venice, and what life “on the road” was like for soldiers, for diplomats, for high officials, for soldiers. For Suleyman. It’s an immersive and detailed use of worldbuilding to bring us into the lives of these characters who intersect with the great Sultan, directly or otherwise.

I have been speaking in terms as if this were a historical novel rather than an actual piece of non fiction, and I do think that this book really does borrow a lot from the novel tradition. The tradition expansive and sometimes dry history book of the past that turned off as many or more readers than they drew in is not so much a thing in modern history and non fiction. The rage these days is for the microhistory, for the history of sometimes not even just a particular person, but a moment in time, a decision, a small aspect of the world that can be illuminated, described and brought to life. Capturing Suleyman the Magnificent at the beginning of his reign, when he rising to his power and the crest of his reign (and arguably the height of the entire Ottoman Empire) is definitely in that microhistorical frame.

Where In the Lion House differs is in its use of narrative, point of view, the tricks of historical and mimetic fiction1 to tell these stories, to tell a narrative and a perspective on a character whose head we do no really get into. The book here at Nerds of a Feather that you may be thinking of, and I certainly was, was two books: The Sun Chronicles by Kate Elliott. Those novels feature a strong main character (the genderflipped Alexander the Great in Space). And while we do get point of view from Sun, in the two chonky novels in the series to date, we get particularly little page count in their heads. Instead we rely on the Companions, particularly ones like the Wily Persephone. It is through the frame of all the characters in those two novels that we get a picture of Sun herself, and what she does and who she is. De Bellaigue does the same thing, here.

One could write a fantasy novel in this way, sticking obliquely from the main characters and sticking to unusual point of view and “Camera choice”. Ann Leckie does this in The Raven Tower, and I know that was a difficult book for some people on that basis. I thought, however, it was brilliant.

So is it good? Is it successful? I happened to consume this in audio, and so it took me a bit to realize and recognize how the format, how the tone and shape of this story was going to go. I went thinking this was going to be a more traditional history book, a more traditional (even modern traditional) book than what I got. But in audio, the novel narrative lines worked for me, I wasn’t quite listening to a historical novel, but it was in that ballpark, with the immersive detail and the swirling around the main characters who themselves orbit in various ways around the Sultan. It was a transporting experience and I highly recommend that if you are looking for an audiobook that educates as well as entertains, this is the book for you. It’s not the one true and single biography of the Sultan, but it will give you a sense of who he was by the lives he touched.

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Highlights: 

- Historical Novel like feel to the narrative

- Audio version may be superior to print given unusual format for a history book

Reference: de Bellaigue, Christopher, In the Lion House, [Vintage Publishing, 2023] 

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Review: Empires of the Steppes by Kenneth W. Harl

Kenneth W Harl’s Empires of the Steppes is a new and up to date look at the nomadic tribes ranging from the Huns and Mongols to less familiar names, who helped shape Eurasian civilization

You've heard of the Mongols, at least vaguely, I am sure. Attila the Hun is still a byword for destruction and malevolence. These are high points of the Steppe Nomads, nomadic tribes that roamed from Hungary to China, influencing all the civilizations they contacted. But they were far more than the narrow vision you probably have. And there are many more beyond these two names. Diverse and dynamic migratory cultures. Who were these nomadic tribes, the Huns, the Mongols, and others you may not have heard of before picking up this book? And what was their importance to history? 

Kenneth W. Harl’s Empires of the Steppes explores the history of these nomadic tribes and how they shaped Eurasian civilization. Further, it engages with the whole idea of labelling the nomadic tribes of the Eurasian Steppe as solely being warriors in the first place. Certainly, the Huns, Avars, and the Mongols caused much destruction in their conflicts with settled civilizations. But the whole history and relationship of these nomads with settled civilizations is far, far more complicated and diverse. Harl's book looks at a much broader picture of what the steppe nomads were and who they were.

The book is a narrative history, running in a mostly chronologically linear format (although the prologue, showing Attila on the road to Rome, is a flashforward in terms of this linear chronology). The lack of a lot of archaeological evidence means the first couple of chapters may put off a reader, since there is much we just don’t know, and piecing together things from changes in dialects of PIE (Proto Indo-European) is somewhat obscure and arcane. It is with the Scythians that we start to get true interactions between the nomadic tribes and civilizations, and the narrative can take off. The zig-zag forward of the narrative in time means that our location and our focus, in Eurasia, shifts as different nomadic tribes and their impact on civilization are seen: Scythians in the west Steppes, Alexander the Great in Central Asia, China and their first dealings with the steppe nomads, and a couple of chapters in the East before swinging back to the Parthians, the Huns and more.

There is a lot of detail and, although I consider myself relatively well-read in history, a wealth of new information about these nomadic tribes came to light in the reading of the book. I knew a bit about the Huns, more about the Mongols, but in this book I was introduced to the Seljuks, the Scythians, the Hepthalites, and others. The complex web of relationships these people had with the more settled neighbors is a fascinating story that Harl explores. Is there a lot of back and forth raiding, attempts at conquest, submission, booty? Absolutely. But these peoples also provided mounts, transmitted ideas, and stimulated trade, commerce and technological development. Time and again, the nomadic tribes on the borders of more settled societies are shown to be agents of change. Even as they often are absorbed or disappear into the mix of the peoples they raid and conquer, their very existence, even as it is destructive and often catastrophic for peoples, cities and cultures, is also shown to have the effect of a wildfire upon a forest.

Still, contrary to the conception that the nomadic peoples just wanted to “destroy” civilization, Harl shows time and again how raiders wound up getting co-opted by their settled neighbors, either in conquering them and becoming settled themselves, or getting attracted to the goods and comforts of their neighbors. They didn’t want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, but they did want to gain control of it. But the nomadic tribes as a whole, and we see it over and over, never were able to cohere for long. The potency of a single ruler usually held fast for a generation, but the nomadic crests of power never lasted longer than a couple of generations. Protip: when designing your nomadic tribal warrior character, don’t skimp on Charisma. Charisma and personality, as much as tactical brilliance and skill, is what made Attila, Genghis, Kublai, and Tamerlane so powerful. That’s what got people to follow them and lead them to conquest and glory. Genghis’s story, which I already knew, is very much a rags-to-riches one in this regard, starting with nothing but his family half-starved and ending with an empire. But the endless changes and developments of the Steppe meant a succession of new and different challenges to settled civilization. The Avars nearly conquering Constantinople is far less well known to most people as opposed to the Huns, Vandals and Goths smashing Rome.

The book ends with Tamerlane, the last high point of the Steppe nomads. The ambitious Timur the Lame was the scourge of Central Asia, and as bad as Genghis Khan actually was, some of the things that people attribute to him, some of the worst atrocities, can be actually laid more correctly at Tamerlane’s feet. He was much more the “pyramids of skulls” type of conqueror than Genghis ever was. After Tamerlane, the nomads ceased to be an important force in Eurasian civilization. The rise of oceanic trade, the European contact with the Americas, the rise of technology making horse archers and cavalry less effective in the face of pikemen and firearms meant that the Steppe nomads ceased to be the once pivotal factor they were for two millennia. They ceased to matter much in the same way the Silk Road itself that they sat across mattered so much.

Karl doesn’t speculate or talk about it at all, since his focus is Eurasia, but a Jonbar point comes to me as a reader of SFF. Would Indigenous cultures in North America have reached higher technological levels if they had had nomadic nomads to deal with on a regular basis because horses survived in North America and some enterprising tribes (as they did once they were introduced in our TL) decided a nomadic, raiding way of life on horseback was a path to success? The Great Plains from Alberta to Iowa and Kansas could have been the equivalent of the Steppe in Asia, providing pools of warring tribes pushing out against the mound builders of Cahokia, or the Iroquois of the East, or the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, or the Ancestral Puebloans of the South. Would this constant pressure force technological development in a way that the Native Americans didn’t do in our timeline?

Overall, in Empires of the Steppes, Harl makes a strong case for the importance of nomadic tribes in pre-1500 Europe and Asia, and provides a lot of evidence and correlative information to back up his thesis. Were Attila, Genghis and Tamerlane figures who caused much destruction and devastation from France to China? Absolutely. But were they also instrumental in making the modern Eurasian world what it was? That is Harl’s thesis, and I think he strongly argues it.

One final point. Read the book with Google Maps or an atlas at your elbow. The book lacks maps, and could surely use them, especially to get a better sense of the scale of the Eurasian steppes. Genghis’s conquests are all the more impressive given the distances he was covering. While Harl does paint good word-pictures, I think the book sorely could have used some maps.

--

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights:

• Extensively footnoted and annotated thesis
• Strong narrative historical style makes for good reading
• Book frankly could have used maps, and in plenty

Reference: Harl, Kenneth W., Empires of the Steppes [Hannover Square Press, 2023].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Interview: Myke Cole, author of Sixteenth Watch

Myke Cole's first novel, Control Point, was published in 2012, he's been putting out approximately a book a year since, alongside including short fiction, non-fiction, and even starring in television shows. If you enjoy Military Fantasy or Epic Fantasy (and now, with Sixteenth Watch, Military Science Fiction), Cole is an author you should check out. A veteran himself, Cole intimately understands the choices that soldiers make, and the long term consequences of those choices. He did three tours in Iraq and was recalled to serve during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. His work includes the Shadow Ops trilogy, the Reawakening trilogy, and the Sacred Throne series, and his short fiction has appeared in Black Gate, Weird Tales, and multiple anthologies.

Angry Robot is publishing Myke Cole's forthcoming novel Sixteenth Watch (available March 10), in which the Coast Guard must prevent a lunar war. This book promises to be low G and high intensity!

I was lucky enough to see Myke at ConFusion science fiction convention many years ago, and I remember him being funny, humble, razor sharp, and an absolute stand up guy. He's super busy these days, so I was thrilled that he found time to answer all my questions about Sixteenth Watch, writing about middle aged characters, being on TV, writing non-fiction and comics, and more!

You can learn more about Myke and his work by checking out his website, MykeCole.com , or following him on twitter, @MykeCole.

NOAF: I love that the plot of Sixteenth Watch focuses around de-escalating a possible war. Your characters are trying to avoid a war by stopping it before it starts. Why did you want to tell that particular story?


Myke Cole: Military SF is a tried and true sub genre. It has a solid and reliable fan base that has a set of expectations that military stories will be about the military’s core function - to kill people and destroy property. While that is most certainly at the heart of what militaries do, it is only one of the things they do. Militaries do search-and-rescue, further diplomacy, provide aid, build infrastructure, develop new technologies and processes, and even influence pop culture. I’ve read a lot of Military SF, and I’ve been feeling for a while that these other aspects of militaries aren’t sufficiently explored, and the US Coast Guard, a military branch dedicated first and foremost to saving lives rather than taking them, was the perfect branch to do the exploring.

NOAF: The main character of Sixteenth Watch, Cdr. Jane Oliver, she's in her 50s, she's counting down the time to when she can retire. How did you develop her character? 

MC: Although it’s easy to forget since 2016 when this country has been saddled with a corrupt gerontocracy, America is a country that hates old age and lifts up youth at every turn. Older people are expected to disappear, or at least fade socially, to shut down their ambition, sexuality, and vitality. I didn’t realize how much that culture that impacted me until I crossed the line to where I’m closer to 50 than 40. It’s only as I become more interested in stories about people dealing with the second half of their lives that I realize how few stories are told about them, and in particular how few stories that deal honestly with the fact that while our bodies wither, our humanity doesn’t, and we have to grapple with the frustration of a heart that wants to write checks the body can’t cash.

NOAF: One challenge to writing Military Science Fiction and Military Fantasy is that not all readers will be familiar with military terminology and acronyms. What is common knowledge to active military members and veterans may be opaque to readers with no military experience. How have you handled this challenge?

MC: I have to thank my agent for this. When I was first doing my military fantasy Shadow Ops trilogy, I used military argot to the hilt. I used every acronym that I would normally, expecting my readers to pick things up by context. My agent read it and said “Dude. Take all that shit out.” And I was horrified. “But it’s authentic!” I cried, “it will transport the reader and make them feel like they’re really experiencing a military environment!” “Hell, no it won’t,” he said, “it’ll confuse them and throw them out of the story. Trust me, this book is so military, they can’t fill to pick up on that. Your first goal should be to make the book accessible to people who lack that first-hand experience. Put a glossary in the back if you want, but for the love of god, make another pass and take out 80% of these acronyms.”

It was hard advice to accept, but I’m glad I did. Because he was right.

NOAF: How did you come up with the title Sixteenth Watch? Is the number 16 significant?

MC: Astronauts in the International Space Station (ISS) see sixteen sunrises and sunsets every day. In my fictional universe because of this, getting assigned to the ISS became called “going on the Sixteenth Watch.” Eventually, the term “Sixteenth Watch” became used by all branches of the military as slang to mean “any duty in space.”

NOAF: What was your favorite scene to write in Sixteenth Watch?

MC: I can’t answer this without giving major spoilers. Sorry. Suffice to say it’s a conversation between Jane Oliver and the Commandant of the US Coast Guard, a conversation that Jane (and hopefully the reader) expects to go one way, and takes a delightful left turn that, if I did my job right, will evoke a tear or two.

NOAF: As I was writing these interview questions, you posted on twitter that The Bronze Lie is done". What can you tell us about The Bronze Lie?  On a related note, of course I need you tell us everything you can about Hundred Wolves from Vault Comics!

MC:  The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy is my second history book. It takes Sparta’s complete military history and compares it to their mythic status as the biggest badasses in military history and asks the question “were the Spartans really so tough?” It’s essentially a book-length version of the argument I made in an article for The New Republic that came out last year. You can read it here. 

Hundred Wolves is my comics debut. I wrote the script of issue 1 and a synopsis for the whole story arc years ago, and pitched it around unsuccessfully. But then I got incredibly lucky when I pitched it to the legendary artist Tony Akins (he did Wonder Woman, Hellblazers, and Fables, among other projects). It just so happened that he’s into the same period of history that I am (17th C. Eastern Europe) and jumped on the opportunity. With him on board, I was able to sell it immediately, and it’ll come out from Vault Comics in April.

The comic is set in the 17th C. in the lawless borderlands between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire. It’s about two Cossacks - Andrei and Oksana - steel-eyed killers who made their living raiding with the Cossack band Hundred Wolves. They eventually gave up the raiding life to raise their daughter Yulia on a farm given to them by the Polish Count Ostoja in return for service. They looked forward to farming and raising their little girl in peace, but the old life won’t let them go. The Hundred Wolves still have need of their bloody-handed skills, and their new liege lord also knows their reputation as killers and badly wants to put them to use. I was really inspired by the badass family story in Saga and worked hard to channel it in this period piece.

NOAF: You write novels, series, novellas, short stories, and now comics. When you get an idea for a story do you know right away that it is novella length, or too long to fit into one novel? How do you determine the scale of the story and world that you are building?

MC: This is a great question and I’m afraid I don‘t have a ready answer. I have my idea and I begin by sketching it out as a 3-5 page treatment. Based on the feedback I get on that, I decided whether the idea is good enough to merit expansion into an outline (usually around 100 pages), and if that cuts the mustard, then we go for whatever the final form will be (novel, novella, comic script). But as for what its final form will be . . . honestly the story itself will dictate that to me and it comes clear only as I work on the project. Currently I have one really good idea I want to get to once I complete work on the comic (and the sequel for Sixteenth Watch . . . and the bibliography, maps and illustrations references I owe for The Bronze Lie), and I still haven’t decided it it’ll work better as a comic or a novel yet. I will say that my experience doing novellas with Tor.com was so positive that I would be inclined to cut a longer work down if it meant I could publish with them again.

NOAF: You're also on TV! While us viewers only see the polished, edited version, you literally get to see what happens behind the scenes. Any funny or surprising stories from your experiences filming the Contact and Hunted TV shows? Is television something you hope to do more of?

MC: I love doing TV. For one thing, I love attention. I used to think of this as a character flaw (we’re all raised to be self-effacing and taught that seeking the spotlight is a sign of egomania), but I’ve come to accept that for better or worse, it’s who I am. TV is so much easier than writing. It’s grueling work (12-15 days when you’re shooting), but it’s compressed into a tight period (Hunted was two month’s work. Contact was one month’s work). I get paid more to do a single TV show than I do in a year of writing, and a book takes me 1-2 years to write.

But just like writing, just because you’re doing it at a professional level is absolutely no guarantee you will get to keep doing it. I thought that starring on two major network shows and having an agent at CAA (it’s really hard to get in there) meant my TV career was set. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The only real benefit of having done two shows is that I now have a gorgeous, professional “reel” (clips of me on TV) that I can show to other shows I am trying to get to book me. Otherwise, I’m basically at square one. So, I’m currently hustling for my next show and there’s no guarantee that I’ll get it.

It’s a lot like writing, to be honest. When The Bronze Lie comes out, I’ll have published twelve books all with major publishers. It means nothing. There is no guarantee I’ll sell my next one, and I have to work just as hard to make sure that what I am producing is punching at a level where it stands a real shot of being picked up by the majors.

NOAF: Thanks so much Myke!

Interview: Jess Nevins, author of Horror Fiction in the 20th Century

I first heard about Jess Nevins from  his Big Idea post at Scalzi's Whatever.   If you are interested in the modern history of horror and how the genre has evolved over the decades, if you're interested in exploring horror from all corners of the world, and discovering new-to-you horror authors, his newest non-fiction reference book,  Horror Fiction in the 20th Century: Exploring Literature's Most Chilling Genre is the book for you.

The more I researched Nevins, the more fascinated I became.  This is a guy who has published 19 non-fiction reference books on genre since 2003, including The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, The Fables Encyclopedia, The Encyclopedia of Pulp Adventures, The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger, and Horror Needs No Passport, among many others.  The knowledge this guy must have!  The memory! The passion for genre fiction! Also, how in the world does he find the time?

Of course I had to ask him if I could interview him!

I am thrilled to say that yes,  I did get to interview him.  And yes, you will be just as fascinated as I am with his work and his abilities.   Jess was kind enough to talk with me about his adventures with Interlibrary Loan, doing his own foreign language translations, scope creep,  surprising things (and sad things) he found while researching Horror Fiction in the 20th Century, his bucket list of dream projects,  the secret behind how he publishes so many books, his newest project, and more!

If that isn't enough, Jess Nevins' short fiction has appeared in Shimmer Magazine, Skelos, and elsewhere, he has also published three novels.  You can find him online at JessNevins.com, and on twitter at @jessnevins .

Let's get to the interview!

 Nerds of a Feather: Congratulations on Horror Fiction in the 20th Century: Exploring Literature's Most Chilling Genre! This type of reference book has been sorely needed for a long time. Up until now, your work mostly focused on superheroes, long running comic series, and pulp fiction. What made you interested in doing a Horror reference book?


Jess Nevins: Thanks very much! What sparked the idea for the book was my doing research on various topics in encyclopedias of horror fiction and horror authors, and being dissatisfied with what I kept finding. I’ve been reading horror fiction all my life, but the more I learned about the genre the more stories and authors I discovered weren’t covered in the standard reference books on horror fiction. And I kept finding that my own critical judgments were at odds with a lot of the critical judgments in those books.

It finally occurred to me that perhaps I could write a book about horror fiction—as Benjamin Disraeli wrote, when I want to read a book, I write it. So I started doing research for the book, and comparing what I wanted to research and what I wanted the book to have to what was in the standard reference works, and I realized what the book could be  and should be. That’s how I got interested in doing this particular horror reference book: I wanted a horror book that included all the stuff the standard horror reference books left out.


NOAF: What was your research process like?

JN: First I went through the standard reference books and made a list of authors they covered who I felt I should include in my book. Then I started reading anthologies and collections of horror stories by women, books like Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s What Did Miss Darrington See? and Lynette Carpenter and Wendy Kolmar’s Ghost Stories by British and American Women—women have traditionally been slighted or ignored or overlooked in discussions of horror authors, something that is regrettably true about the standard horror reference books as well. I knew I wanted to include a lot of female authors, whose work was just as good (albeit often in different ways) as their male counterparts, so I found as many books and research articles on women horror writers.

Then I read books of criticism about the authors on my list, and took note of the authors those critics mentioned, who were occasionally not in the standard reference works. I spent a lot of time in college and university libraries and special collections—the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center has an excellent collection of horror, and I passed many an hour in the Center’s Reading Room. I spent a lot of time reading articles and electronic books and dissertations online in various research databases and places like Google Scholar and the Core (core.ac.uk ). And I spent a long time going through the bibliographies and footnotes of everything I read and consulting those books and articles which the authors I was reading had used in their research.


NOAF: This reference features incredible coverage of international horror literature. How did you go about finding these horror stories and learning about these authors?

JN: Nearly all of the standard reference books on horror include at least one or two authors who aren’t American or from the United Kingdom—what I call the “Anglophone countries.” Almost as soon as I began writing the book it occurred to me that, as with female horror authors, there must be more horror authors from outside the Anglophone countries than were included in the standard reference books. So I began using all of the databases I had access to via work (I’m a college librarian) to find books on non-Anglophone horror fiction and authors. That gave me a basic list to begin researching. Then I began reading books of criticism and history about regional literatures and the popular literature of various regions and countries. Doing that I found books like O.R. Dathorne’s The Black Mind: A History of African Literature and Albert Gérard’s European Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa and Muireann Maguire’s Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature, which pointed the way toward authors and stories/novels I didn’t know about and books of history and criticism which might be useful.

I spent a lot of time in college and university libraries and special collections, as I said, and I requested, through my library’s Interlibrary Loan service, an enormous number of books, most collections and anthologies of non-Anglophone authors’ work. Then I began to translate particular stories—which was the most labor-intensive part of the research process. I can get by in French and German, but when it comes to languages like Finnish and Hungarian and Croatian, well, it was word by word, dictionary in hand. Which is not the ideal way to translate anything, but was the best I could manage, since I couldn’t afford to pay for a translator.


NOAF: How has the horror genre changed over the last 100 years?  What types of patterns (if any) did you notice the most?

JN: As you might expect, the horror genre has become much more welcoming to different voices over the past century—different voices, and different characters. The all-white-cis-hetero-male parade of authors and characters is over, thank heavens. With this change in voices and characters has come a similar change in the types of stories told; horror fiction by and about characters who aren’t white-cis-hetero males often (not always, but often) addresses different concerns and anxieties and beliefs than what is found in horror fiction by white-cis-hetero males.

Horror fiction is generally more explicit about what’s going on in the story now, less elliptical and more detailed, whether it’s the violence, the threatening human or monster, the emotions, or even sex. A lot of the old(er) stories would allude to violence and sex and what the monster looked like; most horror fiction now is direct about these things.

In general, changes in horror fiction reflect the changes in society of the author(s) of a horror story. The decline of religion in the West is reflected in the near-disappearance of religious horror in Western horror fiction. The end of colonialist empires in Africa meant that African horror writers could write horror fiction about their former colonizers and about the horrors of colonialism; a generation later, African horror writers began writing horror stories about anything and everything.

Metaphorically, horror fiction a century ago was classical music (including the experimental branch of classical music); by the end of the century, horror fiction could be anything from John Cage’s “4’33”” to Pusha T’s “What Would Meek Do” to Vampire Weekend’s “Harmony Hall.” Anything can be horror fiction now. Anyone can write it. It’s great!


NOAF: What were some of the surprising things you learned, while you were working on this book?

JN: Just how dominant women horror writers were in the 19th century. (Up to 70% of the horror fiction in the 19th century was written by women). Just how widespread horror fiction was, globally, before the 1970s. (The colonial print networks brought 19th century horror fiction to the colonies of the world, so that Edgar Allan Poe could be equally influential on Indonesian and Brazilian horror authors early in the 20th century, and execrable Western authors could dominate local tastes in horror, as Dennis Wheatley did in the former British colonies in Africa up through the 1970s). How effective, and frightening, even the oldest story could be, if I just cleared my mind of expectations and accepted the story on its own terms. (W.W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw” has become a cliché, but if you try to approach it as if you didn’t know the story it becomes a taut, scary little story. The comfortable, Oxford world of M.R. James’ stories is an alien one to most of us, and his protagonists share little in common with us today, but damn if James isn’t a master of horror despite that.

Less happily, how wide-spread and long-lasting the bigotries were in horror fiction: racism, misogyny and sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, nativism, etc. etc. etc., were all too common in horror fiction through the 1960s and kept appearing even into the 1990s, when authors should have known better.

On a happier note, how pleasingly transgressive pre-1970s horror fiction could be. It’s commonly-accepted wisdom that the horror genre is innately conservative, but I don’t believe that’s accurate. Pre-1970s horror fiction can be politically transgressive, can transgress sexual mores, can feature shocking body horror and body violations, can deliver the unhappiest of endings to characters who don’t deserve it—can do, in other words, anything post-1970s horror fiction does, and even more shockingly, because it’s unexpected.

Lastly, just how good the best horror writers from outside the Anglophone world could be. So many of them have never been translated into English, but if and when they are, readers of English are in for some outstanding horror experiences. The Belgian writer Jehanne Jean-Charles is in the tradition of Saki but is, if anything, his superior. The Cuban writer Esther Díaz Llanillo’s stories are superb mergings of M.R. James and Franz Kafka. And the Japanese writer Ryo Hanmura’s novels are a gonzo mix of Marxism and every pop culture horror trope one could hope to find. Someday, I hope, we’ll get these and many other authors in English, and then all of our minds will be blown.


NOAF: You've put out nearly 20 books since 2003, so I've got to ask - what are your time management secrets? How do you work so efficiently?


JN: I cheat. I’ve been an academic librarian since 2001, and every job I’ve had at a college or university has had a scholarly publishing component to the job requirements. All of my bosses, when they read my work, have decided that what I write meets the requirement for scholarly publishing. So I get to write my books as part of my day job.

I’ve been able to write as much as I do are that I write every day, without exception, for as long as I can—I am not the most talented writer in the world, but I will outwork anybody. My wife understands how important writing is to me and is willing to support me in any way she can, from proofing my manuscripts to not blinking an eye when I tell her I need to go to London for two weeks to do research at the British Library. And when I started seriously writing books I decided that I’d have to give up a lot of pleasure time activities. So I don’t watch much tv or see many movies or do a lot of pleasure reading. I spend the time I used to spend on those things doing research and writing and rewriting books. I miss out on a lot that way, but I’m more productive as a writer.


NOAF: How did you first get started with writing Annotated Guides and Encyclopedias for comics, pulp fiction, superheroes, and Victoriana?

JN:  I got started writing because there were things I wanted to read—at first, scholarly annotations to comic books—that didn’t exist. After I’d written a few of those, I had the confidence to start thinking of myself as an actual writer, and to begin thinking about books I wanted to read that didn’t exist and that I thought I could write, like my Victorian literature encyclopedia. After a while I had more ideas for books than I’d ever have the time to write, and since then the books I write are the ones whose ideas won’t leave me, like the history of horror. I’d like to write a history of the Kansas City underworld, and a history of the British comic industry, and a history of how popular literature evolved after the end of every American war; but for the past couple of years I’ve been obsessed with writing a history of horror fiction, and now I’m obsessed with a novel idea. I have to follow the obsessions.


NOAF: I know projects can often grow larger that we expect, and often in directions we didn't expect. Any funny stories about scope creep?

JN: OMG. Nearly all of my books have suffered from scope creep, sometimes ridiculously so! If my publisher for the horror book hadn’t instituted a hard word limit of 110,000 words, I’d probably have written a book that was twice as long. My pulp encyclopedia really suffered from that, because I started out thinking I’d only do recurring heroes from pulp magazines—and surely that would be a small number—and then I said, “Why not include recurring heroes from radio shows?” and then “Why not include recurring heroes from detective novel series?” and then “Why not include heroes from movie serials and comic strips?” and then “Why not include recurring heroes from international pulps and dime novels and movie serials and comic strips?” and before I knew it the pulp encyclopedia was about 800,000 words long! (The manuscript is almost 1800 pages long).

NOAF: If I'm not mistaken, your next project is the second volume of your Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana. What can you tell us about it?

JN: The first edition of the Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana came out in 2005. It was an encyclopedia of genre fiction published in the 19th century, although I included Gothic fiction from as early as the 1760s—can’t write about the Victorians without including the Gothics—and I included a story published in 1905, because the character was more Victorian than Edwardian. The encyclopedia was a success—a finalist for a literary award, sold out its print run, won me some fans—but it was too expensive to reprint, and so it went out of print.

Last summer, it occurred to me that maybe the time was right to do a second edition of Victoriana. There were certain things about the original that had irritated me for a long time: the lack of a good index, the lack of scholarly apparatus like footnotes and a proper bibliography, the lack of certain authors and stories or novels. The first edition had been written from 2001-2004, which is about six generations in Internet time; the amount of critical and historical material available online now is staggering compared to what was online in 2001. Most of all, what bugged me and even embarrassed me about the first edition was that I’d written it when I was in my early thirties, when my personal politics were sometimes less than woke and when my literary/critical judgments could sometimes be callow. Now, in my early fifties, I’ve got better personal politics and a better set of critical judgments.

So I rewrote Victoriana. I rewrote most of the entries and incorporated new information into all of the entries—all the criticism and histories that had been written in the past twenty years. I removed some entries and added a number of others. I made the book scholarly, so everything’s footnoted now. I included a proper index. I corrected the mistakes of the first edition, cleaned up the embarrassingly wrong statements, and refined my judgments and criticism.

The resulting manuscript is over 2200 pages long, and will only be available as an ebook, but it’s finally the book that the first edition should have been, and anyone interested in the popular literature of the 19th century should find it very useful. (I’ve put the list of entries in the second edition here,  and put a sample entry online here:)

NOAF:  Thanks Jess!


POSTED BY: Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. She can be found on twitter, @redhead5318 , where she posts about books, food, and assorted nerdery.