Podcasts - Strange Horizons: Recent Episodes

View Details

In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Aisha and Dan discuss the knotty question of "the canon": what is it, how is it formed, who is it for? They do so in conversation with the critic Abigail Nussbaum, whose new reviews collection, Track Changes, has just been published by Briardene Books.

https://d3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net/staging/2024-7-25/385289244-44100-2-5d7eea42e3b4d.m4aTranscriptCritical Friends Episode 12Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And I’m Aishwarya Subramanian. In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be discussing science fiction and fantasy reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

Dan Hartland: In this episode, we welcome back to the podcast the critic and reviewer Abigail Nussbaum, in part to talk about her brand new collection of reviews, Track Changes.

Aishwarya Subramanian: We also wanted to take the opportunity to talk about canon-building: how we choose the texts we talk about, remember and recommend - but also who does it and for whom, and what it all means.

Dan Hartland: But we began, in a grand tradition, with a humble con report …

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: So you have just come back from Worldcon.

Abigail Nussbaum: I have.

Dan Hartland: We were wondering what position the kind of criticism that this show does, or is interested in, held at the convention. Aisha and I do all these episodes and we talk about all this stuff, but obviously in some ways it’s an extremely niche interest. How niche?

Abigail Nussbaum: I think I would have to say very niche. And one example that I unfortunately have to give to that is that in the best related work Hugo category, our friend Niall Harrison, his book, All These Worlds was nominated. And of course the memorial collection of Maureen’s reviews A Traveler in Time, they were both nominated in that category and they both came last and I love those books. I wanted one or the other of them to take the Hugo but you have to admit what’s going on there. I feel like that tells you the situation in very stark terms.

Dan Hartland: And in terms of representation of criticism or reviewing on the program itself, like if there is that little interest in the Hugo voting population, is that also reflected in the programming, like the enthusiasm for items about this stuff?

Abigail Nussbaum: I think that’s two things, though, because there were a lot of critics on the program and that I think probably reflects the people who were making the program because some of them know us. Liz Batty, our friend, also recent Hugo winner was on the program team and they are aware of us as critics and they, not to toot my own horn, but they knew that critics do a good job on panels.

So we got A lot of panels where critics were present, but I am aware of only one criticism panel, which I attended, I wasn’t on: Liz Bourke and Roseanna Pendlebury from Nerds of a Feather, who also just won a Hugo, and Paul Kincaid, and another participant whose name I am now blanking on, unfortunately .

So that there was one reviewing panel. I’m not aware of a lot of other panels that actually discussed reviewing. And in fact, this discussion of reviewing was the discussion of reviewing that always happens at a convention. There is one. What is the purpose of reviewing? How do we feel about good reviews? How do we feel about spoilers? It was a good panel. There were, there was a good discussion of all these questions, but they are the questions that always come up.

Dan Hartland: So there’s no sense of a conversation about criticism, which takes place at Worldcon and improves over time.

Abigail Nussbaum: First of all, there was my own book launch, and that was the conversation that Niall and I were having at the book launch. Which unfortunately was not recorded. But what we were basically talking about is what is criticism, what is the purpose of criticism, how has it changed and developed. So that conversation was going on, but it was going on in a very contained area.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I’m enjoying the thought of you and Niall being kept in a contained area to talk about reviewing.

Abigail Nussbaum: That is basically what would happen, isn’t it? You just put us in a room and we talk about reviewing and people would come and observe us.

Dan Hartland: Okay, so there aren’t, at Worldcon, a great deal of panels specifically about criticism. So what happens is that the critics sneak into other panels and do their thing under cover of darkness. And I’m just wondering in your experience of going to these panels, or being on these panels, what does that perspective add? And more importantly, how, or does it, merge or link with the other perspectives?

Abigail Nussbaum: The distinction that I tend to think of is between the critics and the professionals, the authors.

And those are two very different approaches. When you’re talking about a panel about environmental science fiction, which is one panel that I participated in, when you’re talking about a panel about representation of indigenous characters in science fiction, which I attended. When you bring an author to speak on that panel, they are often looking at the topic from the inside out, from how they specifically approach this topic.

And when you bring a critic, they will often approach it from the outside in, looking at the the end result rather than the process. You end up with a very different approach to any topic that you could discuss.

Dan Hartland: You mentioned that you launched your book at Worldcon. Congratulations, book!

Abigail Nussbaum: Thank you very much.

Dan Hartland: It is, of course Track Changes: Selected Reviews. It is published by Briardene Books. I have my copy on the table next to me. How did the launch go? We know what you spoke about. How was it? Because you’re differentiating here between critics and authors, which of course is fair, but also critics are authors.

So how does it feel to have all of these things that you’ve written for various websites, your own blog, Strange Horizons, in book form? How did it feel to be at your own launch?

Abigail Nussbaum: First of all, there were all sorts of logistical issues because and this is, praise for the Worldcon because the program was so full of good things that every single person we came to that we thought would be interested in this launch and said, Hey, we’re doing this at this time said, Oh, I have something else at exactly that time.

And Niall and I were getting quite nervous and thinking no one’s going to come. And in the end, quite a lot of people came. It was a nice little crowd and very appreciative. And as they asked questions so that, the whole logistical aspect of it, of what if I launch a book and no one comes that, that was, I got to feel a little bit like an author, but yeah, you’re absolutely right.

Because obviously all reviewers are authors, and I believe that strongly, especially on the level of craft. I believe that a review should be well written, I believe that there is an element of honing your craft, and I believe that a review can simply be beautiful writing. That has been a part of my work, my career as a critic from day one, but there is something to putting all the reviews together in a book, not just the physical object, which is, of course, incredibly gratifying to, to look at and to hold. The book itself feels like a single whole. Maybe I won’t say greater than the sum of its parts, but distinct from them. It felt very different being someone who has published this collection of reviews to being someone who was just writing and publishing them continuously over 19 years.

Dan Hartland: One of the things that really strikes me about the volume is that you have clearly thought about that question of its, I’m going to use this word, but imagine many scare quotes around it, unity. So you’ve thought about, and you say so in the introduction, okay, I’ve got nearly a thousand reviews from 20 years of reviewing to choose from, they’re not all going in the book. So how do I make sure that the ones, that these reviews speak to each other?

Abigail Nussbaum: First of all, it’s not nearly a thousand reviews. It’s nearly a thousand pieces of writing. I wouldn’t have called all of them reviews. I don’t, I don’t want to make it sound like I’ve collected so little of my work in the book because it’s, I think it’s quite substantial.

But yeah, no, that was a huge question. And. Like the first question you ask yourself is what here is even, still usable, still worth reading, going back and reading your old stuff is sometimes quite horrifying. But no, I was really, while I was reading, and collecting this list of things that I thought were still worthwhile or that I thought I could rework into something that would be good and still publishable.

I was constantly asking myself, what, is there kind, some kind of unifying theme here? Is there a whole that I can make out of these pieces? And that took a while to get to. I had to go and read and reread again and again. And then. I was actually reading Niall’s book and Niall and I are very different critics. He he looks at the whole a lot more than I do. And he reviews with an eye towards that.

Dan Hartland: Can I ask just briefly, I know it’s a diversion, but what do you mean by that? So what is the whole that Niall is inspecting that you tend not to?

Abigail Nussbaum: He looks at the whole of the genre. He looks at how a work speaks to, the history of the genre, the author’s career, obviously every reviewer does that. I try to do that in my own reviews, but Niall does that a lot more. It’s ... if you read All These Worlds, it’s so present in every one of his reviews that he is approaching the works as part of a tradition. And he’s thinking about how that tradition is built by the pieces that make it.

Whereas in my reviews, I tend to draw connections. I read one book and I say, Wow, this reminds me of another book that was published twenty years earlier on a different continent. Maybe the two authors knew of each other. I don’t look at the whole when I’m writing specifically. But then, as I was reading my old work, I suddenly realized that, of course, that was there from the beginning, that sense of the whole was building throughout what I was writing, and that is the essence of the book, the track changes.

This idea that without meaning to, I had been charting what was happening to me and to the genre and to the world.

Aishwarya Subramanian: So that kind of ties into something that I was going to ask you and it answers it partly. I was going to ask about when you’re selecting these reviews and when you’re going back through all of this writing that you’ve done, which is sometimes a very painful and cringeworthy process.

At some point, if you are looking for unity, in a way what you’re doing is building a narrative of yourself as a critic. And one of the things that I wanted to ask was: to what extent, did you have a sense of what that narrative was going to be before you started selecting pieces? Or did it just emerge as you were reading?

Abigail Nussbaum: I’m not sure I have that sense right now because there was a review of Track Changes in Locus, a very positive and generous review. And one of the things it said was how much I am a political reviewer, how much that is the focus of my criticism. And of course I was aware of that. That’s something that I do quite consciously, but it’s not how I ever thought to define myself.

And there is that author experience, isn’t it? That you put something out into the world and you thought you knew everything about it. And someone comes and says, Oh, look at this. And you realize, wait, I put that in there and I had no idea I was doing it. Yes, I think the book is very much a narrative of myself growing into an awareness of topics, growing into a greater understanding of issues of feminism, of anti racism, of many other political topics.

But at the same time, I think I may not have fully been aware of what I was putting out there by constructing it.

Dan Hartland: Having read the introduction to the book, you were a little bit aware of it. In the sense that, yeah, so Niall Harrison, I agree, treats each text as a specimen of a genus, right?

So he inspects each book as a block in the great wall of genre. He’ll hate me for saying that. Whereas in the introduction to the book, you talk about exactly as you just said, "ideas such as representation, cultural appropriation, anticolonialism, they moved from the outskirts, to the mainstream of the fannish conversation."

But you also note in the next line, "these crises were not unique to the fields of science fiction and fantasy." And it feels to me like, if Niall is really interested in genre and reading the books as belonging to that, you are, I don’t want to say outward-looking, because that’s saying that genre is inward-looking, which it doesn’t need to be. But you’re really interested in making those connections between, yeah, that outside political world and the text and your introduction more or less says that, right? So what is it that you weren’t aware how deep that hole went in your work?

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah, basically, like I said, it did not occur to me that people would say, "Oh, that’s Abigail Nussbaum, she’s such a political reviewer." And saying it out loud, I realized that, of course, that makes sense for people to say. But, it’s not really how I think of myself. When I approach a work, it’s always first and foremost, and the desire for pleasure and enlightenment. And, for seeing how this work interacts with other works.

That also gave me pleasure and enlightenment. And then of course, the politics comes in. The politics are often in the work itself. The author themselves may have been quite conscious in introducing them. But I never quite had a sense of myself as someone who approaches a work first and foremost politically, and I don’t think that’s what I am, but I think that probably when I write, that is what I put out there.

Aishwarya Subramanian: That always makes me think, what is an apolitical reviewer and do I want to read one because ...

Abigail Nussbaum: I suppose it’s possible to be a more political reviewer or a less political reviewer, but not to criticize that review because it is extremely kind. By the way, it’s by Ian Mond, I should have said. I think that there are reviewers who put that stuff more on the back burner.

Also I think that there is perhaps a tendency, maybe less in reviewing, but certainly in the marketing of science fiction these days, to treat box ticking as political, those marketing promos where you have all the arrows pointing at the book and it’s protagonist of color and friends to lovers and anti colonial, and these are all great things.

But they don’t really tell you that much about the work in question, much less how it handles any of these topics. And I think that one of the things I always try to do in my reviews is dig in and say, okay, this work thinks of itself as anti colonial, but how is it doing that? This work is trying to talk about the exploitation of labor, but if all the laborers here are middle class, what is it actually saying?

So maybe that is why. I am seen as primarily a political reviewer because I engage with that political subtext in a way that’s a bit more confrontational.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And equally it’s possible - and there are reviewers that I can think of that do this, but I also don’t want to name them because I feel like it would spoil things, because I think part of why they’re successful is because they do this so subtly - they don’t name it.

Dan Hartland: There’s a virtue to naming it, right?

Aishwarya Subramanian: There is a virtue to naming it.

Dan Hartland: And in doing so, you insist upon the attention being drawn to it, and the attention should be drawn to it, but perhaps some readers, and I’m not saying that Ian is one of these, aren’t used to their attention being drawn in that direction.

Aishwarya Subramanian: There’s certainly a, an area of genre fandom where the description a political reviewer would be seen as a criticism of you.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yes, though again first of all, maybe it depends on the politics first of all, to and I mean that’s significant in every, any level, not just in certain parts of fandom. You can’t just say I’m political without specifying what your politics actually are.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I was kicked out of this place for my politics!, she said, mysteriously, not telling you what those were.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah, exactly.

[ musical sting]

Dan Hartland: So your lens is whatever your lens is. Okay. Let’s not use the P word, right? But in the book, you look at five separate kind of buckets. I hate that word, but that’s what it is. It’s a bucket. And you stick a bunch of works in these buckets. And the buckets are: Space, Systems, Places, Bodies, and Tales.

And I actually think they are really interesting. Neat. Neatly done. I wouldn’t object to the categorization of any of the texts, or let’s put it this way, any of your reviews of those texts and how you’ve done it. I think it works really well, gets a great breadth, it’s a super framework for the book. I wonder whether you paid attention, any attention, to what the texts were as opposed to what your reviews were doing with them. So for instance, in the space section, books that you feature include Nova Swing, but also Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. In the systems section, you’ve got The Stone Sky, but you’ve also got Surface Detail by, Banks.

Was there any attempt to ensure that the texts were I’m not going to say representative, but in some way speaking to each other, or was your focus when building this book mostly on, "okay, what am I saying with these texts and how does that fit into this unity we’ve been talking about?"

Abigail Nussbaum: The thing is that once that framework was established, once I hit on this structure, which, not only These specific scenes, but the way that the theme go from the biggest to the smallest, and then, into tales, which is the foundation of it all.

Once I had that framework, picking the reviews was almost a non issue. There were a couple of places where I did there. Should I do this? Should I do that? But almost none. Once the framework was established, it was so easy to look at a review. And say, yeah, this goes in this segment. This doesn’t really fit in any segment.

So it doesn’t belong. This goes in that segment, but there’s another review that does a similar thing better. So we’re going to leave it out. The framework determined the makeup of the book almost entirely. And having said that, yeah, there were places where I said to myself, I’m going to squeeze this in a bit.

Like it was important for me to have an Iain M. Banks review in the book. So I went looking for the one that would fit in one of the frameworks that I had chosen. And I’ve reviewed both of Sofia Samatar’s novels. And for a while I said to myself, “you can’t have a review of both of them.” And then after a while I said to myself, "Why? Why? It’s my book. I can do whatever I want." And I just ended up putting them in different segments. Which, by the way, is a decision that I feel is open to, to challenge, but I wanted to do it. So there but really what determined the choice was that focus, that structure.

Once I hit on that, everything else fell into place.

Dan Hartland: Another way of looking at, putting together a collection of reviews is to build a kind of personal canon, not of reviews, but of text. So of text that you have reviewed over time, which you feel belong in some sort of, Everyman Library of, your personal reading, which may in turn inform any wider canons that you think should or should not exist.

It doesn’t sound like you did that. It sounds like you were much more interested in what the review was doing rather than beyond, I want Iain M Banks, I want two Samatars. And it was much more about, okay, who am I as a critic? What have I done? Put that in the book, than these books are really important and I need to document what I feel about these books.

Abigail Nussbaum: There was a degree of that. There are reviews that it was important for me to have in the book because I feel that the books I was talking about are important. I really wanted The Moonday Letters, for example, in there. I wanted The Unravelling by Benjamin Rosenbaum. Both books that I think are excellent at what they do and have not gotten the kind of attention that they deserve.

So there was an element of that. But no, I would absolutely not say that there was any effort at canon building here because on the contrary, there are quite a few reviews in the book that are anti canon. That are negative reviews of works that are quite mainstream, and if not yet canonical, then perhaps on their way to getting there.

That definitely wasn’t my focus. This was, this is not a book about what I think are the best works, or even the worst works, or the most important works. But having said that, once you put them together, I think you start to notice that a lot of these reviews are in conversation with each other, sometimes literally, sometimes one of them refers back to the other.

But for example, if you look at the segment of space, I think you see ideas. Start in one review and make their way to the later ones. Not even consciously. But because this was a a reaction and a development of that reaction that I was having to these works over time.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, because I think I’m right in saying, aren’t I , that you order the reviews by the sequence in which you wrote them, rather than the sequence in which the books were published.

Abigail Nussbaum: There’s very little variance there. I think there’s one or two places where it falls out of whack. But yes, they are in publication order. The review, not the work.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I was interested in just now when you said that some of these reviews are anti-canonical in that they are very negative about books that are likely to become canonical, that that have been, widely praised or have been successful enough that they’re being considered as central to the genre over this time.

And because, I think, one of the ways that I think about canons in general is, again, as shared histories, right? Shared narratives of, community; what did science fiction think was important enough that it influenced the genre, influenced other science fiction, etc. And I think that the negative review is actually a really important part of that, isn’t it?

Because this is the history of this conversation. When this book came out, yes, everyone loved it, but then actually, no, everyone didn’t love it. Here are some people talking about what was wrong with it. And one of the reasons why I think that’s quite important is because I think that sometimes, particularly in the context of, in genre and in a lot of other fields in the arts, we can tend to think of our progress in very flattening ways, so you’ll often hear someone talk about a book that came out say ten or fifteen years ago and the underlying idea is, oh back then they thought this was okay, but now of course we know better, we have better politics. And there’s something quite important about, I think, retaining a sense of the complexity of these conversations that actually at some level it’s important that a book became canonical and important and beloved and best selling despite the fact that quite a lot of people could see quite a lot wrong.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah, it’s the minority opinion, isn’t it? You want it on the record. You’re right. Like you, you have a tendency to assume that people in the past knew less than you did, understood less than you did. And, to a certain extent, that’s true. You go to a book that was written 30, 40 years ago, and it makes certain assumptions that just wouldn’t fly today. In terms of the diversity of its characters, in terms of how it, it views queerness or racism or colonialism. These things are true, but it shouldn’t be assumed that people at the time weren’t cognizant of this. And if you go back and you read criticism or commentary, from decades ago. You will find people who are making this exact same point and sometimes making it more cogently than people in the present are just because they’ve thought about it, I think, more deeply. They’re not just repeating buzzwords.

Dan Hartland: I think we’re back to the lack of influence that critics seem to have. Where there are critics in every age saying this is rubbish and yet somehow the text is still canonized. Which is a fascinating story in and of itself, actually. How the canon is formed, we could have an entirely separate podcast on because the idea is that it’s formed by, some sort of intellectual elites in university departments.

But these are often the critics who think it’s, it’s terrible. So there is a sort of material element of canon production, which I think is understudied. It strikes me while we’re talking, though, that there’s a question and you, I think you’ve glanced at it a few times, Abigail this question of what it, what are we canonizing?

Or what are we, what is it about a book that we are seeking to admire? Is it best? Is it great? Is it most popular? And the New York Times recently did their hundred best books of the twenty-first century so far, which was a really fascinating example of this in action. I don’t whether either of you listened to the New York Times books podcast, but they discussed the list on that.

And they noted themselves that they were quite surprised by some of the ballots that came back. So they asked a bunch of different writers and even all the literary writers came back and obviously listed literary novels, but so did the genre writers. With honourable exceptions, they make mention of Rebecca Roanhorse’s ballot, which was, full genre.

A lot of the genre writers come back and at least, they might offer a couple of genre books, but they also offer all of the literary works that you might expect, because there is this sense of greatness is something separate to most popular or best. So for example the book that many people have noted, isn’t on the list is and we can debate its virtues or lack thereof, and I think Abigail you may have reviewed it is Gone Girl, which was a huge publishing sensation but does not make the list and the question is why. I’m really interested by Track Changes including both Nova Swing and the Becky Chambers book because you are deliberately covering the bases there, right?

Abigail Nussbaum: No, I don’t know if I would describe it as deliberate. Because again, like you said the focus was a lot less on the specific works and more about what I was saying in my reviews of them. And Nova Swing, I think is a great work of science fiction. The Becky Chambers, in my mind, is not. But I was interacting with both of them in a way that reflected on that specific topic of books about space, of how our genre processes this whole concept of space exploration.

So I did, you’re right, you’re absolutely right. Those are two books that most people would not put on the same shelf, even though they both belong to the same genre, but to me the reviews felt much more in conversation than maybe the books themselves. And while you were talking, I was thinking about this whole issue of popular and prestigious.

And, that’s something that science fiction readers and fans have bifurcated attitudes towards. Because, on the one hand, there is this profound anxiety about hostility from outside the genre. Those people who look down on science fiction. Someone will always trot out Margaret Atwood, which is pretty tired if you ask me.

And on the other hand, there is, even within the genre, this no sense that, the important works are the popular ones The Expanse or Game of Thrones. Maybe that really is the reason that critics are not setting the tone because we’re the worst of both worlds, aren’t we? We’re both the outside intelligentsia who are saying, Hey, maybe literary fiction isn’t that bad.

And even within the genre we’re saying. We don’t like The Expanse so much. Why don’t you read M. John Harrison? So really, who can stand us? I think that if you’re talking about canon forming, there is this impulse to say what’s popular is what’s important. And I think within science fiction, that impulse is quite powerful.

But I’m not sure that over time it, it holds sway. I’m not sure that it has the last word. If you look at the older lists, if you look at the books that have endured over time, they are, maybe they’re not literary, but they’re substantial. At the very least.

Dan Hartland: The New York Times list is a good example of this process that I think you’re talking about, Abigail, where there are some books on the list that are more surprising in their presence than others, and they tend to be the ones that are more recently published.

So it takes a little bit of time for these things to, these various dynamics to play out in the case of a book. Although it’s also, it can be, we all agreed, entirely arbitrary which books are remembered and which are not. And if not arbitrary, then multifactorial and some of the factors have nothing to do with the quality of the book.

Abigail Nussbaum: Oh, absolutely. But also, I’m always very suspicious when I read a book like this and I see a list like this and I see a book that was published a year ago, two years ago. Unless it’s Piranesi. If it’s Piranesi you’re absolutely right. But more generally I I do not think you can tell that a book is going to be a classic or that it deserves to be a classic as soon as it comes out.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, I think that was something I noticed when I was looking through the list as well, just the ones where I’m automatically a bit suspicious are the 2022, 2023 publications, where there’s a part of me that’s going, okay, so I can understand that you think this is good, but to be canonical it needs to be something else. It needs to be influential. You haven’t given it time. To influence anyone.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah, again, the question of whether a canonical work has to be influential is a really interesting one. We could have a whole podcast on that alone. I just mentioned Piranesi, but one of the things that is often observed about Susanna Clarke’s first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, is that it does not have that much of an influence. Though I would absolutely describe it as canonical.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, it gets treated as this weird anomaly. Especially since she then goes several years without publishing. It’s treated as this thing that’s sprung up out of nowhere, was important and then there was no further context to it.

Dan Hartland: And I also wonder whether the kind of that multifactorial element comes into play here because Jonathan Strange might not have been influential, but it was at the time very popular. So you saw a lot of copies everywhere. Were it neither influential or popular upon initial publication?

Would it still be canonical? Is, can we talk about the innate quality of a text overcoming all of that? To still make an unpopular and non influential book somehow, quote unquote, canonical.

Abigail Nussbaum: I can think that the, one of the best books of the twenty-first century is something that only I and 10 other people read. And I can think that very strongly, and because I’m a critic, I can say it very loudly. But that will not make that book canonical. I don’t think you can escape the fact that the book has to be read in order to be canonical.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And then I suppose we have to ask the question, canonical to who? Is this canon? Is there a canon of stuff that science fiction critics like from the twenty-first century? There probably is. If we were to make those lists ourselves individually, there’d probably be quite a lot of overlap.

Dan Hartland: And I think there are probably also science fiction critics, particularly, genre critics more widely as well, who kind of embrace - Abigail glanced at it earlier - the idea of genre sitting outside of the literary canon, that genre is by definition, non canonical, and that’s as I see it. Differentiated from anti canonical, it’s non canonical, it cannot be, it does not wish to be subsumed into the canon. And there is a kind of tension between wanting the genre to be recognized, wanting particular generic works to be recognized, and having them co opted by the genre.

A canon that I think we’re all agreed is ultimately a communal decision, right? So as Abigail says, no one critic can make a text canonical. It’s got to be read, presumably quite widely.

Abigail Nussbaum: As you said, I think there are different canons. For example, one of the criticisms that I saw of the New York Times best books of the 21st century list, as someone said, apparently there was only one important book of poetry published in the last 24 years, and that was Citizen by Claudia Rankine.

And I read Citizen, I thought it was brilliant, but I am not a regular poetry reader, so it is quite possible that there’s quite a lot of important poetry published this century that I have missed. So maybe I am not the best person to ask on this topic. And if you went to poets they might come up with a completely different list of work.

But then that brings you back to the question of how do you define canonical? Because if there’s a book that a lot of poets agree is one of the best books of the twenty-first century, but poetry being a little red field, most people don’t know about it. Is it fair to stack it up against Citizen, which so many people, even non-poetry-reading people like myself, read and admired?

Aishwarya Subramanian: I suppose then the question is, what is a canon without a defined audience? Or who is it a canon of? Is there a defined community here? Because one of the things that struck me about the New York Times list is when they, at the beginning, talk about who they approached to source these books, it’s very deliberately diverse in the sense that it’s, here are some authors, here are some readers, here are some reviewers here are people on, very pointedly, across the political spectrum, here’s Sarah Jessica Parker, specifically named for some reason. Sure, fine, great, but once you’ve got all of those people in a room, is there a defined sense of community that links them together, that makes a canon even a reasonable, a viable thing? This is not a representative sampling of the world, and it’s also not a representative sampling of a particular community. So what is it?

Abigail Nussbaum: I think if you’re the New York Times, then you’re invested in the idea that you are representative.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Of the world.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah. And that’s that the group of people you selected are represented while at the same time, you are being quite selective. You’re going to celebrities, you’re going to publish authors.

So it is simultaneously an appeal to populism and to prestige, which I think is the New York Times brand, isn’t it? Whereas if you were doing a list like this within science fiction, I think you would also want a mix. Of authors and critics and, lots of other publishers, very obviously editors.

But I think that would be a more insular group. Even allowing for the fact that science fiction has very different fandoms within it. That there are fandoms right now that consider themselves the white hot core of science fiction or fantasy that I am barely aware of, all those kids on TikTok.

But even with that caveat, I think the group that you would get if you tried to recreate this list for science fiction books would be more of a consensus group. Maybe even more representative.

Dan Hartland: But, it would only be science fiction books, right? Whereas, the New York Times list pretends to take in all genres.

Even though I think really, of core science fiction, I think only Jemisin is on the list. But it would pretend to be, again, broadly representative of all genres, all types of writing. There’s non fiction on there, there’s fiction on there. They’ve really gone for breadth, whereas the purely science fictional canon would obviously have more depth than breadth.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah. And on some level, I respect that. I respect them saying you can put anything in here so long as it was published this century. And what that means is that when you’ve got works that are more siloed within their genres, if they end up on the list, that means that they really broke out.

Again, see the example of Citizen. And to a certain extent that’s a valid criteria. That, this work that is usually not on the radar of the type of people who make these lists broke out and became so well known and well regarded that it ended up on this list. So that is an interesting data point.

Dan Hartland: To go back to whether there would be, a more representative, a richer version of this list that could be developed by the science fiction community. Some fans would say, because we’re, obviously this is a criticism podcast, so we’re centering the role of the critic. But some fans would say, we already have the science fiction canon, it’s produced by the Hugos, which is a voted for award, and therefore we don’t need the critics. We are the truth of the science fiction canon is coming forth from the voting population of the Hugos, and we here glance at Gautam Bhatia’s recent argument that there’s a problem with that because it’s a pay-to-play system. But nevertheless. So the critic, they’re just voices off in that kind of more democratic reception.

Abigail Nussbaum: That is one argument. It is frequently made. Let’s not ... you’re not unique in voicing it.

Dan Hartland: I would say I’m ventriloquizing rather than voicing it, just to be clear!

Abigail Nussbaum: That is a more accurate representation, yes!

First of all, let’s not ignore the fact that the Hugo. Is it best to first among the equals? There are a lot of science fiction and fantasy awards. Many of them prestigious, many of them of long standing. This year in particular, I really liked the fact that the Hugo and the Nebula went to two different books and that they were both debut novels and that they were both excellent novels in very different ways.

The Saint of Bright Doors is, of course, brilliant. Some Desperate Glory is fantastic. So I really liked the fact that there were two major awards, and they could be split between them, and, this is not something that anyone planned to do. It, a wisdom of crowds thing that worked out really well.

You can’t just say the canon is the Hugos, because the Hugos are not alone in seeking to create a canon. But also if I look at the books that are being nominated for Hugos in the last 10 years or so, I don’t get the feeling that the people who are voting are thinking about forming a canon.

I feel like there’s very, a very of-the-moment feeling, this is what has captured people in this particular moment, as opposed to thinking this book will still be read in five years, in ten years. And by the way, that’s a reasonable way of looking at it. Okay, like someone’s asking you to vote for the best book of the year.

They’re not asking you to say if someone, if a professor were putting together a syllabus for best science fiction books of the 2020s, which one of the books published this year do you think would be on it? It is a perfectly reasonable approach to, to think short range, but I don’t know personally if I look at a lot of the Hugo shortlists of the last few years, there are books on them that I think will last, not the majority.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I was just thinking about Emily Tesh’s Hugo speech, where essentially what she says is, this book is speaking to this particular moment, and so in many ways she hopes that it doesn’t have longevity, because the current moment is awful, which is actually quite fair. I respect that position.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah, and to be a bit more fair to the Hugo voters, sometimes the of- the- moment reaction they’re having is a reaction to things that are happening in the real world.

And they’re picking a book that reacts to those events reacts to their feelings. People ten years down the line might not relate to as much, and maybe that’s a good thing if they don’t relate to them. As Emily Tesh said, maybe that is what we should all be hoping for.

Dan Hartland: You mentioned curricula, Abigail and, if a tutor was putting together a syllabus of science fiction text, they wouldn’t necessarily be the same thing as the Hugo Awards.

And I think that’s right. But a syllabus also isn’t necessarily a canon. Indeed, it may include anti- canonical or non canonical works, whatever. And the canon comes from maybe the interaction between the both. I’m thinking of this there’s a book by John Guillory, which was published years ago, I think in the ’90s now, called Cultural Capital.

He says there are two elements of canon production. There’s the institutional, which is universities and syllabuses and curricula and lists, and there’s the social, there’s the social reproduction of capital, which is what we’re talking about here votes and the wisdom of crowds, and at some point, they swirl together in this sort of Panglossian world, which I’m not sure entirely exists, that the canon is a bit of both ... and yeah, I think Emily Tesh hopes that she gets, her book is lost along the way because the institutional element of it, doesn’t feel the need to put it on a syllabus in five years time because all of the problems have been solved.

Aishwarya Subramanian: If you were putting it on a syllabus where the point was what things mattered to the world in general in the 2020s and here are some books that address those things, I suppose it would make sense because I think the institutional and the social obviously bounce off each other in sometimes very basic ways, like me putting something on a syllabus might be part of what keeps it in print, which makes it possible for people to go out and buy it. Whereas if I’m creating a new syllabus, I can only do it based on what is currently in print which means that it had to have been at least at a social level kept alive enough for me to put it on that syllabus. And, we end up just working with these really basic fundamental material necessities.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah, but to take it back to what you were saying, it’s like the way that if you go back and read books from the mid-twentieth century, they’re all suffused with nuclear anxiety. And you read him today and it’s not impossible to relate, of course, but you can’t, you have an instinctual patronizing attitude towards it.

Aishwarya Subramanian: What were you worried about? You didn’t die.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah, no, there was nothing to worry about guys. But then you go and you read books that are being published today. In the mainstream as much, if not more than in science fiction. And they are suffused with climate anxiety. And I would love to believe that in 50 years people will be reading those books and viewing them.

With quite patronizingly. I’m a little more concerned that they’ll be like, “Oh look fuel for the fire.”

Dan Hartland: The canon shouldn’t be - obviously, I’m preaching to the choir here - but it’s not a fixed thing books move in and out of it over time. So there is a such a thing as a historical canon where you go back and you look at what people are worried about In the 50s or the 60s or wherever else it is, but there’s also a kind of moving canon which is shaping itself all the time based on where and who we are right now.

And I happen to think, actually, Abigail, that your book is one such canon, that it’s being shaped by, as well as shaping, all of these heh quote unquote political concerns that you’re so interested in.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yes, obviously the book reflects those changes, but they also impacted on the books that I read, and the books that I found myself interested in talking about.

You can’t untangle those two influences, like Aisha said, you can be the person who keeps a book in the, in circulation in the public awareness, but at the same time you need someone to have done that for you. To bring this back to the beginning of our conversation the critic has power, but every individual critic has only a limited amount of power and I’m not sure all of us together have that much power.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And this is again bringing it back to the beginning of the conversation because one of the sort of pre Worldcon things that the University of Glasgow ended up being involved in was a project called Future Voices of Scottish Science Fiction and Fantasy and it was this really interesting set of conversations between people involved in the genre where they also got a few academics in to comment, essentially play the role of the critic. And I ended up being the academic respondent for a conversation about the canon. And one of the things that the conversation kept coming back to was that yes, on the one hand, you’ve got the canon, which is a single narrative of the canon, what is important or what is important at the time or what is important to a particular group of people at a particular moment in time.

But then on the other hand, you’ve also got the archive. You’ve got this set of ideas and things that are preserved that you can keep coming back to. And for the canon to change or for the canon to develop, the archive needs to be there and accessible. Otherwise you can’t go back and say, okay, what else were people saying?

What else was going on? What else was important? What else may have been influential, but we didn’t recognize that because for some reason we were only focusing on novels by white men published in North America in these years? And so I think there’s also something quite important there about preserving the archive as being part of the conversation as well.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah absolutely. And if you look at so much of the publishing world right now, there is a concerted effort. To seek out these books that have been overlooked or forgotten or fallen out of print or ignored because they were not by or about the right sort of person. But they need something to build on, don’t they?

They need us to save the archives. To give them the inspiration to expose them to these works, which they then go on and expose the rest of the world to.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And I think critics sometimes, even where we don’t have the power to actually move the canon around frequently do have the power to keep some sort of knowledge of that book in the public sphere. So that it is accessible at these moments when the cannon is maybe being reconsidered, just trying to claw back a little power for us.

Abigail Nussbaum: Maybe think of it as shining a light. We each have a very little light, but we try to shine it.

[ musical outro]

Dan Hartland: I’m really concerned that ends the episode on a really uncharacteristically optimistic note.

Abigail Nussbaum: I apologize, I didn’t mean that!

[ musical outro continues]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. Theme music is dial up by Lost Cosmonauts. You can hear more of their music at grandvalise. bandcamp. com. See you next time.

View Details

In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Aisha and Dan discuss genre boundaries in texts and criticism: how they’re used, where they fall ... and what, if anything, they’re good for. Is science fiction is more of a technique than a genre? Might it help to think about all texts as sitting across modes and categories? In the course of the conversation, Dan and Aisha return on several occasions to ⁠⁠a recent episode of the New Yorker podcast Critics At Large⁠⁠.

TranscriptCritical Friends Episode 11[Musical Sting]

Aishwarya Subramanian: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF Criticism Podcast. I’m Aisha Subramanian.

Dan Hartland: And I’m Dan Hartland. In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be discussing SFF Reviewing. What it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

Aishwarya Subramanian: In this episode, we discuss genre boundaries in texts and criticism. How they’re used, where they fall, what, if anything, they’re good for.

Dan Hartland: We think about whether science fiction is more of a technique than a genre, and about how it might help to think about all texts as sitting across modes and categories.

Aishwarya Subramanian: We also: pick on The New Yorker for no good reason, shamelessly promote a book by a friend, and spend a good ten minutes on books that aren’t even SF.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Okay, so we thought that we could talk a little bit about genre boundaries, and specifically where science fiction starts, where it ends, where different types of people reach science fiction and what they assume to be science fiction, because people, it seems to me, often bring priors to the genre, and assume that one thing is and one thing is not SF, when in fact, the genre might be a lot broader than all of that.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, and I think this is something that can be quite—it becomes particularly notable, particularly noticeable when you find two people coming from maybe different sets of assumptions about the genre, having a conversation, and then you suddenly realize that these are—that we’re not talking about the same thing.

Dan Hartland: Well, let’s try and be, let’s try and break that down. So what sort of text might two readers approach and just kind of bounce off each other in that way?

Aishwarya Subramanian: I’m thinking about this partly because I saw someone doing this recently, but any sort of work of social science fiction, where the way that society works is the technology, is something, I think, for a lot of people who don’t necessarily read a lot in the genre, if you were coming to that, for the first time.

Dan Hartland: Right, which is the long tail of Gernsbackian SF, right, where the gadget is always the thing, where science fiction is about like a new tool, or, uh, yeah, a widget, a whatsit, a novum, and the novum is material. It’s a thing that does something in the world, rather than a set of behaviors, which of course is also a form of technology.

So one of the things that this makes me think, and I know we’ve both listened to it, is a recent-ish podcast from The New Yorker, which focused on science fiction, and in particular its relationship, or otherwise, to realism. So the podcast is called Critics at Large. It’s a regular podcast in which some critics get together to talk about texts and themes in text. Sounds like, yeah, format’s never gonna work. And in this particular episode, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alex Schwartz get together to talk about mostly Dune II. So they’ve just seen Dune II, but they are also aware that science fiction is very visible in the culture right now. Which, you know, I feel like has been true for some years. But nevertheless, they want to try and pick this apart as people that come from the genre from outside. And it really struck me, from what you were saying before we recorded the episode about people coming to Science Fictional texts with different expectations, that that podcast is almost a case study in the form.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I think so, and I think part of the issue for me—well, I don’t like generalizations and I also don’t like people sounding certain about anything ever. Part of the problem for me is sort of the shift between or the gap between, criticism that applies to a single text, criticism that applies to Dune as a text or specifically to Dune II, the film, and criticism that applies to the genre as a whole.

Dan Hartland: Mm hmm.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And how far you can extrapolate about one based on the other. And it just felt to me that on the one hand, there was a set of ideas about what science fiction is, or why it might be important to come to terms with science fiction as a genre. And on the other hand, there was this, actual individual film that they’d all watched and that they all had some interesting things to say about.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, so part of me likes the discussion that they have because it is three people from outside the genre looking in, noticing that the genre has become dominant or pervasive, and thinking, what does this mean? And I enjoy that element of it, but you’re absolutely right, that they draw conclusions from a fairly limited selection of texts, and that Dune II is central to the discussion, for obvious reasons, you know, topicality and all of that. And at one point, Vinson Cunningham (whose novel, by the way, this year’s Great Expectations, is really super, not science fictional) says that, for him, science fiction is kind of defined by its relationship to lore, to backstory, what, you know, we might call worldbuilding, which is definitely true of Dune. They have Josh Rothman come on later, who sort of does know about science fiction. He introduces them to the millennia-long chronology that Herbert eventually developed behind Dune, and Dune is definitely a kind of novel of worldbuilding, and then obviously the series goes off to the races as a whole. But it’s not true necessarily of science fiction in general. Not all science fiction is embedded in the idea of worldbuilding, whatever that may be. So yeah, again, it felt to me that they were approaching SF as it’s always about spaceships. It’s always about alien races. And they also talk about Three Body Problem, which doesn’t disabuse them of that notion.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And it’s also—that’s a particularly funny example, in some ways, to me, because there are so many people that we both know who would see that they needed lore to get into a book and immediately go, “oh, that’s fantasy. That’s epic fantasy. I’m sorry, you’ve given me a millennia-long chronology at the back: that’s epic fantasy.”

Dan Hartland: That’s really interesting because in this discussion—in The New Yorker, that is—the difference between those two things is never really even noted, let alone gone into. I think they would be aware that, for instance, Lord of the Rings isn’t quite like Dune, but at the same time I think they might yoke them together in some way.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, and I think in some ways that was quite refreshing. If you are an SF fan, or particularly if you’re a speculative fiction person more broadly, and you like both science fiction and fantasy, you are probably used to people being very, very rigid about where the boundaries between them are. “Well, that, that doesn’t count as this, as part of this genre, that definitely belongs over there.” And so, for someone completely outside of both of those genres to just sort of lump them together a little bit, it’s quite nice, in many ways.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I think that’s true. Bear with me here. I’ve been watching, at the exhortation of my friends and erstwhile Strange Horizons reviewers Graham Sleight and Tim Phipps, a Doctor Who serial from 1968. And the particular serial is called The Mind Robber, and it’s from the Patrick Troughton era. And it is—I can see why they told me to watch it. Because it is interesting and intertextual. In the sense that the Doctor and his companions, find themselves in another dimension outside of time, which we learn eventually is the land of fiction. Where every story that humanity has ever thought up exists together. So they come across superheroes and Lemuel Gulliver, they come across unicorns and robots. So every fictionality that has ever been invented exists in this place. And the episode therefore kind of embeds Doctor Who, which is itself, a kind of generic edge case. Is it science fiction or is it fantasy? Well, it’s kind of both at the same time in the sense that, you know, the Doctor is a wizard with a spaceship.

Aishwarya Subramanian: It’s national myth. It’s the twentieth century’s response to the Arthur mythos in that this is the story of Britain.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, absolutely. And therefore, uh, what’s so fascinating about this serial is that it embeds the Doctor in myths, in other attempts to, like, Gulliver, create, you know, sort of, fictions for the ages. But, the reason I mention it is because there are a set of, there’s like a six-volume series of critiques of Doctor Who, called About Time, I think, by, Miles and Wood, and in the volume about The Mind Robber, they try to say what the difference between science fiction and fantasy [is], and they say, and it’s quite an interesting definition, they say that science fiction is about man’s relationship with tools, and obviously I’m quoting here because I wouldn’t say man’s, but fantasy is about humanity’s relationship with symbols. Now, I don’t know how far that sort of goes, but what really interests me is that even, even critics that are writing about a show which itself mixes genres feel the need to demarcate genres. And I just wonder, you know, in exactly the same way that the New Yorker discussion is seeking to, oh, separate science fiction and realism, or find out the ways in which they overlap, why are we not more open to the idea that perhaps these generic boundaries are, aren’t as fixed as we may prefer?

[Musical sting]

Aishwarya Subramanian: So I think when I think specifically about the, about genre boundaries in general, I tend towards the idea that actually I would like them to be as blurred as possible. So I think someone who’s very useful on this, with regard to fantasy, but also with regard to thinking about genre more broadly for me, is Brian Attebery, who thinks about the genre in terms of sort of resemblances between texts, and overlaps, and fuzzy sets rather than “here is the hard line between this and this.” And I like the idea of focusing our attention, not on the boundary, but on the centre. So when I’m talking about science fiction for the purposes of a particular conversation, what is a text that exemplifies what I’m talking about? What is an example that does all the things that I’m attributing to [the genre]. And then just work outwards from there. Like, obviously for a lot of epic fantasy, Lord of the Rings is that kind of taproot text, right? Where it is, it exemplifies a certain understanding of the genre. And so we, when we talk about books in the context of epic fantasy, we’re in some ways talking about them.

Dan Hartland: Yes, yeah. Which of course is something that both powered and bedevilled epic fantasy for years and probably still does, but, but people in particularly the late ’90s, early 2000s around the New Weird thing, people like Miéville really started to chafe against, right? They thought that fantasy could be wider and yeah, weirder than that. So there’s an example of like a, a touchstone text also being something that a genre can drift away from, right?

Aishwarya Subramanian: Absolutely, and I think why I find that a more useful way of thinking about genre is because there’s the possibility of drifting away from it. Because you can say okay. I’m not doing that I’m doing this other thing and there may be some overlaps. But in a way you’re sort of starting with the text and then you’re thinking about what kinds of categories apply or don’t apply to it rather than starting with the genre and then trying to, um, sort of hammer every text into it.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, very early on in that New Yorker conversation, Alex Schwartz says something for me crucial, but then they kind of walk past it, which is that, that they’re saying that SF is more noticeable in the mainstream than, than ever before. I don’t know whether that’s true, but, um, that’s what they say. But she says that those mainstream texts, she doesn’t say they are SF, she says they use SF tropes, which I think is a good way of thinking about texts. In other words, they may use many techniques. They may draw from several traditions and that’s kind of okay. In fact, one might almost say it’s where the art is.

Aishwarya Subramanian: You’d hope!

Dan Hartland: I mean, I suppose on one level, you know, this probably goes without saying, but I guess I hope that’s where we sit in the reviews department at Strange Horizons, where we aren’t always reviewing core SF, what you might call core SF, you know, we are interested in kind of the breadth and sometimes texts, which can be quite, not difficult to justify, but you, you need to demonstrate the ways in which they, they are related to SF and fantasy, very broadly defined. I’m thinking of, one of our recent reviews was by Aran Ward Sell of You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue. Now this really is a sort of historical novel. It has elements of magical realism, it has elements of fantasy, um, but nevertheless, it feels a novel that is drawing upon the traditions in which we’re interested, and therefore is as relevant as the next book that we reviewed in that issue, which was Forge of the High Mage, which is as sort of core epic fantasy as I think is probably being written right now.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, and I think—I’m very quickly trying to remember if I’ve said this on the podcast before because I feel like it’s something I say a lot, and I’d hate to be repetitive to people who aren’t already my close friends who have had to hear this several times. Um. But: Genre is a lens. Genre is: “here’s a framework. Here’s a text that I’m going to read through this framework. What possibilities, what critical possibilities does this give me as a framework? Um, does reading this text as science fiction allow me to come to new insights about it?” If yes, great. If no, then, you know, find another lens.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, that’s really interesting. It makes me think again of that discussion of the Three Body Problem in that New Yorker podcast, where they mention that they experienced the scene of the struggle session in, I think, the first episode of the most recent dramatization, um, as sort of science fictional. And I found that both quite an odd reading, which kind of perhaps spoke of other maybe problems with how they were approaching that particular text, but also really interesting. I’ve just been reading the Women’s Prize, the UK Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, and there are a couple of quasi-historical novels on that shortlist, which—particularly Brotherless Night, a book by V. V. Ganeshananthan, which can be enhanced, I think the reading of the novels can be enhanced, by applying the lens of SF and fantasy and all of that. The text itself isn’t SF in any way, in fact it’s viscerally about the Sri Lankan Civil War of the 1980s, but there are techniques and ways of reading which I think can nevertheless reward a novel which would otherwise not seem to be, quote unquote, core genre, or even genre at all.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I’m also sort of: this is making me think about Hild—

Dan Hartland: Yeah.

Aishwarya Subramanian:—by Nicola Griffith and how Griffith basically said, um, that she used the techniques developed from writing in genre to write essentially a historical novel and to flesh out the world. And it also just makes me think—so on the one hand, there’s something to be said about the history of certain strains of science fiction and fantasy with real world historical encounters with the other and that sense of how do you make, how do you come to terms with and make sense of what is alien and new to you?

Dan Hartland: That’s right.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Um, which then it almost sounds like one of the things that you’re suggesting is that that kind of feeds back into realist fiction again.

Dan Hartland: I think so particularly realist fiction and Brotherless Night isn’t the only book on the shortlist to do this; so there’s also the remarkable Enter Ghost [by Isabella Hammad], which—

Aishwarya Subramanian: Which I have read. And with Enter Ghost I can absolutely see this!

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Right? So Enter Ghost is a fictionalization of the Freedom Theater, which is, which was is a theater on the West Bank, the founder of which was assassinated in 2011. It’s very famous for its Shakespeare renditions, and Enter Ghost is explicitly a novel which is trying to introduce the variety and depth and breadth and life of Palestinian experience to people for whom that experience is flattened by their limited exposure, often limited by design. And in order to do so, you’re absolutely right. It draws on sort of worldbuilding techniques that you or I would be familiar with from science fiction, that sort of immersive aspect of the novel felt to me really familiar and Brotherless Night does the same thing. It is again explicitly, it has a frame narrative where the protagonist, much like the protagonist of Enter Ghost, explains the events from outside of them. So the protagonist of Enter Ghost is an English actor with Palestinian heritage, who kind of almost cultivates a distance from that heritage until she’s encouraged no longer to do so.

And Brotherless Night is narrated from outside of Sri Lanka. So, both of these novels are trying to introduce, I think, to a wider audience, these kind of often hidden narratives, and yeah, I think you’re right, does so by adopting these techniques.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And on the one hand, you’ve got that sort of inside, outside, across the border, not across the border, um, perspective, which is in some ways very deliberate. And which I think does sort of then reward the use of these techniques. And then on the other hand, of course, when you think about this in a larger publishing industry and book prizing context, then, of course, the cynic in me is like, ultimately then, is it also, are these texts also in some ways reducible to horrifying things happening elsewhere?

Dan Hartland: I do worry about that, and to that extent, I actually don’t think that Enter Ghost is entirely successful. Ooh. Um I think it’s in many ways like a really vivid, remarkable novel, but I’m not sure it is entirely kind of, yeah, I don’t know. Um, but I think you’re right to be wary of that sort of approach. And I was thinking while I was reading, uh, Brotherless Night, um, of a Booker-nominated book called, uh, A Passage North [by Anuk Arudpragasam], which is a similar novel in the sense that it is about the Sri Lankan Civil War, but which doesn’t really make the same concessions to an imagined reader. It is much more kind of obscure, in terms of the, particularly the narrative. Brotherless Night often pauses to explain, oh, by the way, this is the historical background to this thing that is happening to this character. Um, and I think you’re right that there is, there comes a point where, yeah, there is perhaps an unavoidable consequence of giving the novel a kind of outsider’s point of view.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And again, I’m sort of—having raised the cynical point. I then want to defend—

Dan Hartland: We get back to never wanting to be certain about anything, right?

Aishwarya Subramanian: [mutters] “Taking stances.” Disgusting.

[Musical sting]

Aishwarya Subramanian: There is obviously value in that outside perspective there is also value in making something legible to an audience in ways that it needs to be made legible. I mean, again, when we think, um, when you described Enter Ghost, um, that was a big part of why that novel feels important. The idea of making a particular set of horrors legible.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, yeah.

Aishwarya Subramanian: In, in the face of, um, a system that is very invested in not making those horrors legible.

Dan Hartland: Indeed, yes.

Aishwarya Subramanian: So, I mean, I don’t want to dismiss two books, one of which I really liked and another which I haven’t read yet, um, on the basis of this. But I also sort of, on the one hand, I can see a value in reading these from a genre perspective and with the tools that we have developed as genre readers. And on the other hand, those are precisely the things that make me suspicious.

Dan Hartland: And this might be a part, a point where the writer is tempted to, you know, we’re talking about drifting away from core texts. Might be a point at which they’re tempted to drift back towards them. I’m thinking again of the New Yorker conversation, where Rothman says that, um, science fiction helps make the future into something you can imagine. Which is again a kind of empathetic project, but maybe by putting stuff into the future, you avoid some of these, I was gonna say traps, but they’re not traps, just some of these difficulties, some of these knots that using the lens in a more contemporary setting sets up for you.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I think so. It sort of, it makes things hypothetical in ways that reduce responsibility, which in some ways is true of the entire genre. So, um, I guess once again, we’re coming to the conclusion that actually Science Fiction is bad and we should, we just should stop.

Dan Hartland: Yeah I’ll just, yeah, yeah, fine. And that was the episode of Critical Friends …

Would it be unwise to mention Vajra’s book now, The Saint of Bright Doors, if for no other reason than it is exactly that, right? It is a fantastical hypothecating of some of the experiences that Brotherless Night does, talks about. So they are, they are dealing with some of the same historical events, but one is choosing to narrate them as they happen, but through a particular lens. The other one is adopting kind of more of an estranging generic lens, right?

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, which then forces you to sort of, to think of it as fiction, but also to, to, to be a little more cynical of its realism?

Dan Hartland: In other words, to sort of be either enabled or more ready to question the Author?

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, or to question this reality, to question what’s being presented to you, um, because I think that is, that is one of the issues that we have, obviously, with, um, when we say that a particular author or a particular text makes something legible, um, there is always that possibility of oversimplifying, of, okay, this is, uh, nice, palatable, or not nice, because these are often awful realities that are being depicted or emotionally quite upsetting. But here is a, here’s a version of events that I feel I can parse in its totality.

Dan Hartland: Here is the world built for me.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah.

Dan Hartland: Mm, yeah. And it strikes me that—and I feel like I’m saying this a lot recently—it strikes me that this is one of the great things about The Saint of Bright Doors, um, which is that (people are going to get bored of me saying this),which is that it more or less sets out to be misread. It really wants to wrong-foot you, to make you expect one thing but then it does another, to introduce plotlines that you think might do this but then they do that. It is misread—really interested, not so much in that kind of classical or anglophone tradition of, you know, worldbuilt SF, so much as kind of, yeah, as you say, world questioning, reality-undermining SF, right?

Aishwarya Subramanian: I also wonder how much the presence of that strain in, um, Western SF is also kind of a myth that, that poor reading has built up. Because, again, I think a lot of the time, the example that everyone goes to for this is Tolkien. Tolkien is this strange person who builds an entire world and an entire history and an entire everything and then writes texts set in it. We have complete chronologies and we have so much about language, um, that we, that many of us maybe don’t necessarily want. But I always feel like it’s—The Silmarillion is very clearly told from a particular perspective within that world. There’s always this sense of the texts being written by people in this world and therefore not telling the whole story or being, if not inaccurate (and in some cases inaccurate as well), but of having massive gaps in what is accessible to you as an audience. I don’t think that Tolkien necessarily does that, but I do feel that a lot of his imitators do.

Dan Hartland: There is, in the kind of Tolkien legendarium, there are lots of, um, inconsistencies. And it always interests me that the urge is to, in some quarters, is to explain those away, to force some sort of uniformity onto, oh well, at one point, um, Tolkien tells this story about this particular elf, but then he tells this other story about this particular elf, and are they the same elf or different elves, and how do we … But for me, you’re right. Part of the texture of the world is that both of those stories exist in that world.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And I think there’s like two responses to that, right? One of them is to chalk them up to mistake. The author got this wrong, or the author forgot what he’d said earlier. And then the other thing is to try and sort of retcon them both into a world where they both make sense alongside each other. Like, obviously this person thought this is what happened, but actually this other thing happened. And I’m, and I think in some ways both are limiting. I think that the one that tries to, that accepts that there can be contradictory stories is perhaps a bit more charitable to Tolkien in accepting that he was capable of more nuance, but they’re still both limited. They’re still both trying to create this very total sense of the world.

Dan Hartland: It strikes me that this links to the discussion we had in our last episode, which sort of jumped off Casella Brookins essay about the complicity of science fiction in some of the contemporary world’s worst injustices. And in other words, we spoke then a little bit about the effects or the characteristics of bad reading. And we seem to have returned to that here, that if one of the priors that you bring to science fiction is that science fictional texts offer a fully built consistent world in which it is possible to inhabit totally, I think that you’re bringing an imperfect reading of the form to a particular text.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And that you risk missing when a text that you’re reading isn’t doing that. You risk missing something very fundamental about a text, which doesn’t conform to that.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: There are other examples of authors that do similar things to Tolkien, you know, like we’ve mentioned Frank Herbert’s kind of future history. Asimov is another person that the New Yorker gang mention, who does exactly the same sort of thing, you know, literally a future history in Foundation. Um, but another of the writers that they, they mention as a sort of canonical science fictional author, whom Vinson Cunningham says was one of his favorites as a young reader, is Ray Bradbury, who I don’t, I think I’m right in saying, never really saw himself as a science fiction writer. He saw himself as a writer that happened sometimes to write these science fictional texts, and I guess that circles us back to the idea of science fiction as technique rather than genre, a sort of, you know, this old view of it as a mode, like a mood, almost, of a text.

Aishwarya Subramanian: In some ways I find that again, much more useful as a way of thinking about it. Um, but it also then sort of makes me wonder if authors are then locked in to the genre. Okay. If Kim Stanley Robinson decides to write a romance novel, are we all going to just read it as science fiction?

Dan Hartland: I think we might. And in the same way, you know, if Richard Powers writes an obviously science fictional novel, are we going to read it as literary fiction? Yeah!

Aishwarya Subramanian: I feel like we’ve done that one.

Dan Hartland: Right! So I think to some extent it, you know, critics, such as us and critics such as, uh, at the New Yorker (and of course Strange Horizons and the New Yorker are [Aishwarya Subramanian: very similar!] They are organs of similar record.) think of these things in a particular way, but science fiction also exists as a shelving mechanism in bookstores. And I think that matters too.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Well I think it’s something that critics should pay attention to in the sense that we should be thinking about the material realities by which certain books end up being brought to our attention. And we should be thinking about the material realities that allow certain books to be produced or not produced. I was thinking, again, going back to the New Yorker podcast, where they bring up that question of, um, the presence of science fiction in the mainstream, and whether it’s particularly prominent right now, and if so, what the reasons for that might be. And this is, this is one place where I found their reasoning a little dubious, which to be fair, they also seemed to think it was a little dubious. Um, just the idea that we are living in a world where science fictional things keep happening to us and that’s why we’re interested in the, the implications of those things; which is an argument for the centrality of science fiction that you could make from the end of the nineteenth century to the present at any moment. So it’s, it’s not the best argument. Whereas, when I try to answer that question, and I’m not sure if I agree, firstly, that science fiction has an unprecedented presence in the world. But if I, if I accept that premise and I try to think about the reasons why it might, why that might be, all of the reasons are material and economic. There are reasons why it’s marketable. There are reasons why, um, it is filmable right now in ways that it hasn’t been previously. Why those films are being financed in particular ways and who’s financing them. All of the things that we already have discussed in the past, including the last episode.

Dan Hartland: I think ultimately where I land on all of this is really where we began. So I’m happy to say that I’ve just confirmed my own biases, which is that the best type of text is one that can’t be entirely pinned down to one or other genre or approach.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And the best kind of criticism is one that isn’t going to try and force that text into that one genre or approach.

Dan Hartland: Which of course is a good moment to mention that it’s the Strange Horizons fund drive, and criticism like that doesn’t pay for itself.

Aishwarya Subramanian: So in case you thought this entire podcast was an ad for the Saint of Bright Doors, it turns out, no, it’s an ad for Strange Horizons as a concept.

[Musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF Criticism Podcast. Our theme music is “Dial Up” by Grande Valise. To listen to more of their music, visit grandevalise.bandcamp.com. The Strange Horizons Kickstarter and Patreon can be reached via links at strangehorizons.com. See you next time.

View Details

In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Aisha and Dan discuss a recent essay by Jake Casella Brookins that appeared in the Ancillary Review of Books. “The vaunted prophylactic prophecy of science fiction—the ability to prevent an undesirable future by loudly predicting it—has consistently proven false,” argues Brookins, and so Aisha and Dan ask themselves: what good, and bad, might SF do? And when we find a piece of good criticism such as this essay, how can it help us think better about its questions?

TranscriptCritical Friends Episode 10[musical intro]

Aishwarya Subramanian: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF Criticism Podcast. I’m Aisha Subramanian.

Dan Hartland: And I’m Dan Hartland. In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be discussing SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

Aishwarya Subramanian: In this episode, we took the radical step of … reading some criticism.

Dan Hartland: We take a look at a recent essay at the Ancillary Review of Books, and ask what it’s saying. And then, well. We do some criticism.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Okay, so we’re here to discuss one essay, one piece of criticism in particular, which is a recent article by Jake Casella Brookins, which appeared at the Ancillary Review of Books, where I should disclose I currently have a column ongoing, and this particular piece is called “An Anti-Defense of Science Fiction.”

It was published on New Year’s Eve 2023, and I just felt that was like … yeah, both end and start the year as you mean to go on.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Also, ensure that no one reads it.

Dan Hartland: Well, I really hope …

Aishwarya Subramanian: So having said that, we read it.

Dan Hartland: We read it, so it’s had two readers, and what article can ask for more? I really hope it does get a wider reading though, because I think it’s really interesting. The ideas it plays with are … I was going to say urgent, but that sounds very pompous.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, but I don’t think … there isn’t really another way to say things are important; I mean, you can’t not sound pompous when you’re saying something’s important.

Dan Hartland: That’s true. And this is a podcast about literary criticism. I mean, I don’t think there’s any way around pomposity, to be honest. The starting point for the essay is a tweet, as all good critical essays begin …

Aishwarya Subramanian: Is it not a post, formerly known as a tweet?

Dan Hartland: Oh dear, oh, you’re right. I’m still in that phase where, I feel like I’m still in the denial phase. What comes after that? Anger?

Aishwarya Subramanian: Uh, bargaining? I can’t remember.

Dan Hartland: One of them. Um, so a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, by someone called Tyler Austin Harper, which is in full as follows: “Science fiction is not simply politically useless, it’s dangerous. Two centuries of sci-fi have been a net negative for the world, fueling the megalomaniacal fantasies of tech tyrants and inspiring the invention of untold horrors. The world would be a better place without it.”

And from here, Casella actively does exactly what the title of the piece suggests, which is put together an anti-defense of science fiction, which is this literature and this community in which Casella is embedded, and in which they’ve invested a lot of time and effort and I guess emotional connection, but also knows is kind of broken … just maybe not in the particular way that this tweet suggests.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And I think it’s important as well to add that part of the reason for writing this “anti-defense” is the response that the original tweet gets … um, post formerly known as … X …

Dan Hartland: It’s a tweet. We all know it’s a tweet. It’s a tweet!

Aishwarya Subramanian: Okay. Um, well, the response that the … original comment … gets, is largely quite defensive in ways that I think are probably quite familiar to anyone who writes criticism about science fiction.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, and part of the essay’s purpose is to try to identify the source and the consequence of that kind of knee-jerk defensiveness, which I found an especially productive thing to do. So, Casella suggests that although, and I quote here, “Although SF readers don’t use the phrase anymore, we’ve never fully excised the belief that fans are slans, superior to non-fans.” And, yes, this idea that science fiction is intellectually, even morally, superior to other forms of literature, I think, is one of the things that this original post takes on, and offends so deeply.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, I think there’s a few things going on with that, because one of them is just the nature of fandom itself, right? Where we identify ourselves to a great extent with the literature that we consume. What books I love is supposed to tell you something very fundamental about me. And I think that’s true across fandoms, and is what makes writing criticism about anything that has a fan following quite complicated.

And then, as you say, there’s this very specific history of that within science fiction fandom, which sometimes gets linked to the idea that science fiction fans have faced deep oppression for their beliefs. Which I personally do not find particularly convincing, if that wasn’t obvious. And maybe that’s partly an age thing, but also maybe that’s partly a difference in opinion of what oppression constitutes.

Dan Hartland: I think so, yeah. So one of the things that this essay doesn’t … It focuses explicitly on science fiction’s complicity in different sets of oppression. So not the oppression of the people that read it, but the oppression that the literature itself perpetuates.

Such as, for example, the essay focuses quite a lot on the military side of SF, both the encouragement towards pew-pew weapons, but also the longstanding relationship with the military industrial complex and the sort of uncritical reproduction of frames of violence and so on. Which I think strays towards, but doesn’t actually say—despite, you know, the way in which the essay notes that space exploration in particular at the moment is one of the ways in which science fiction is seen as influencing damaging techbro fantasies—that you can’t really separate the history of science fiction (perhaps you can, but I’m not sure you can) from the history of colonialism.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And from the history of science.

Dan Hartland: Indeed, which is itself, obviously very tied together. Yes, and so where you see the oppression happening, I think will depend somewhat on how aware or willing to be aware you are of that interface.

And so one thing I wondered about when I was reading this essay, which is excellent, is whether it focuses sufficiently on quality of reading. So the original comment obviously says, “Science fiction bad. Science fiction encourages people to make pew-pew, bad!” The essay is like, “Hmm, this isn’t quite it, this is something else over here, science fiction does this, science fiction does not do this.”

But I wonder whether, given this is a podcast about criticism, we need to talk about, is literature read differently by different readers? Obviously, yes. So when Elon Musk comes out and says Douglas Adams is his favourite philosopher, and yet uses what is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which of course is a satire of all the things that Elon Musk is … Would better critical reading skills help us here? Is there an element that science fiction is a little bit Blameless, except insofar as the way in which it is read?

Aishwarya Subramanian: So on the one hand, better critical skills would be amazing generally. I’m very in favour of people being better readers. On the other hand, I think, “Oh but you’re just reading it wrong” is … it’s not the strongest defence you can make of something. If I write some incredibly popular, incendiary text that inspires people to, I don’t know, commit mass murder, I don’t know that I can really sit there and be like, “Oh yeah, but if you’d read it more closely.”

On the one hand, yes, please read things more closely. On the other hand, people are usually responding to something in a text. At least, I’d like to think so—though again, caveats … because I’ve read some very strange critical work from both academics and non-academics that make me question this.

But in theory, if someone is reading something and coming to a particular idea, they’re either doing so because there is enough in the text that leads them to that conclusion, or they’re doing it because they are projecting something onto the text, which suggests that that thing is already in … well, the world around them. The text isn’t obviously denying that idea enough that it’s possible for that idea to be projected onto it.

Dan Hartland: One thing we might want to chase in the essay, Brookins argues that science fiction, quote, “Science fiction has been one mode, a prominent one, by which popular artistic consciousness makes known humanity’s relationship to the world.” And I think that’s true. But, of course, the original comment, the original criticism, was that science fiction influences too readily how we understand humanity’s relationship to the world, and I’m sure that it does; but it’s also the case, isn’t it, that it is inevitably only reacting to, trying to understand itself, what it sees in the world.

So science fiction … one way of thinking about it is that it is less about the technology, the particular gadget, and more about how the gadget impacts upon the characters or, more commonly, the society around the gadget. And it is quite difficult sometimes for a text to escape. The text isn’t just creating the world. It is subject to the gravity of the world, and how easy it is to pin exactly where a text’s responsibilities end and begin in that regard, I think is harder than the original comment allows.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I feel like I should defend the original comment a bit. I don’t actually know Harper at all, so I don’t want to step in and be like, “Well, obviously what this person was trying to do …” But it is in the context of essentially a meme about extreme opinions that will offend people. So it is framed in a way that I’m assuming Harper’s own thoughts on this are a lot more complex than the tweet—um, X post!—allows.

But I also think, when we think about science fiction as being not just about technology—but about social change, about how the world changes in response to technological change, or how the world changes in response to particular things about it changing—in some ways that ought to make some of these misreadings harder, right? It’s very difficult to read a text about cool-weapon-that-causes-mass-destruction-and-horror and think that the conclusion is “Cool weapon!” when the focus is on the mass destruction and horror. At least, ideally that should be the case and yet, evidently, it’s not the case if we go by the history of how the world has responded to stories of cool-weapon-that-causes-mass-horror, and I think part of the problem is the word “cool.”

Dan Hartland: But is, for me, one of the things. Like, maybe this comes back to what people project onto the text, as much as what the text itself projects. In that, you know, it strikes me that “cool weapon creates lots of destruction” would describe the function of Achilles in The Iliad just as easily as the phasers on the starship Enterprise.

In other words, Achilles is clearly in The Iliad meant to be the subject of at least some of our admiration, empathy, whatever reaction you want to assign to that particular text within its original context or within its context of rereading. But I mean, Achilles is a brutal murderer too, right? And therefore, if literally among the earliest possible pieces of literature we could point to has this problem, I start to wonder if it’s science fiction’s fault that we think the weapon is cool.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And I wonder how much of this is simply a sense that power is inherently cool. I’m trying to find this in the essay. Yeah, so: “the issue is that science fiction, and I’m talking fairly narrowly here about the harder, more technologically oriented kind of science fiction, is intertwined with the entire cultural project of the Anthropocene, with our philosophies of dominion and exploitation and their consequences.” And I think there’s a sense, then, that—this will possibly seem like a massive tangent—but when … The last couple of years, I have been teaching a film module at the university where I work, and one of the things that we’ve ended up talking about are fight scenes, and what makes … what we enjoy or don’t enjoy about fight scenes.

And these are very sort of … we start off from very, very sort of basic “man with sword and other man with sword” fight scenes. And we think about that and it’s obviously partly competence that is appealing about a scene in which someone is attacking someone with a weapon. But it’s also just the implication of power that comes with that, where it’s not just mastery of a particular skill, but it’s the fact that that mastery has the potential to hurt that we all end up finding very appealing, even if we are personally not in favor of people attacking each other with swords.

Dan Hartland: Yes, because the attacking with the sword, if you are good at it, gives you an opportunity to impose your will. And there’s something compelling about watching that.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And there’s just something deeply cool about it. The first time we had this discussion in class—and again, we were talking very much about individuals with swords, which are not a highly technologically advanced form of weaponry—but one of my students immediately skipped to, you know, the scene at the end of Rogue One, where Darth Vader basically just takes out a lot of people, and drew a link to that: an individual person with a weapon. Like, no one obviously thinks that Darth Vader is the good guy—though, I don’t know, maybe … there are certainly people … yeah, OK, there are people who think that. But no one would argue that Star Wars as a whole is telling us: side with Darth Vader. But I don’t think anyone would argue that Darth Vader isn’t made to look incredibly cool. And there’s something about that.

Dan Hartland: I don’t know whether you’ve watched it yet or intend to, but as you’re speaking, I’m immediately thinking of Blue Eye Samurai, which has been out on Netflix for a few months. It is a sort of alternative history set in Edo-period Japan, and it’s an animation. I would not be able to watch this show if it were—I don’t know whether it would be able to be made if it were—live action. Because the violence that titular blue-eyed samurai wreaks upon, uh—

Aishwarya Subramanian: Everyone?

Dan Hartland: Yeah, more or less everyone!—is notable. The ballet of it, there is no doubt, is pleasurable to watch. And the skill, but also absolutely the coolness of it, is not just a feature, but a focus of the whole piece.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s a … I haven’t watched that, but Netflix seems to think I will really like it because it keeps recommending it to me. But I think as well that pretty much any … One of the questions that came up as I was rereading the essay was about whether there’s a difference in visual science fiction and written science fiction. And I suspect part of the reason I’m asking that question is because I am a book person and therefore a snob! But there’s something about the idea of science-fiction-as-spectacle that in some ways does prime you towards that sense of coolness.

Dan Hartland: I think that’s right. There’s something about, you know, the Darth Vader thing, which, I mean, if you just wrote it down on the page would be more horrific.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, there’s something in us that responds to the pew-pew. She said, eruditely!

Dan Hartland: I think pew-pew is one of the key critical terms that’s coming out of this podcast!

I think it’s significant, that. What one of the—one of Brookins essay’s points is that SF has become one of, if not the primary means of understanding particularly humankind’s relationship with technology and so on. I think, though, that if we do believe that, I think that a large part of that mainstream influence comes from the visual media of science fiction more than it does from the text themselves. All of the, you know, spaceship stuff and the transporter stuff, and the, even as we’ve been talking about, weapons stuff that the Thiels and Musks of this world reference when they are looking for some way to make their fantasies seem attractive: almost all of them have that element of a media franchise attached to them.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah. I mean, for a moment, I thought is Palantir the exception here? And then I checked and the company was founded in 2003. So, um, no.

Dan Hartland: And I think that is really significant, that we’ve got to talk about different kinds of science fiction as well. I think with the artificial intelligence hype train, of course Terminator is the thing that people constantly talk about. And again, that ain’t a book.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, and that’s partly … I think it’s the result of a few things. I think one of them is that, in public discourse, you are obviously more likely to use a film as a kind of point of connection than you are with a book. But that’s because more people have—

Dan Hartland: But that’s because more people have seen it, right?

Aishwarya Subramanian: More people are likely to see it. It’s more accessible in some ways. Apart from just the numbers, is there something about film as a whole that is inherent to simplifying these ideas? Maybe you just have less time and less space to explore a specific concept. I don’t know.

Dan Hartland: I think this is why, again, when we’re talking about the level of science fiction’s complicity, you have to be, you know, conscious of the fact that science fiction doesn’t exist above or beyond any other element of the society in which it’s operating. And, yes, I think that it’s almost the case that the inherent qualities of film matter just as much to how SF has been consumed and understood—and therefore the lessons that have been learned from science fictional texts as the inherent capacities of science fiction itself. I think it’s very significant for SF that it became one of the dominant languages of film.

Aishwarya Subramanian: To some extent, that also draws us back to the whole question of popular fiction, right? Because we don’t, we wouldn’t really care very much about the capacity for the ideas in a particular work to influence the world if three people are reading that work.

Dan Hartland: I guess it depends who the three people are, but yeah.

Aishwarya Subramanian: OK, fair! The three people being the president of the United States and two randomly chosen billionaires! But in general, we don’t really care as much because reach is inherently limited, and on the other hand, things that become popular partly become popular because they are accessible or desirable to a mass audience. They’re doing things that the audience wants. So at some point it becomes quite circular as a piece of reasoning: popular work is popular because it is what its readers want it to be.

Dan Hartland: And the classic example—or a classic example—of this is again Star Wars, which George Lucas will say was meant to be received as a pointed criticism of US foreign policy in Vietnam. And I’ve got news for George: Star Wars is not commonly read as a left-wing text.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And I think that when we were talking about, “Is this about, is this a problem of, people reading it wrong?” … I feel like maybe the whole of the public is not entirely to blame there, George. Though, you know, good on him for Wanting to write that text!

Dan Hartland: And I guess that does bring us on to a question of, given that largely what we’re talking about is science fiction that has been sufficiently broadly received that it can be influential, is there a way for science fiction or texts that are adopted that broadly to be more critical in the ways that Casella’s essay would like?

So the conclusion of the essay is, “Science fiction, a genre I love, a community I’m part of, is by turns the muse and the mouthpiece of an economic-technologic system committing atrocities that implicate us all. To defend science fiction [this is where the anti-defence comes in], in this moment, against these charges, is to betray it and to mistake what’s wonderful about it in the first place.” Yes. But how do we create, can we create, a better science fiction?

Aishwarya Subramanian: So I think there’s a couple of things there, though, because on the one hand, yes, sure, there are writers that do that. I don’t think I watch enough science fiction film or TV to know if there are people working in those fields that have come up with solutions to this, but there are writers that do force you to approach them critically, that require you to distance yourself from the text, or that force you to watch them deconstructing some of the assumptions of the genre, even as they’re writing. I’m thinking—because we talk about this book far too often given that we haven’t actively sat down and talked about it on the podcast yet—but I’m thinking about Vajra’s Saint of Bright Doors, which is really good at doing this.

So I think the question of whether it’s possible or not is one thing. And is reasonably answerable, yes. Is it possible for a writer to do that and have a massively popular influential text? Is it possible for a writer to do that and be giving an audience what it wants, especially the kind of audience that actually has any sort of power to do anything in the world at all? That, to me is a slightly different question and I’m not really sure … I’m not really sure how to answer it because there’s a part of me that thinks that a text influencing anyone to do anything at all is inherently suspect.

Dan Hartland: As the essay itself says, mapping the material impact of literature is probably a fool’s errand.

I think the essay itself, I’m happy to say, uh, cites a piece of criticism that we ourselves published in last year’s Criticism Special: Clark Seanor’s piece on the novels of Becky Chambers, which does exactly this. It shows how a piece of popular literature—and it is literature, it’s a set of books—reproduces at least some of the problematic contexts the readers of the books inhabit, and that it does so whilst also believing itself to be a kind of clarion call for change. And that’s a tricky one because you might like to focus on the ways in which it is trying to be good, or you might want to focus on the ways in which it is trying to be bad, and perhaps we slowly kind of push towards better science fiction in a kind of unreliable, backsliding kind of way.

All that said, of course, we’re speaking from our own perspective, but for many people, the mainstream media franchises that we are saying replicate and re-entrench the problematic cultural positions … many people believe that those franchises are too woke!

Aishwarya Subramanian: Oh yeah, sometimes there are women, sometimes the women are brown, sometimes the women are brown and gay. Sometimes they’re trans!

Dan Hartland: So, are we underestimating the extent of change that is possible?

Aishwarya Subramanian: I think one of my fears—and this is very much you know, “living in the end times” fear—is that yes, change is possible in these very incremental ways. Obviously that’s one of the complaints that a lot of us have about representation as a mode, right? We move from White American men doing war crimes, to, “Look, a brown woman did war crimes! And then eventually, maybe someday, we will get to no war crimes. But this is an important step on that road.” And I do worry that, given the scale of destruction that we are currently facing, that we don’t have the luxury of that amount of time for incremental change.

But I also think it ties into, um, another thing that the essay talks about that I think is really important, which is the idea of comfort. And the way in which … I think one of the things that’s really great about Clark’s piece on the Chambers series is how it addresses that idea of “This is Good. These are Good ideas. I am Good because I approve of these ideas.” And I think that if science fiction is not going to, well, re-entrench problems, then it has to, at some level, eschew comfort. And that’s a problem because I, much like Jake, have basically only been reading Comfort Reads for the past several months because, um, the world is awful.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, the essay has a lot of balance and poise to it, which I think is one of the reasons why it’s so productive. You can have a lot of conversations from it, because, as you say, it does address a lot of countervailing currents, which I think is the sign of good criticism. The one … another point it makes, which is related to this idea of comfort is that, quote, “fandom’s reaction to and rejection of overtly right wing bigotry during the Sad Puppies era has led to the frankly bizarre stance, rarely stated openly, but readily discernible, that merely consuming properly diverse and inclusive science fiction is itself a moral act.” And there is a level of comfort to be derived from reading these sometimes slightly kind of half-baked texts that kind of just, well: “I’ve done my bit. I’ve read a diverse book, there we go, and I can put it to to one side.”

Aishwarya Subramanian: And again, it’s so focused around ideas of consumption. “I bought this book. I read this book, I have told everyone on the internet that I read this book and it was diverse and I am … I’ve done my bit.”

This is obviously a very different genre, but I’ve been reading quite a lot of Dario Fo recently because, again, I teach him. And there’s this … at some point he makes this comment about audiences who come to his plays and who show up, watch the comedy, laugh about it, possibly agree that they are part of the butt of the joke, and then go home. And there’s that sense of, “Okay, I’ve done my bit. I came and watched the thing that said that I was part of the problem. Okay, now I will go home and …”

Dan Hartland: Keep probleming.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, not do anything, but I’ve acknowledged it.

Dan Hartland: And so are we kind of … are we, are even we, in this conversation, kind of buying the billionaires’ spiel when they bring into service science fiction to say, “Oh well, you know, we’re doing the cool thing”? Because it’s just literature, right? To some extent, it isn’t a call to action. It isn’t a thing that has material impact. It isn’t necessarily even a thing that can persuade us to go and make a material impact. It’s just a play that we watch for two hours and then go home. It doesn’t have this grand impact that we would like to think it does.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, and I feel like if it did actively tell us to go out on the streets, we’d be reading a lot more articles about why literature is dangerous and morally problematic. So, in a way, it’s almost the fact that it’s not getting us out on the streets is possibly the only thing that’s keeping it accessible.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. At one point, Brookins says, “If we’re going to give science fiction credit for solar power and electric cars, then it’s only fair, unfortunately, to give science fiction credit for child slavery in the cobalt mines.” And that is true. It may also be exactly opposite the case, which is that it’s responsible for neither. It’s just that some readers will bring it into service to justify one or the other.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yes. At some point it’s basically, it’s the question of, you know, does literature have any kind of moral value in the world? To what extent does literature influence the world around it? To what extent does it just make it possible for us to imagine things that are already in the world, but also to justify things that are already in the world?

I think because of the connection with technology in particular, it becomes easier to point to examples with science fiction. And say, “This led to this.” But did it really?

Dan Hartland: Yeah, there’s an element of, did Star Trek persuade us all that we should have iPads? Or was there some sort of … I wanted to say need, there is no need for an iPad. But Star Trek didn’t invent the iPad, something else did, and Star Trek merely gave it some shape. Star Trek’s just one of the ways in which the iPad was imagined into being.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah. Star Trek maybe gave us a vocabulary for talking about the iPad when the iPad existed. Though, if it hadn’t been Star Trek, it would have been something else.

I don’t want to dismiss the idea of giving things vocabularies, or giving things contexts, or giving things reference points, because those are inherent to how we make sense of an idea, right? Those are how we contextualize things. It’s a new thing, but it’s not really the same as “A billionaire was sitting watching a science fiction film under an apple tree one day …”

Dan Hartland: And alas, the science fiction program did not fall on their head! I completely agree. And I think that if literature—and science fiction in particular, given we’re talking about it—has a value, it is in that commentary element. Where it creates a vocabulary. It helps us think about something. It’s not that it creates the thing or is responsible for the thing—because, as we’ve discussed, probably any text can be deployed without good faith.

If a text tries to build sufficient walls around itself that it cannot be misused, I think it probably becomes inert. Obviously a text will, should attempt to guide its reader. But to lock the reader out, I think, is a different thing. And therefore what we should look for is better vocabulary, better commentary, better ways of thinking from the literature. That’s what it can maybe give us.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And I think that, having said that, we also perhaps have to accept that the texts that can do that, the texts that can give us that vocabulary, aren’t necessarily going to have that kind of global impact, simply because it turns out that a lot of people don’t really want to hear that they are the problem. You know, people are going to gravitate towards comfort. And so I think it’s more a question of, as readers, if we want to shield ourselves from some of these impulses, then we need to seek out these texts and we need to also seek out reading practices.

Dan Hartland: Are you suggesting that we need to seek out criticism?

Aishwarya Subramanian: Uh, no. No one, no one needs criticism. Never. Just no one needs criticism.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, that’s, that’s the end of the episode.

Aishwarya Subramanian: And in conclusion …

Dan Hartland: … what a waste of time!

Aishwarya Subramanian: Read the Criticism Special, everyone!

Dan Hartland: It’s great!

[musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF Criticism Podcast. Our theme music is “Dial Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can find more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com. See you next time.

View Details

In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Aisha and Dan talk to critic and poet Catherine Rockwood about her new chapbook, And We Are Far From Shore, a set of poems about the television show Our Flag Means Death. Catherine reviewed the show for Strange Horizons less than a year ago, and discusses how reviewing and criticism feed into creative practice. There are also, of course, pirates.

TranscriptCritical Friends Episode 9Aisha Subramanian: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF Criticism Podcast. I'm Aisha Subramanian.

Dan Hartland: And I'm Dan Hartland. In every episode of Critical Friends we'll be discussing SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it's going.

Aisha Subramanian: In this episode, we're talking to critic and poet Catherine Rockwood about her new chapbook, And We Are Far From Shore, a set of poems about the television show Our Flag Means Death.

Dan Hartland: Catherine reviewed Our Flag Means Death for Strange Horizons a few months ago, so we wanted to discuss how reviewing and criticism feed into creative practice and, of course, about pirates.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: So here we are with Catherine Rockwood, whose review of Our Flag Means Death came out at Strange Horizons last year—not quite twelve months ago, in December last year—and now comes to us with a new chapbook of poetry inspired by, well, I think by ... why don't you tell us, Catherine, what is the book?

Catherine Rockwood: The book is a microchapbook of poems. It's coming out from the Ethel Zine press in October of this year, so that would be coming right up. And it's … it's basically, it's a very short volume of six thematically linked poems that are inspired by it and indebted to the world created in the show, Our Flag Means Death.

Dan Hartland: As soon as I saw you announce this, it just really struck me. Because first and foremost, I love the review that you did for us. And it's really stuck in my memory for all sorts of reasons and maybe we can talk about a few. But it, it really struck me that here is, you know, as I say, not twelve months later, here is this … this other consideration of the text, this other interaction with it.

I just wondered whether the two things were, or had been, linked. Like, how did you get from the review to the book? Or were they not associated at all?

Catherine Rockwood: Well, they were; they were both driven by my very powerful interest in the show. And I would say that they came from different parts of the cognitive tangle that is my brain.

And first of all, I just have to thank you for—so I think I had to beg you. A little bit to run the review, just, just a little. It was also a very busy, difficult time for Strange Horizons, and for you in particular. But I, again, there was some question as to whether it was appropriate in terms of genre. And part of the pleasure of the review was untangling some of that, right? Whether … whether it made sense to review Our Flag Means Death in a magazine that's devoted to science fiction and fantasy and engagements with the field of science fiction and fantasy.

But yes, so there was, so the review was … I really wanted to try to untangle what was fascinating about this show, and what was sort of, I don't know, what was critical in my ability to kind of deal with its content. And would it actually be okay to just kind of be enthusiastic about it and to really love it, you know?

And I'd say that the … the poems, it's … it's just a different way of working. But in the review, you have to deal with what you see as being present in the text and the kinds of evidence and arguments that you can muster about that. And with poems, you can actually kind of enter into the world as you understand it and make your own small contributions and perhaps additions or counter arguments.

Aisha Subramanian: But then presumably the entering into the world and the inhabiting the world is also kind of a function of … You've already done some of that critical work in understanding how the world works in the first place?

Catherine Rockwood: That's right. Yes, so … you know, again, I can't really remember the chronology exactly. I think I wrote … I think I finished the review before I really sat down to start writing poems, and in fact, yes, that's right.

But yes, so the review is the entrée, right? You know into the … the world as I've been able to kind of understand it through the poems is shaped by the work of structuring and understanding that's been done by the review. I should say some of it is a bit different. So in the review, one of the things I was really focused on examining is to what extent does the show engage with the colonial legacies that are present in the historical matter that the show is tethered to. And in the microchapbook, one of the things that I look at pretty carefully is family dynamics, particularly in the family of, or the now sort of dispersed and changing family of Stede and Mary Bonnet.

And … and so that's, again, it's a … it’s a different area of activity, but there are poems that sort of, again, directly relate to the work done in the review.

Dan Hartland: You've mentioned the three things that really stick in my head about the review, which is your consideration of the generic element; your meditation, if you like, on enthusiasm versus, critical thought; and then, yeah, as you say, the engagement with the—you put it in a really nice way—the historical matter to which the show is tethered, which I think is a really, a really good way of explaining this show's relationship or otherwise to the past. And I want to get to all three of those things, actually, but I wonder whether, because you mentioned that the poems are kind of different to the review—and since the review is there online for everyone to read—I wondered whether you might be okay to read one of the poems for us, so that we can kind of see that difference in action.

Catherine Rockwood: I'd be happy to. And so I should mention that the name of the microchapbook, so its title is And We Are Far From Shore: Poems for Our Flag Means Death. And so the first three poems in the collection are sort of nominally epistolary. They are as if letters written to people who are not immediately in contact with the narrator. And that's … so that kind of relates to the show's interest in what happens when you can't, like, when you have a relationship that is complicated, that's unresolved, and you actually … and you cannot get to the person immediately, right?

This second nominally epistolary poem in the microchap book is called “To Doug at Home,” and the narrator here, Louis, is thinking about the fact that his parents’ marriage—Stede and Mary Bonnet's marriage—has dissolved. And that his father is now a pirate and his mother has a new boyfriend. Name's Doug. Here we go.

Dear Doug
this is Louis
I have been wondering what pictures you paint
when you are by yourself at home
and where that is.

My mother says
I am not to inquire too anxiously
she says
our engagement as two households
is sufficient

and that I should try not to borrow worry.
Doug
I wish she knew that I am happy
sometimes I think I am misunderstood
by everyone but you.

Alma is brave
Mother is flourishing
my father is a pirate against us all.
I hated him until I saw you walk
whistling away to your own life

and return here in the morning, both hands full
of flowers none of us had seen before.

[pause]

I neglected to mention that Doug is a painter!

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: It's a lovely poem. And what strikes me about it is, as you say, you are working your way into the show in a quite different way to the one in which you worked your way in in the review. And it just strikes me that—and take this in the … in the right way, Catherine!—it's an unusual thing to do to write a mini chapbook of poems from the perspective of characters in a show.

One of the things we often talk about on this podcast is that it's really easy to get quite po-faced about criticism. And it's certainly easy for people that don't do it or read it to think it's all about kind of complaining about a text, all the things that are wrong with it, or at least trying to figure out whether anything's wrong with it. That is not what you did in your review, and it is certainly, surely, not what is powering or motivating you to write a bunch of poems about this show—like, if you only cared about what was wrong with this show, these poems wouldn't exist.

And, as we discussed, in the review you do engage with this, okay? So where does the—and Strange Horizons often engages with this, various reviewers in different ways—that traditional way of looking at it is the difference between a fannish review and a critical review, but I think the two can coexist and I think they do in your piece. So I just wondered whether you could talk a little bit about that, because it's such a beautiful poem which gets … puts itself almost perfectly in the position of that character in that world, and it really does speak of the love for the show. So can you talk a little bit about how you balance, or if you balance, the critical with enthusiasm.

Catherine Rockwood: Uneasily! You know? Yes. I think that whole question of what you're doing when you do criticism—which of course this podcast is very interested in—I think … you know, one of my goals as I, you know, kind of keep going with my life and with various writing projects and with thinking and with reading and all the rest of it … I mean, one of my goals when I love something is to love it as thoughtfully as I can. You know, you want to be able to talk with some balance and insight about things that you love as well as things that you don't. This idea of criticism as something that has to come from being really irritated, you know, by a piece of art, you know, finding all the ways in which it doesn't do the things that you would like, you know? And again … so there are, there are lots of different levels here.

There can be, you can … you can have a negative critical response to something because you don't like the way it works and or you can have a negative critical response to something because you see the way it is, and you disagree with the intent and the message and the technique behind that, right? But in this case, yes, I absolutely was deeply moved by the show, was a little worried about how deeply it moved me.

Aisha Subramanian: Ok, that is relatable!

Catherine Rockwood: And I wanted to talk about it in as many and as thorough ways as possible. And test hypotheses, you know, and … and learn more.

Aisha Subramanian: I mean, I do not … I avoid doing any sort of creative work as much as possible apart from criticism. But I feel like, even with quite traditional forms of criticism, sometimes reading things closely—and that sort of … the sort of intimacy that you develop with a text—is an act of love. Even when you're ultimately doing that in the service of explaining why a particular text is, you know, embedded in a lot of deeply harmful systems, you're still … there is still a love in the intimacy.

It's a really strange thing sometimes. I can see more and more of a text's flaws as the process of reading it gets deeper and deeper, and then love it much more than I started out with, and I think that's … that's a pretty common stance for critical reading.

Catherine Rockwood: Yes. Well, you know, I so agree, Aisha. I mean I've been nodding, you know, heartily the whole time we've been talking.

And I feel like … I mean, it's almost like that, you know, there's the sort of, I don't know: there's a theory that if you lock … if you make, eye contact with someone for long enough, you know, you're … you're kind of at risk of developing, you know, romantic feelings for them.

And you know, it's a little tricky because you may get a book to review and you can see … you know that there are things you really have to say about what it's trying to do and how it's trying to do them. But, as you come to understand the way the book works, you know, nevertheless, you're like, “But look at this beautiful bit over here!” You know, like, and, “Look at, look at, like, how amazing the intention behind this piece was,” you know?” Like, even if it doesn't work or even if it's problematic sometimes and, and—yes—it's, you know, the intimacy that comes with attention. Right? It's pretty profound.

Dan Hartland: You mentioned that one of the things you're doing when you engage with the text as closely as you have is testing hypotheses. I just wondered whether you were testing different hypotheses in the different forms. So, did you find that reading the text in order to produce a review or a piece of criticism gave you a different set of thoughts or a different set of findings than reading it for the purpose of producing poetry?

Catherine Rockwood: You do have to make choices, pretty careful choices. One thing is, I mean, in the review, I certainly didn't want to be delving too far into the emotional life of a family that is … you know, again, historically speaking, the family of a violent plantocrat.

Dan Hartland: So what was it about the poetry then that made you feel you could? Because I noticed … so, for example, Doug and … and Louis: the poem you just read was from the perspective of a character that does not appear in your review, isn't mentioned. And is … is that why? Did you feel freer in the poetry to do that thing than you did in the review? Can you describe why, if so?

Catherine Rockwood: Yes. Well, I think, you know, critically speaking … again, if you're looking at … and so in the review I get into the ways that the show, I really think, does try to cope with and acknowledge the fact that it's tethered to this, you know, violent colonial history.

And if you … if you really follow that thread, you have to talk about the fact that … I don't want to be too spoilery!

Dan Hartland: Well, at Strange Horizons, we don't discourage spoilers, but we do allow each reviewer to decide their own policy. So some of you … some of you like to avoid spoilers. Some of you love to give them. We'll leave that to you!

Catherine Rockwood: Okay. Well, so spoiler alert! If you haven't watched Our Flag Means Death season one, then you should probably switch off the next forty-five seconds of the podcast. But at the end of the first season, in episode ten, there's this sort of plot manoeuvre where Stede renounces, you know, again, his inheritance in … you know, his, basically, which is—and this is not dealt with in the show—but, you know, again, in the sort of loosely tethered historical material, he owns … He's inherited a plantation from his father who was in, you know, the first part of settler colonialism that really shifted over to sugar plantations and therefore began to employ enslaved labor on a vast scale.

And again, this is all … the show doesn't talk about it, it's all supposed to be kind of in a box. Although there are acknowledgements and there are kind of attempts to deal with it. So, at the end of episode ten in the first season, there's this manoeuvre where Stede renounces his holdings. He kind of … he sort of divests himself, right? He sort of washes his hands and says, “You know, you, Mary Bonnet, my ex-wife, and the children can have all of it. I don't want any of it. It's all yours I'm going to go and be a pirate with a free conscience now.” [laughter] Very strange sentence!

And so you have to, if you're looking at things from and through that lens, you have to talk about the fact that this kid, Louis—who it's very, you know, it's fascinating to think about what he would have thought about everything that's going on—but he is going to be the inheritor, right, of this property. And you don't want to go ahead and over-empathize too much, you know, with a character who's in that particular relation, right, to the colonial content of the material. And I think, you know, in the poetry, the frame is narrower. It is fictionalizing. And so I think, you know, I felt some … some permission to participate in the field of distancing that the show establishes around the material, and to just try to see things through the lens of a kid who doesn't himself necessarily understand everything about the way he is structurally situated in the world that he inhabits.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah, I was sort of thinking about this, the idea of permission and the kind of, you know, how comfortable you feel settling into the world of the show, how comfortable you feel sort of inhabiting the world of the show to some extent. I'd like to hear you talk a bit more about the field of distancing that the show establishes that makes it possible to do that. Did that also affect your ability to write criticism around the show?

Catherine Rockwood: Well, you know, in the review I talk about how narrow the camera field is in the show and the fact that it doesn't … it does not do landscape. It does interiors because you can't do landscape—because to look at the landscape reveals again the colonial underpinnings and the violence that's kind of present in the world outside of the house, right? The house at the plantation. And again, I know, I mean … I know very well that the violence is present in the house, too. You never … I mean, there's no discussion, right, of who does anything domestic, other than Mary Bonnet, right, in the shots that are shown in the family home, on land.

The creators of the show—and so I've seen a quotation somewhere, I wish I could attribute it, but I only know it's something I've recently read—said that they wanted to create a world, you know, where a diverse audience and, again, a diverse cast could watch the show, engage emotionally with the show, and not feel that they had to be constantly traumatized by reminders of what, for instance, you know, the eighteenth-century in the West Indies was actually like, particularly for people who had been brought there under slavery from Africa and other colonies. It's a difficult, difficult thing that they're trying to do. And I think, you know, people will—justly, right?—get to decide whether they feel that the show has succeeded or not, whether they can engage with it without, you know, pain and anger or not.

And, and I am … you know, like, I'm a white demigirl, right? You know that's where I stand in relation to this material. It’s not the only place I stand, but, like, that's important information. And the best answer I think I can muster is that, again, you can debate the degree to which they are successful, but I think there has been a conscious effort to acknowledge the colonial content and to reveal its power to harm, particularly in episode five. But then sort of—again—moving out from that, you know, through the rest of the show, sometimes it's managed and sometimes I think, you know, it's just very deftly sort of handled … and other times I think they, they did kind of, they … you know, it's a massive, terrible sort of historical context that they're trying to work with, and sometimes it gets away from them.

So for me, I had to keep the camera narrow. Same thing as … as the show did.

Dan Hartland: Do you think that—because we're talking about your review which is obviously a piece of critical work, and your poetry is a form of criticism, as well as being many other things—in the way that the show itself deals with its own material, is the show critical? Or does it choose to … not ignore, but, as you said, place in a box those things about its setup that it would struggle to encompass?

I'm thinking there is a trend, particularly in books at the moment, for coziness, right? And the best cozy books manage to put all these elements into balance. Others kind of fall over because really it's not so much cozy as just wilfully ignorant. And I'm just wondering how the show manages—if it manages, because in your review you're very open to the idea that it doesn't manage everything that it attempts to achieve—whether it manages to be critical towards that material itself.

Catherine Rockwood: Yeah, I think it's of two minds about it. And I think, you know—and again, I think it kind of needs the unpredictable, you know, violent, traumatic quality of the history that it sort of floats next to, like two ships moored near each other at sea, because this is a … it's a show about pirates! And I think that kind of sense that you might get stabbed, you know is actually—by the history, right?—is actually part of what the show is using. I'm not gonna lie, I think it really actually uses it to maintain this field of unpredictability and danger and unexpectedness that it is attempting to kind of … you know, braid in with the cozy and the delightful and the passionate and the queer. And, you know, I mean, like, I think it's … I think it's trying to use it.

And I also do think about, you know, so I don't know, but I mean: Taika Waititi is involved with this project, and in a Taika Waititi project, you often get just, like, some completely unexpected lashing of blood. Just like, all of a sudden, an artery! Which can be … it speaks, I think, to something in the body of work that he and affiliated people are interested in building, which is, you know, you don't … this might be cozy, right, you know, or we might really hit you with something.

And again, part of the critic’s work is to look at that and say, “Well, if, if you're getting lashed with blood, if all of a sudden—zing!—you've got arterial, you know, spatter on your face, then, like, in the service of what? Whose blood?” And ask yourself whether you think that worked.

Aisha Subramanian: I'm just thinking a lot about splatter patterns now.

[laughter]

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: So yeah, my thought on that is that … that sounds like a … it sounds like a really interesting attempt to create a show, as you say, that enables a viewer to really engage in the ways that you have, Catherine, without having to worry too much, whilst also acknowledging that, yes, there is, just beyond the narrow field of vision, stuff that can potentially—not potentially, did do and could potentially still do a lot of harm. It doesn't sound like an entirely—to me, personally—an entirely consistent or satisfying way of … of dealing with the historical matter. But it may be the only way open to the show to do what it wants to do with that matter.

Catherine Rockwood: Yes. I agree.

Dan Hartland: You coined a really interesting term for really what it is doing, which is lo-fi fantasy, you called it. And I just wondered whether—because you're right, we do think carefully in the reviews department about what to cover and why, because we're conscious that Strange Horizons is a genre of publication. So yeah, you did … you did have to justify this one to us! But I think you did. And it is through this—this … this lens of … of lo-fi fantasy.

So I just wonder whether you could talk a little bit about … about that, because it seems key to me not just to the sort of generic justification for why this review exists at Strange Horizons, but also almost for what we're just, what you've just, been talking about: the way in which and why the show engages with the past in the way that it does.

Catherine Rockwood: Well, you know, it is arguing that it takes place somewhere slightly else. Again, not a fully-realized secondary world, but somewhere that's not quite here, right? And you know, the supernatural, the use of the supernatural, is one way to do that. I mean, of course, there are lots of ways to engage directly with the supernatural, through kind of, you know, maritime fables or folktales, but that isn't what they've chosen to do.

They've chosen to have seagulls hex people. [laughs] You know, they've chosen to have an interesting balance between really, I mean—again—almost science fictional—like the, the interiors of the ships, you know, are somehow like the TARDIS, bigger on the inside—or simply like sort of a fantasy-historical set. In something … I mean, you can almost … you know, the inside of the French ship, you know, you can almost imagine that Steve Bonnet is participating in something like “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” It's like he's somehow gone to this fairy underworld, you know, where they're just vast palaces, you know, and he kind of has to find his way through them. And so does Blackbeard and so do all the other crew members of the Revenge.

This interesting kind of willingness to do exactly that: to use you know the inexplicable, the fantastical, the sort of straight-up magical, all the while insisting that what they're really doing is showing you kind of what's actually happening. And to argue that these are people who are good at producing illusions that are kind of like stage illusions that can be explained. Right? So there's an interesting combination of the illusion that is explicable and the strange visual or physical phenomenon that cannot be explained.

Dan Hartland: There was a critical term that had a particular flowering a few years ago: liminal, liminality. And it just strikes me that you use a lot of phrases in the review, as we said—lo-f fantasy, you also use the phrase, or the word, semi-historical—and it just feels that this is a show that sort of is really delicately balanced, in all the ways we've already discussed, but also kind of generically as well.

Catherine Rockwood: Yes. I think it is. And the more you look at it, you know, closely, the more you're like, “Ooh, I think they pulled that off there. And then grrrr!”

[laughter]

Dan Hartland: why did you write the review first? Why didn't the poems come first?

Catherine Rockwood: I wrote the review first because I really was having trouble making sense of my feelings! You know? Reviewing for Strange Horizons has been, I mean, it's been a wonderful way … So my background, I'm a former academic with a deep interest in science fiction and fantasy. And once I wasn't writing sort of straight-up criticism, these straight up articles about you know, British literature in the seventeenth century I found that I couldn't … it was difficult for me to get as analytical and as engaged with things I was interested in as I could when I had a critical project. You know, for me, to really love something, but be uneasy about it and to really want to think about it more and try to work out, you know, as far as I can, what is going on in there, and why it makes me feel the way I feel, is a) a deep need, you know—and again, that's why I'm very grateful that you said yes, after I begged you—and two, it really is … that’s how I can sort out what I think, and really get access to information, you know, and evidence that I would not be able to access, if I didn't write a critical piece about something.

For me, it's a way of, you know … so the show distances many things in the interest of kind of managing its material in the way that it wants to and, and producing the effect that it wants to. And for me, writing a review is a way of distancing all of the work that the show is doing to persuade me that it's succeeded.

Dan Hartland: I like … I really like two things that you said there. Again, the first is that you feel that Strange Horizons is a place where you can kind of engage as deeply as you want or need to with a text, but outside of all of the problems that come with sort of an academic environment. And the second is that you perceive your critical practice as kind of a generative process—so it almost freed you, or created the space in which you could create something of your own, which I think is a really wonderful way to think about criticism—but also a really important thing to reassert about criticism sometimes, which is that it doesn't … it isn't a purely reproving form. It doesn't exist only to find fault. It, at its best, it enables better things to be made.

Catherine Rockwood: Yes. Again, I feel like it's a very … it's a very useful type of work to do when you have a powerful interest but are also trying to assess the nature of that interest and decide if you want to take it into other areas of your working life. And it's very satisfying!

Aisha Subramanian: This is possibly quite a silly question, but as you say, you did kind of have to pitch to us the idea that the show was Strange Horizons-relevant, or that the show was genre-relevant. And, you know, rereading the review, I am pretty satisfied with that. I think we were willing to be convinced by your pitch, partly because we were … partly because we just wanted someone to write that piece as well!

Have you spoken to other people about this idea that this show is fantastical or fantasy-adjacent, and how convinced were they? Because I remember a couple of responses to the review being like, “Great review. I am NOT convinced that this is fantasy!”

Catherine Rockwood: That's okay. I didn't see those responses! [laughter]

Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, that's fair. I mean, I stand by my argument, but, you know, it is a little … it's … you have to make the argument. It's not … it doesn't stand on its own. You know, sort of self-evidently, the artifact needs to be interpreted.

You know, I think one thing I would say is that the creator, David Jenkins, is clearly very interested in genre, but with a strong interest in science fiction and fantasy. So for instance, his previous series, People of Earth, was nominally about alien abduction: actual spaceships and things like that. But in a more sit-commy form where, you know, the aliens are kind of bickering up in their spaceship about what they're going to do with these irritating humans who they've been assigned to kind of cover. So, I mean, again, you can make the argument that, well, the director and writer is clearly very, very interested in working with science fiction and fantasy. And there are these strong links with, for instance, the movie The Princess Bride that are acknowledged throughout the series.

One of the difficulties was working with pirates and talking about genre in relation to pirates. It's just that, I mean, they've been so involved in the generation of myth and legend and, you know, occupied this very sort of borderline status themselves in terms of fact/fiction and how you categorize them, really, since piracy emerged as a thing that was engaged with in books and in broadsides and in popular culture.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I would agree that the pirate has always, as depicted, always had something of the fantastical about them and yet that fantastical presentation comes to us via historical documentation. So yes, so the reception of the pirate is inherently fraught with these questions.

Aisha Subramanian: To add to that, the performance of the pirates is also fraught with these questions. Like, once piracy is a thing pirates are performing. Which is obviously something that the show thinks about quite a bit as well.

Catherine Rockwood: Very much so. And very overtly and all the time. Costumes! I mean, you know, Stede Bonnet is the clothes horse, isn’t he? He calls himself that at one point, you know. He's like … he's basically like, “This is my costume department.” They go into the wardrobe and—whatever episode that is, I think that's episode four—and he's like, “Here are my, you know, my costume changes.” And Blackbeard is, like, “Whoa, like, awesome!” But, you know, the show is interested in, like, what else might people who have performed as pirates, how else might they be interested in performing?

It's all very tricky to kind of get to grips with, really. I did my best!

Dan Hartland: And that seems like a good point at which, if you were willing, to read another poem.

Catherine Rockwood: Sure. So I think I'm going to read an excerpt from a fairly long poem. So the third epistolary poem in the chapbook is a poem that's in the voice of Lucius Spriggs, the highly educated secretary of pirate captain Stede Bonnet, a man whose life has clearly taken some strange turns.

And this is a poem addressed to his fellow crewmate, Pete, who used to sail with the Dread Pirate Blackbeard—so he says. And Lucius and Pete have fallen in love over the course of the voyage. So this is an excerpt from “To Pete, Tired at Midnight.”

What did I have to do with love before?
All my loves which, counted, number

more than there swim silvery minnows in the sea,
each of them, Pete, rests tonight with thee.

Tomorrow they'll awaken with the dawn
and I will grow distracted, without harm,

by elegance of one kind or another:
Jim's slender, deadly smile. The golden hover

of Captain Bonnet's hair. A fancied look
From Israel Hands, whose heart's a burning book.

With your permission, sweet, I would undo
Roach's full concentration on his stew

and all for joy. We both know at the end,
here is no crime—so therefore no amends.

Draw nearer, then, my darling, balding mate.
We weren't early, but we are not late.

Now, while the rigging sways above our nest
I can imagine all is for the best:

This ship, these crewmates, and our course and heading
which bear us on, not knowing but not dreading.

[musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Honestly, thank you. I mean, obviously, what everyone has learned from this conversation is all they need to do is beg us and we publish!

[laughter]

Aisha Subramanian: Okay, I feel at some point we might have to release that email just so everyone can open it. We were actually quite easy to persuade!

[musical outro continues]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF Criticism Podcast. Our music is “Dial Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can hear more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com. See you next time.

View Details

In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, the critic and reviewer Paul Kincaid joins Aisha and Dan to discuss how and why critics persevere in their work, what changes about it as the platforms and delivery mechanisms that surround criticism shift, and the challenges that face those writers who seek to collect or look back on their previous work. He also discusses A Traveller In Time, the forthcoming volume of reviews and essays by the late Maureen Kincaid Speller, a founding critical friend—and Paul’s wife of more than thirty years.

Alongside memories of Maureen and her critical practice, Paul remarks on the work of John Clute, Jared Shurin’s definitions of cyberpunk, the book as object ... and why moving house can be such a pain.

TranscriptCritical Friends Episode 8[musical introduction]

Aisha Subramanian: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Aisha Subramanian.

Dan Hartland: And I’m Dan Hartland. In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be discussing SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

Aisha Subramanian: In this episode, we’re sitting down with veteran critic Paul Kincaid to talk about his own history of reviewing, the process of anthologizing and collecting criticism, and why you should read Maureen Kincaid Speller’s forthcoming collection.

Dan Hartland: We began by trying to establish whether we even like books.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Okay, so we are here with the esteemed Paul Kincaid after our what I have to admit was a little bit of a summer vacation last month—which was mostly my fault because my idea of a summer vacation is to move house.

Paul Kincaid: You are weird.

Dan Hartland: It has been said! There is the moment as well—and I’m sure many people listening to this are the same—there’s that moment when you’re moving house, when you realize, “Oh, I really did buy a lot of books.”

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah. There’s also quite a prolonged moment—possibly weeks and months—of really, really hating books.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I haven’t got through that yet. I’m still there.

Aisha Subramanian: I mean, all they do apparently is take up space and collect dust.

Paul Kincaid: The last time we moved house was 1990, because the experience was so horrendous that we decided not to move again.

Aisha Subramanian: I don’t think you should ever move again after that!

Paul Kincaid: What I remember from that is the number of occasions you pick up something thinking, “Why do we have multiple copies of this book?" And equally the number of times you’re thinking, “I’m sure we had that book. Where is it?"

Dan Hartland: And there are these moments of clarity, aren’t there, where you are moving house and you realize these things, but then, I don’t know, what is it, six weeks, eight weeks, three months into the new house, you’re like, “No, no ... definitely need to buy those duplicate coppers again!" And all the habits ... I’m in the moment of transition.

Paul Kincaid: Can I give you a … a promise, a look to the future. When you get as old as me, I’m now in the process of downsizing the number of books I have to get rid of some books, doing some building work on the house. There’s less, there’s less space. So I have to get rid of a fair number of books to allow for everything else.

Dan Hartland: Is that as painful as it sounds?

Paul Kincaid: ... It’s worse.

Dan Hartland: Well, thank you for that vision of my future.

Paul Kincaid: It comes to us all.

Dan Hartland: Well, one of the things that would be really useful to talk about is related to your—self-confessed, these are not my words!—great age. Which is: Aisha and I recently were looking through the Strange Horizons archive of reviews. Names come and go often. So there are people that produce a lot of reviews for a short period of time, and then they go away. Some people come back; and there’s this undulating coming-and-going of names.

That’s not the case with your name, Paul. You are just always there, and I just wonder: what is the source, if you even know, of this persistence? That you ... you keep reviewing, you keep doing criticism?

Paul Kincaid: I think part of it is, is very simply, that’s what I do and it just never occurs to me to not do it. Um, I’ve been writing criticism in one form or another since the late seventies. It’s sort of ingrained. I don’t think about it now. It’s just a natural way of doing it, and when I’m reading for pleasure, I end up thinking in my head, “How I would review this book?" What I would do, what I need to say about it, what it opens up for me. So it’s just, it’s an ingrained habit of mind.

Dan Hartland: Is that an unalloyed good thing? So you mentioned, even when you are reading a book—quote unquote—for pleasure, not for review, you’re kind of reviewing it. I mean, is that something that ... gets in the way? Is it something that you’re grateful for?

Paul Kincaid: Sometimes yes. Sometimes it’s a right pain. There are times when you … you just want to shut off. I’ll give you an example. Uh, a few months ago I read Daisy Jones & The Six. Because there is nothing like anything I have ever reviewed, ever would review. It is as far away from what might be seen as my province as possible. And I was reading away quite happily, and I certainly found myself constantly thinking about the technique, about the structure of the book and about not what I was reading, but the shape of what I was reading. Even something like that, I just can’t get away from it. It’s a pain sometimes, but it’s also interesting.

Dan Hartland: And is that something that happens to you with things other than books as well? So is it, is it a specifically literary thing that you do, or does it kind of affect texts of all types?

Paul Kincaid: Kind of, but not to the same extent. Films and television, I tend to regard them that way when I have an idea that I might want to review it.

Dan Hartland: That’s really interesting. To link it back to the original question about persistence, the persistence is literary to some extent. There’s a weak link, but it’s a link, with books specifically. I mean, is there ever, it sounds like there is, moments when you wished, “Oh gosh, I wish I didn’t have to be this way!"

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, obviously. And there are times ... I mean, quite frankly, there are times when you are reviewing a book and you know, you are reviewing the book and you think, “God, I wish I didn’t have to do this." I’m reading a book at the moment The Big Book of Cyberpunk.

Dan Hartland: Is that the Jared Shurin?

Paul Kincaid: Yes. Yeah. Yes. 1,150 pages, and I’m about 800 pages into it. Part of me is going to really enjoy writing the review. I’ve got a lot of it planned out in my mind already, and I’ve got far more notes than I’ve got space for in my review, but at the same time, I’m thinking, “Oh God, really, can I just put it ... You know, I’ve been doing this for days and days and days and days and days. Can I just go away from it? Leave it?"

It is just so big. I don’t think anybody who isn’t reviewing the book will ever read it beginning to end. It’s not that sort of book and, quite frankly, if they do read it beginning to end, I pity them. But when you do read it beginning to end, you see connections, repetitions, links, and you can’t stop yourself. I can’t ... well, I can’t stop myself.

Dan Hartland: That’s … that’s so interesting, because you have just answered the first question, which is you just—you can’t stop yourself. So there’s no noble answer to this persistence, you know, to your contribution to the field over decades. It’s just ’cause it’s what you do and you can’t stop it.

Paul Kincaid: The simple response to that is: I never thought about it as a contribution to the field. This is just what I did. Other people interpret it as a contribution to the field. But I actually think if I started thinking those terms, I’d freeze up.

Aisha Subramanian: From what you just said, that idea that you put ... you do this work and you put it into the world or into a particular publication, and presumably the hope is that someone somewhere is going to read it and enjoy it. Is there a point when you start thinking of yourself as someone who is being read?

Paul Kincaid: I’ve got to, I’ve got to see it in my terms, not as some sort of noble endeavor on the sake of the whole of science fiction, because that would be soul destroying. One thing that strikes me about contributions to the field is absolutely they’re in the eye of the beholder.

Dan Hartland: It’s interesting that you bring up the Shurin book. Any anthology is also itself a form of criticism, right? So you are reviewing it. You are doing criticism. But in collecting those stories and in writing the introduction, Jared is also doing criticism.

Paul Kincaid: Oh, yes. Very much.

Dan Hartland: It begins to get a bit recursive. Does it? How do you avoid that when you’ve been especially doing it for such a period of time that you’ve been through several of these critical moments?

Paul Kincaid: I’ve been putting together a collection. A third collection of reviews and essays and things that I’m hoping will be coming out sometime in the next couple of years.

Dan Hartland: Is this an exclusive for Critical Friends?

Paul Kincaid: Probably, yes, but I’m not gonna say ... I’m not gonna say who’s potentially publishing it or anything like that. The draft I originally did included all my reviews of collections of reviews, because I’ve done a lot of them. And I read through the whole thing at the end, and I’ve decided to take all of those out because it’s too recursive. I’m going in a circle that, you know, you can’t get off of. So I’m leaving, I’m taking out the reviews of reviews. I have this vision of writing a book that’s made up of reviews, of reviews, but the reviews themselves were also of reviews and there’s no end to that. And I just ... it’s crazy. It was doing my head in, so I’m going to take them out.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: One of the consequences, you know, of the perseverance is that you keep ... you wind up with this kind of back catalog that you’re anthologizing in one way or another. How did you begin building up that back catalog? Like this is the obvious question to ask, but it’s such ... I do find it interesting beccause almost every reviewer has a slightly different story. Like, you say that you do it because you do it. But there was a point where you didn’t do it. So how did it begin?

Paul Kincaid: Okay. Um, this is going back to the early seventies. I was at university in Northern Ireland, at University of Ulster, and where I was living at the time, there was only, other than the university bookshop, there was only one little news agents that had books in it. And, most of these tucked away in a rather difficult-to-reach corner of the shop, were those old digests of science fiction: compact book editions of, you know, New Worlds, Science Fantasy, things like that.

So I amassed quite a few of those and was reading them, and actually that is where I really got thoroughly into science fiction. So when I moved on to do a post-grad at Warwick, I discovered purely by chance that there was a science fiction convention in Coventry that Easter, the year I was at Warwick. So I thought ... God knows! You know, “I’ll go along and see what it’s like." And I did and rather enjoyed it, started getting involved in fandom. And of course when you are in fandom, there’s always things called fanzines. And I thought ... maybe, you know, everybody was doing them. So I thought I should ... I should at least contribute to them.

But I didn’t feel comfortable writing the sort of, jokey, self-revelation-type pieces that made up most of British fan writing at the time. So I thought I’d write about a book. You know, we’re all science fiction fans. We obviously like books, and I’d just read Chip Delany's Triton, as it was then called. And, having studied philosophy at university, the thing that struck me was the philosophical bit at the end of the book, the afterword. So I wrote about that and it was ... I was rejected by a fanzine.

But there was a comment in the, “We Also Heard From" bit in the next issue of the fanzine saying, “Somebody even wrote to me to tell me that Delany’s Triton was all about philosophy!" That was it. That was the sum total of my impact on science fiction fandom at the time.

But I’d started doing it. I’d started doing it because I couldn’t think of anything else to write. I did write a few stories, but they were mostly crap. But one thing I seemed to be able to do is write book reviews. So I got into writing reviews for Vector. At that time, the late seventies, there was a big ... well, basically a revolution in the BSFA [British Science Fiction Association]. A new breed of fans, the younger fans, were sort of taking over from those who’d been running the organization for years, and I found myself part of that new company—and therefore I was, you know, one of the writers that they kept turning to for reviews.

And that was it. I just started. At that stage, you had 400 words for a review in Vector and I was doing at least one review per issue for a lot, lot of the time. Practice. You just start finding yourself doing it more and more and more, and it becomes ... it just become just what you do. The way you ... the way you are, the way you perceive books. It’s like I started there rather than getting to that place.

Dan Hartland: The question I asked was, “Was there a point where this wasn’t what you do?" But your answer is, “No, no, no. It was always what I did."

Paul Kincaid: As soon as I started doing it, it was what I ... it was just how I did it.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Yeah. Was that how everyone else was doing it? Because I’m conscious you’re talking about the late seventies, so this is after Mike Harrison at New Worlds. So was it ... was how you do things being done elsewhere? Did you feel different?

Paul Kincaid: I didn’t feel different. I was reading book reviews. I mean, I’d read a lot of Mike’s reviews and John Clute’s reviews for New Worlds and picking up what reviews I could. I always read reviews in the newspapers—there used to be reviews in newspapers in those days!—and I suppose you just absorb it by osmosis. You just absorb that sort of critical angle.

Dan Hartland: So you were conscious of being part of a ... of a critical ... “community" might be too strong a word?

Paul Kincaid: Far too strong a word.

Dan Hartland: Tradition?

Paul Kincaid: I’m not even sure I’d grace it with that strong a word. It was more like that was just where I positioned my own writing. I wrote reviews and all these other people wrote reviews. So I was presumably part of it, but I didn’t see it as a unity. I didn’t see myself as part of something that was going on.

Aisha Subramanian: Earlier, when Dan was asking about how much you felt that you were part of a kind of critical community or tradition ... I suppose the difference between those two things is, with a tradition, you are aware that other people have done work and you are responding to it, whereas, with a community, there’s a sense that you are one of the people being responded to.

Paul Kincaid: Ooh, I like that. I occasionally, very occasionally, get emails from people I’ve never heard of saying how much they enjoyed something I wrote or something like that. That’s always gratifying. It must’ve been when my second collection, Call and Response, was published, or had a launch party as it were, to coincide with the London Worldcon in 20 ... whatever, 14?

Aisha Subramanian: (It was 14.)

Paul Kincaid: It was 14? Uh, the memory goes, you know! But the launch party was me and John Clute and Gary Wolfe. And I felt simultaneously the junior in that company, but also in that company, because they’re both writers I respect as writers as well as as critics, even though I couldn’t write like John to save my life.

Aisha Subramanian: Can anyone?

Paul Kincaid: I presume there’s a pasticher somewhere who might be able to do it, but, you know, I couldn’t!

John was always scary. When I first got into fandom, John was the scary one because people knew he was erudite, but they didn’t know how to take him. So you’d always get warnings about John and how fearsome he was. And I worked out pretty quickly that the reason everybody else found he was fearsome was because nobody dared to challenge him. He knew more than anybody, so you didn’t argue with him, and therefore he became this ... object more than a person.

But I challenged him. I argued with him, I always have done, ever since I first first met him, and I got the distinct impression that John enjoyed that. So that’s how I feel I got into that group without actually ever feeling I was a member of the group. I was still part of it.

Dan Hartland: One thing that strikes me is that I think what you were just talking about could go for critics more broadly as well. Because the sort of trick of criticism—I don’t know whether you agree—is that you have to write this thing that is robust and holds up to scrutiny, and so seems complete. But actually, one of the reasons that we do criticism is because we like to have these kind of conversations. A critic produces something that seems quite final—and a good critic produces something that seems very final—but, like Clute, we kind of want to argue about it anyway.

And I just wonder whether, to return to Aisha’s question about being read: being read involves having an audience, but also does it involve engaging with that audience too? Or do you just write the things and let them go?

Paul Kincaid: Oh God, do I? There are, given the number of reviews I’ve written over the years—bloody hell, an awful lot of them!—there are certainly reviews I’ve just written them and let them go. Contractual obligation reviews, if you get the meaning. I didn’t really want to write it, or I didn’t really have anything to say, but I produced something and sent it out there. But, most of the time, I write to express my view, but not to overwhelm everybody else’s view. I like arguing. I like to win in arguments! I like to be the one who comes out ahead! But at the same time, I do like to argue. I like to challenge people to change their mind and to have myself challenged to change my mind. And it does happen.

I think if all you’re doing is the passive job of putting words down—just go out there and that’s it, you know, they’re out there, they’re no longer part of you, you never hear from ’em again. You know, they’ve left home and never write. That feels sort of redundant. It feels like a wasted opportunity, and I don’t like wasting opportunities.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: So I was listening to ... are we allowed to talk about other podcasts?

Paul Kincaid: ’Course we are.

Aisha Subramanian: Um, it depends. Not too much praise though.

Dan Hartland: So there’s this other terrible podcast that no one should listen to called Decoding TV. It’s presented by Dave Chen. They did a recent special episode on ... I don’t know whether you saw the New York Times piece about movie criticism on TikTok, which caused a bit of a stir in certain circles. There was lots of sort of discussion about studios getting involved in funding various movie critics on TikTok and YouTube, is that good? Is TikTok as a format even able to do criticism? All those sorts of things. But the podcast was so good because it held a lot of space for the idea that, hey, TikTok is the platform that the next generation have. We can’t necessarily change that so much.

Dave and Patrick Klepek, who were having the conversation, came up in blogs—which I suppose you and I did, Aisha—and then, Paul, you came up in paper fanzines.

Paul Kincaid: Because I am ancient.

Dan Hartland: I didn’t say Gutenberg, you know, you weren’t hand pressing the ... well, actually maybe.

Paul Kincaid: I have done!

Dan Hartland: [laughter] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, each generation has a slightly different story of how they come up, which affects the format or expectation of not just what they produce, but also that dialogue, that engagement that feels like an important part of the process, but is different for each generation. And I don’t know where I’m gonna land on this myself, which is why I’m gonna turn this into a question, which is: do you notice those changes as you move through them, Paul? Because I mentioned the Strange Horizons archive that you appear in very early on ... but Strange Horizons—you know, if we go Mike-Ashley-Rise-of-the-Cyberzines—that was leading edge when you first landed on that! So do you consciously move through the platforms? Or do they just kind of find you? Do they change how you write? Do they change how you don’t let the reviews go? What impact does that change have?

Paul Kincaid: Let’s go back to the idea of moving through platforms. When I started writing, I was writing on paper, I was using a typewriter as well, you know, really ancient stuff. And you know, you’d send it off and it would with luck appear some weeks or months later. I got into the habit ... I always read my reviews when they finally appear, partly because in those early reviews they appeared so long after I’d written them that I’d forgotten what the hell I said. And it’s a way of reminding myself.

So you start doing that, the types of magazines you write for start to change as you become competent or develop interests that lead you into new areas. So you start writing for different magazines, you start writing for different journals. You know, I moved from things like Vector and fanzines into things like, Foundation and more academic journals, things like that. I got into the TLS a few times as well, which is rather pleasing. So you’re changing—you’re changing your approach slightly with each one, but not as much as you’d think. You know, you’re writing 400 words for Vector and writing 1200 words, 1500 words for Foundation: obviously there’s a difference because of the length, which is a difference in how much you can say, and therefore a difference in the way you can structure an argument.

But the argument itself is not necessarily that different. And then online magazines like Strange Horizons came along and in a sense that was ... you know, I moved naturally into those. I still write for print, I still write online. I have a blog which I write occasionally. So you use different media and it allows you sometimes different modes of expression, but it’s not that different in the substance of what it is you are saying.

That’s my experience. It’s not always what I pick up. I mean, let’s say when the book blogging phenomenon really got going, I got really, really irritated with the people for whom the most important thing was cover reveals or unboxing or things like that. Because that turns the book into an object, not into what a book really is, which is a mode of expression, a part of your interior cinema if you like. And there is always that carry-through in what I write, whatever the medium: that what I’m writing about is the substance of the book, the substance of what is going on within that book. I’ve never been remotely interested in … in the book-as-object.

When Maureen and I got married, there were people down, we had the party here at our house. There were people going along the shelves and taking books off and just checking whether they were first editions or not. And I think they were disappointed that many of them weren’t first editions because I’m not that sort of book collector. I like my books for the content, not for whether it’s a first edition or, uh, anything as special or anything like that. Because the book-as-object really, really doesn’t interest me. So that approach to books, which I don’t think I can justify by the name criticism, is one of the things that irritated me.

But as long as the people are about writing about what’s inside a book or talking about it as we are talking here, that’s okay. That I like, that I can go with, and the actual medium isn’t going to bother me too much, so long as what I do with that medium is on the same spectrum as what I do whenever I’m talking about a book.

Aisha Subramanian: And I’m also sort of slightly thinking now about how much I care about books as objects, and to what extent I do or don’t ...

Dan Hartland: I mean, we began this conversation talking about my experience with having an awful lot of objects that are books. Like Paul, I don’t collect the first editions. I don’t even check, really. But nevertheless, I also still prefer to read the book in its paper form. So if I’m reviewing a book, or just reading for pleasure, I still kind of enjoy most of all holding the paper book rather than reading it on Kindle (other e-readers are available). I prefer the experience. So there must be some element of me liking the book as an object. But I would agree, Paul, that it’s not the thing itself. It’s not the primary purpose of the reading, which I think for some people is—yeah, just having them is the thing ... which I get! They are lovely things to have!

Paul Kincaid: I suppose one exception would be illustrated books or graphic novels or anything that involves something other than just words on a page. There you need to talk about such things as reproduction, how they come across on the page, how they fit within the text and things like that. So you’re talking about something slightly extra-literary in that, but in the main—no, it’s, it’s just the words.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah. And it feels like the discussion that we started off with was essentially the disconnect between wanting to have the content of the books available to you and the massive inconvenience of their physical forms just taking up space in your house.

Paul Kincaid: And yet, like Dan, I’m not a great fan of ebooks. I read them, but I don’t think I’ve ever read an ebook purely for the pleasure of reading a book. The only times I read ebooks are when it’s a book for research or it’s a book for review.

Aisha Subramanian: I think I’m the opposite in some ways! I will read an ebook for pleasure. If anything, for pleasure and for quite a casual kind of reading experience. But for anything where I feel like I want to pay attention, and where attention is going to be a big part of my thinking about the book or my enjoyment of the book, that’s when I want the physical copy. So I read a lot of sort of trashy historical romance in ebook form, because I can just read that and I don’t have to really ... it is one of the times where I can turn off being a critic, to go back to something else that we talked about. Whereas I don’t think I can do good critical work with an ebook.

Paul Kincaid: I’ve had to sometimes, but it’s not as much fun whenever I’m offered a book for review and they say, you know, you can have it as an ebook or, you know, I’ll see if I can get a finished copy. I always ask for the finished copy, if at all possible, because there’s something about the way the words are arranged on a printed page compared to how they’re arranged on a screen, that makes a big difference in appreciation of the text, I think, and I really don’t understand that. It’s some sort of animal instinct in my mind, I suppose, but it’s the case.

Dan Hartland: I’m interested that this exchange began, Paul, with you saying that you weren’t interested in books as objects, but in fact we’ve realized that something about, if not this sort of objecty-ness of them, but something about the physicality of a text, does influence the reading.

Paul Kincaid: Yes.

Dan Hartland: And I completely agree.

Aisha Subramanian: Me, too.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. For me, it’s actually about part of my technique of doing criticism. So I’m an awful person that writes on pages and sticks notes in things and, you know, finds parts of a text by physically applying myself to the pages. And that is so much less effective an approach with a digital file.

Paul Kincaid: I’ve been sorting through some of Maureen’s books. I’ve a lot of her books on Native American literature and politics. I’ve donated them to her PhD supervisor because he and his students would get more use out of them than I ever would. But some of them you ... you don’t actually have a book. You have this rainbow of little Post-It notes sticking out around the side and actually working your way through it is almost impossible. I honestly dunno how she did that.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Well, since you mentioned Maureen, I wonder whether we could talk briefly about her collection, which is coming out later this year. And I know you’ve been super involved with the editor of that book, Nina Allan, in kind of producing it and so on. I genuinely don’t know how or where to start with this, but we’ve spoken about your volumes of reviews, which of course were produced, if you like, in harness. So you’re curating yourself, are overseeing the kind of ... the canon, if you like, the Kincaid canon.

Paul Kincaid: God, I suppose it is, but it’s a horrible thought.

Dan Hartland: Isn’t it? But that’s not the situation here, right? So other people are doing that for Maureen.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah. She wouldn’t have done it, honestly. She wouldn’t have done it. We lived together for 30-odd years and I spent most of that time trying to persuade her to produce books and she would nod and say, “Yes." And then not do it. And there’d be an excuse, there’d be a reason she never got around to producing anything like that. And it would’ve happened with this. If she had been doing this book, putting this book together, it would never have appeared. There would’ve been ... she ... there would’ve been some reason not to go ahead with it, probably right at the last minute, but it would not have happened. It wouldn’t have appeared.

The only way that a collection of Maureen’s writing could come out is if somebody else took on the task of compiling it. And Nina did a brilliant job. I’m heartily grateful that she did. Actually after she started that, Paul March-Russell suggested doing the same. So something would’ve appeared of Maureen’s writing anyway. But this collection is excellent. And it’s the only way it would’ve appeared.

Dan Hartland: Do you know why? Do you know? Because it’s so interesting, isn’t it? We’ve spent … we’ve spent the last minutes or so talking about reviewers and why we review and, you know, how we do it, and where we do it; the process of then sort of winnowing that product down into a canon. Why did Maureen do most of those things—do you know?—and then just was not interested or just didn’t feel, at the last moment as you say, that the book was a thing that she could or wanted to do?

Paul Kincaid: Practically the first thing I ever talked to her about was to persuade her to review for Vector. I was Reviews Editor at the time when we got together, and she kept putting me off for quite a long time, saying, “I’ve not read enough. I don’t know enough. I can’t trust myself on this." Eventually, you know, obviously she did start writing and she wrote very good reviews right from the start.

But I think that sense of herself as not being quite good enough, not being quite knowledgeable enough, not having read quite enough, was a persistent part. It stayed with her throughout her life. She couldn’t shake it.

Dan Hartland: So I agree that the volume is great. Aisha and I have seen the text of it, and in her introduction Nina does talk about Maureen as a woman in criticism and that must have been part of that feeling that she had, right? Because I’m conscious, you know, we’ve spoken about when you were coming up Paul, and we’re talking about, you know, Mike Harrison and John Clute and Gary Wolfe ... and this is ... surely that’s part of the picture here.

Paul Kincaid: I’m sure it is. Fandom, and Maureen and I both came through fandom though we came at it slightly different ways ... fandom was always incredibly sexist throughout the time I knew it. There were more and more women getting involved, but they were never, I think, central—right into the nineties, I suppose, which is pretty much the time we started being somewhat less engaged with fandom. But right into the nineties, conventions would have “Women in X" panels, and they were often the only panel at that convention with any women on the panel. It wasn’t conscious, but it was something that was just done. Everybody did it. Nobody thought about it. And therefore any woman trying to establish yourself, having—trying to have—opinions was going to have a hard time of it.

I get it in the neck sometime, you know, for some particular views or something like that. But basically I don’t get it in the neck for being a critic. Maureen would’ve done and I wouldn’t have seen most of it.

Dan Hartland: So that’s ... I think that’s one reason why the collection is so important actually, because here is work as you say, which hasn’t yet been collected despite the fact that it clearly is … is worthy of the volume. And will demonstrate—does demonstrate, from its breadth and depth and the publication dates—that, even though perhaps the visibility still isn’t there, women critics are writing if we provide the platforms—and we’re back to that, that word platforms again.

Paul Kincaid: Yes. There are thankfully many more women writing criticism now, and it’s often some of the best criticism out there. I don’t want to say that there’s a difference in tone, a difference in quality in the writing, because she was a woman; there is a difference in tone, there is a difference in quality, because she was Maureen and because she had that very distinctive outlook on what she was doing. I suspect at some points it would’ve been easy for other people to dismiss it not because it was Maureen, but because it was a woman.

Dan Hartland: And the volume is A Traveller In Time, which is out with Luna Press in—I think it’s September, isn’t it, Paul?

Paul Kincaid: Well, I think the official launch date is that launch at Fantasy Con. So that—is that the 16th?

Dan Hartland: It is, yes.

Paul Kincaid: Official launch date, but it’s available to pre-order all over the place now. It’s available, it should be bought. It is worth reading partly because her voice ... her voice comes through on every single page and it’s very distinctive, very sharp. Very funny. I remember many, many times reading her stuff and thinking, “I wish I could draw it like that."

Dan Hartland: When we published the tribute issue to Maureen, one of the things came through in an awful lot of the things that people wrote about Maureen was that voice. And yeah, its distinctiveness as you say.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah. Yeah. I always thought she was a better writer than me and don’t argue with it. That’s just the way I feel.

[musical sting]

Aisha Subramanian: So A Traveller In Time obviously is a collection of writings. And so to go back to something that we were talking about earlier where we were talking about your collections, Paul, and deciding ultimately to leave out certain things because you didn’t see them as being necessarily that valuable or as being too recursive.

And obviously with something like, with something like this volume, there’s a much stronger need to not leave things out. But on the other hand, a very limited space to do it.

Paul Kincaid: I’ve counted. There’s an awful lot of pieces in here, but it’s nowhere near comprehensive. Whether all the pieces left out would be worth collecting is another matter. But there were a lot of things that she wrote that aren’t in there as well—probably another collection’s worth at least choosing what goes in, I mean, I’m glad Nina took this on because I hate doing it when I’m putting my own collections of reviews together. Because you’re trying to second-guess yourself all the time.

You know, you’re thinking, “Oh, does that review really work the way you think it does?" Or, you know, “Is that saying anything worthwhile? Or is it just repetitious?" You know, “Are those two pieces just doing the same thing?" Should you just drop one of them and you always get it wrong? That’s just the way these things work, but it’s a nightmare job. As I was saying, I put together material for another collection a few months ago, building on something I’ve been sort of noodling with for a long time before then I sent it off as a draft as it were. And the moment I sent it off, I was thinking, no, yeah, those pieces take them out: you know, they don’t work or maybe I should add that, that piece in or—you are always arguing with yourself.

Editing like that is a nightmare job. I don’t know how editors per se do it. Like you, I suppose.

Aisha Subramanian: I’m not sure how we—I’m not sure how editors—do it either!

Paul Kincaid: So the thing about doing a … putting a collection together is not amassing the material. The material’s all there. You just jam it together and then you cut it out. Putting a collection together is about removing things, not putting them in. This collection had two pieces from the 1990s. Everything else was from this century. You know, they were pieces I had a lot of time for when I wrote them. So I automatically included them and put ’em in. Then I read the whole thing and said “No no, they’re too old now. They’re not relevant. Take them out. Take them out."

Dan Hartland: Because there’s an element there, isn’t there, where it feels like a volume of that sort is a retrospective, but currency is still important to you by the sounds of it. So, you know, the older pieces felt old. So even in a retrospective they don’t go in.

Paul Kincaid: I think they, it ... it’s a matter of noticing your own style. Style changes. The way I write now is nowhere near the way I wrote 20, 30, 40 years ago. And you look at pieces like that and you think, “Does it actually look like it’s the same author to somebody else?" It may do, but I’m too close, too intimately connected to it, to not feel that what I’m doing there doesn’t quite work. Not in the way that I would if I was doing it now. It’s not thought through, not carefully planned, but more a matter of instinct as you’re going through it and you sense ... I don’t know what’s wrong, but it’s wrong.

Dan Hartland: That’s that, that’s my approach to criticism. Full stop!

[laughter]

Paul Kincaid: The thing about writing criticism is that you really have to understand what it is you are reading, and if you don’t understand it, you can’t see what’s right about it or what’s wrong about it. But if you write a piece of criticism that doesn’t say what’s right or what’s wrong about the piece, you are not doing criticism.

You know, it’s essential to approach each new book or collection or whatever with essentially a blank mind, a blank canvas. See what fills it up, what things stand out that you want to make a note of, what things stand out that you think, “Oh God, that’s horrible, that really shouldn’t have been done, or, that’s a wonderful piece that needs to be emphasized."

You’ve got to ... you’ve got to be aware of not necessarily how the thing works, but how it works for you. Because criticism is always intensely personal. You are writing for a public sphere, but you are writing personally about it. It is your own mindset that is engaged with the work, and it can’t be anything other than personal.

[musical sting]

Paul Kincaid: I am no judge of what I’ve said. Can’t even remember what I’ve said mostly.

Dan Hartland: And you are producing a collection of your own work, are you, Paul?

Aisha Subramanian: Unrelatedly!

[laughter]

[musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial Up" by Lost Cosmonauts. You can hear more of their music at grandvalise.bandcamp.com. See you next time.

View Details

In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Aisha and Dan discuss what happens when books make you work. How does a reader know whether to persevere with a book when at first they're not sure of it? How can we decide if a book really isn't working on its own terms—or whether we're missing something and need to pay closer attention? And how can a critical reader check their own expectations to assess a text fairly? Expect discussion of Susannah Clarke, Yuri Herrera, Christopher Priest, Catherynne Valente, and more.

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Critical-Friends-Episode-7.mp3TranscriptCritical Friends Episode 5[musical introduction]

Aisha Subramanian: Welcome to Critical friends. The Strange Horizons SFF Criticism Podcast I'm Aisha Subramanian.

Dan Hartland: And I'm Dan Hartland. In every episode of Critical Friends, we'll be discussing SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it's going.

Aisha Subramanian: In this episode, we're talking about books that make us work. What happens when we don't at first like a text? How do we test our initial reaction to get a fuller understanding of it?

Dan Hartland: How does an author, how can an author, win our trust? How should we approach a text in order to find it on its own terms? And should we even try?

Aisha Subramanian: We began by talking about where to start with the text, and by trying to talk over the builders next door. Sorry, everyone ... that's my next door.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Can I ask a question? Are you a throw the book across a room person?

Aisha Subramanian: No. Don't have emotions that are that strong. I have no emotions. [laughter]

Dan Hartland: Neither do I. I have no emotions, either! But no, I've never thrown a book across the room in anger. I do have a rule that, I try to have a rule that, I finish a book if I start it, even if I'm not enjoying it or feel somehow that it isn't achieving what it should. I must say that this rule ... although I don't throw books, I do vocalize against them. So if I'm reading a book and I'm going to finish this book and I'm not enjoying it, I do tend to narrate my experience out loud! And the people in the room with me often complain then about my rule about not finishing books.

Aisha Subramanian: That is fair.

Dan Hartland: But I don't ... I finish the book. I insist on, even if it's not working, I keep going with it. Do you do that or do you give up more sensibly than me?

Aisha Subramanian: I am fundamentally a quitter.

Dan Hartland: So at what point would you quit? Because I feel like we're having this conversation about “when do you let a book make you work for it and when do you give up?” But I never give up. I just keep going! So when do you give up?

Aisha Subramanian: That sounds really unhealthy! I think it depends for me what level of commitment is involved. So if I've committed to review a set of books for some reason, I will probably power through them, even if I don't like them. And then I will have to do the work of trying to understand how they work, why they're worth reading, et cetera. Whether or not I actually enjoy the experience. If it's just for my own personal enjoyment, if it's just, “Oh, this looks interesting,” or a friend recommended this, or, well, any of the normal reasons that people read books, then if it's not grabbing me by quite early on, I will either put it aside to try it later, or I'll just put it aside. I think for me, there'd have to be quite a high level of “I am really, really not enjoying this” if I was actually committed to something and ended up not finishing it. It's definitely happened a couple of times. I've definitely had times when I've had to give up on a review because I just cannot get into this book no matter how much I try. But that's quite rare.

Dan Hartland: So what is this process then? By which, as I'm reading a book that I'm not enjoying but insisting on finishing it because I'm, I agree. unhealthy, and as you are maybe putting the book aside and maybe coming back to it or reviewing it later, and we're trying to figure out: “okay, we didn't enjoy this experience or this book didn't immediately grab us, or there are things about it which we were surprised by in an unpleasant way.” What is the process of figuring out whether that initial reaction that we've had is the right one, right? As reviewers or critics or just people trying to understand their experience of a book? How do we think ourselves outside of our initial reaction? What does that process look like for you? How do you think your way into a book that initially you might not want to?

Aisha Subramanian: So, for me, I think a big part of it is, okay, “obviously I don't like this, or at least my initial response to this is one of dislike, but clearly this exists, it was written this way.” So presumably some choices have been made, and presumably there were reasons behind those choices. So what is this doing? What do these choices that I dislike allow this book, maybe, to do? And that isn't necessarily going to mitigate the dislike. Sometimes it does. Sometimes my reaction is going to be, okay, I still dislike this, but at least I understand why it is the way it is.

Dan Hartland: So I'm thinking of a book that we have spoken about on this show, A Stranger in Olondria, which, when I first read it, I didn't bounce off it, but I really had to, at first, work to get into the way in which it was telling its story. And the way I did that was, I guess, try to imagine things from the book's perspective, that is, meet the book halfway and then kind of cross over into its territory. I think that's what the reader is trying to do when they engage with a book. But if I hadn't done that imaginative work, I can imagine it would have gone in the maybe try again later pile, which I do not have because I am unhealthy.

Aisha Subramanian: In general, having a sense of where the book is coming from, who's writing it, what kinds of traditions they're writing into, what kinds of styles they're writing with ... that can be a useful way in. It's not always entirely useful, because, again, there can be things about those choices that I fundamentally dislike. But at least that way I have a sense of what this object is and what it is trying to achieve. Which I realize means that I'm speaking about the book as if it had agency, and obviously it doesn't, but presumably the author had some agency and presumably these choices were choices. There was intent and art, hopefully.

Dan Hartland: Of course, sometimes there isn't. [laughter] And I suppose as readers have to be open to the idea—and maybe with my rule of always finishing a book, I'm not sufficiently open to the idea—that sometimes the book, maybe it did make choices, but they were the wrong ones. Maybe our initial reaction is correct. But we spoke about those kinds of books with Abigail, so I'm really interested in this process of figuring a book out.

At the moment, I'm working with some of our reviewers on a roundtable on the novel Goliath—which will be available as a tier on the Strange Horizons fund drive, so there you go, there's some motivation, everyone—and it's an excellent discussion. And it revolves around this because Goliath—and we've reviewed the book before so people can go and read the review—Goliath is a book which kind of challenges its readers to meet it. And what you're talking about, Aisha, it seems to me is this idea that the author and the reader are in a kind of dialogue where they have to meet—and the reader needs to kind of trust the author at some point and try and figure out what they were trying to do rather than necessarily the initial effect that the reader is experiencing.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah. And I think, as you say, sometimes the author possibly isn't worthy of that trust. It is possible for an author to write a terrible book that is objectively terrible, where either no choices were actually made with any particular level of meaning, or the choices that were made were actually all the wrong ones. But on the whole, I like to assume that if I'm reading something, some thought has gone into it at some point, and some thought by a reasonably reliable person whose judgment can be, not necessarily agreed with, but respected.

Dan Hartland: It's a nice thought, isn't it? [laughter] I wonder whether we could think about how that happens, how we sift through the authors that deserve our trust, even though they're kind of not trying to win it—they're not pandering to the reader, are asking for some investment, some work, some effort from the reader (almost deliberately, in some cases, they will try to alienate the reader)—and those authors that aren't doing that in as thoughtful a way. Is there an example of a book that you've read recently, or that I've read recently, that sort of felt at first as if it was doing something that we didn't expect of that book or didn't want to necessarily experience, but which proved in the reading and in the working to have virtue.

Aisha Subramanian: Okay, I think you're going to need to come up with examples here because everything I've read recently has been great, but it's also been great in ways that I thoroughly expected.

Dan Hartland: See, that's interesting because I do think, and we've spoken about before, that, to some extent, genre literature is or can be a literature of comfort, right? So one of the things that people come to for, from genre literature, is the familiar this might seem a counterintuitive thing to say about science fiction, which people often say is the literature of estrangement; but I think in reality, sometimes people just want to read about cool starships. And that's okay, that level of comfort. But sometimes books don't want to give you that.

For example, I recently read Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest. This was his book from last year, which is a very Priesty book: there are twins, and there are parallel timelines; and there is sort of a clarity of prose which also somehow doesn't offer clarity, by which I mean a sort of very finely wrought prose which kind of doesn't sometimes tell you anything about how the characters are actually feeling. And all of that is very Priestian and very, very deliberate. And we know it's deliberate because we've read Priest novels before and they all do the same thing.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah, if you like Priest, you will love this Priest book.

Dan Hartland: Exactly. And so some of the things that are alienating about a Priest novel are not alienating if you are aware of Priest—because you come to that with those expectations. They're not expectations that you would necessarily go to other books with. But Expect Me Tomorrow has also a climate change theme whereby one of the characters discovers that, if all the glaciers melt, they will be cold in the water and that will lower global temperatures—and that's a different problem to have, but essentially we won't be hot anymore. And I'm deliberately simplifying what happens, but essentially that is the thing. And that feels, in 2023, or felt to me in 2023, an uncomfortable thing for a novel to be doing—because hopepunk is great and all that, but at the same time, I kind of don't want to let us off the hook in that way, by essentially a magical glacier doing the work for us. And so I kind of bounced off the book a little bit because ... almost because of its, I hate to say this, but almost because of its politics more than its prose. But as you read through the book and try and figure out why it is doing this, I think a project does emerge.

You might disagree with the project, but it's not that the book hasn't put thought into it. And it's not that there isn't a perspective by which you can defend the project as a kind of artistic one, if not as a sort of climatological one. And that did make me think because I did have to sit with the book for a while and imagine why Christopher Priest had done this! But the difficulty there is we're second guessing someone that we can't talk to, right? So we're talking about trying to check whether the author has put thought into this. But how do you do that? Because you can't ring the author up—well, maybe in some cases you can—but you can't call the author up on the phone and say, hey, why did you do this? What are the tools that we apply to figure out why the glaciers are melting in this novel?

Aisha Subramanian: Well, one of them is the one that you already mentioned, which is to some extent we know what this book is because we've read a lot of other Christopher Priest books, and it also gives you a kind of shield against certain things. So, you said that one of the things that initially got you was the politics of it, but again, you've read a lot of Priests, so there's a certain perhaps willingness that you have to hear him out.

Dan Hartland: You're right. So a preexisting relationship with an author will mean that we are more willing to sort of give them time or ...

Aisha Subramanian: ... space to develop the idea and see if we still feel the same about it once it's been further developed for us.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: How does that work for an author that we haven't read before? So if if it hadn't been a Christopher Priest book, if it had been by an author, if it would have been a debut novel that had the same plot and mechanism ... how would I have figured out in the same way what it was up to?

Aisha Subramanian: You certainly wouldn't have figured it out in the same way, I think we can probably establish that. The uncomfortable answer is maybe you wouldn't have, because criticism is not an exact art and you are bringing what you know and your own personal baggage and your own personal biases to any kind of encounter with a text. I think though, that maybe you could also be thinking about what ... even if you don't know this author, are there things about the way this book is written that remind you of other things, that give you that sense of familiarity, that maybe allows you to hear this person out? Are there things that you know about this publisher that maybe give you that sense of trust? And sometimes, obviously, the answer is there are none of those things. But I don't think ... that's quite rare. I think especially now for people ... you and I end up getting so much marketing material in our inbox, for one thing, and the Internet exists and it's very hard to be completely unaware of it. I don't think any of us ever goes into a new book with completely no knowledge. So maybe some of that knowledge ends up being at least part of what you use to try and make sense of what's making you uncomfortable.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, that's a really good point: that a lot of the tools or knowledges that we're going to bring to a book in order to understand it are contextual, that the clues aren't necessarily in the text itself. I was thinking about as you were speaking, I was thinking about reading The Past Is Red by Catherynne Valente, which I did sort of late last year, I think, and I really enjoyed it, actually. But there was a structural issue because the book is a what we would once have called—maybe we still call them—a fix-up. So it has a previously published bit, and then it has a bit that has been tacked on to the previously published bit, and the join really shows. But I was expecting it because I knew the story of the book, and so it didn't disrupt my reading in the way that an irregular structure would have done in a book that I didn't know that about, or indeed did not have that—quote-unquote—excuse.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah. No, I think it's possible. And if you were inclined to be generous in your reading, you would probably have thought that was an interesting structural choice, maybe a deliberate one, if you didn't already have that information.

Dan Hartland: But those would be in-text clues, wouldn't they? If we didn't have the context, we would try and find clues for why this structural choice had been made in the text itself, maybe in the story it was telling, or the experience of the characters in the book.

Aisha Subramanian: And you might find some.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. So what books recently have you been reading that were great, that required no work whatsoever in order to get along with?

Aisha Subramanian: So I'm currently reading Yuri Herrera's Ten Planets—which, incidentally, so good. I'm assuming at some point we will be carrying a review of it. And I'm also assuming that at some point we'll both be yelling about it somewhere. But again, this is one of those things where I went into a book knowing that I was going to love it, that this is an author who I have an immense amount of trust and respect for, that this is a translator that I have an immense amount of trust and respect for. So it was very much a situation where I was fully prepared to love it, and the result is that I have fully loved it. Now, would I have felt this enthused by it if I didn't already think that this writer was great? I'm not sure. Probably. I think I would probably still really like it. I think it's really good. But I think that this works with enthusiasm as well as with dislike, doesn't it? That we are prepared to see greatness, and we're prepared to see brilliant choices being made, when we know that something is like what we have loved before and when we know that this is something that we are expecting to love.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And there's this currently in-vogue style of criticism where critics read books explicitly embedded in their daily life, right? So they talk about reading an author alongside all their other things like bringing up the kids or making the meals or going on vacation or whatever, which I think can be overdone, but is interesting because I completely agree that sometimes when we read a book, we're reading a lot of other books at the same time.

Aisha Subramanian: I'm not sure if you mean that literally or not, because it's true both ways.

Dan Hartland: It is true both ways—yeah, you're absolutely right! My book piles would attest to this. No, what I mean is, even when we read a specific book, we are reading a specific book at a specific point, but it is evoking in us responses based at least in part on all the other books that we have read before, and that this helps inform the level of effort that we are willing to make with this particular book ... and, indeed, the level of effort we're able to make. I think that might be a conversation worth having. Sometimes a reader, for whatever reason, isn't able to give the time, space, or effort to a novel that it seems to be requiring of.

Aisha Subramanian: And again, that's one of the reasons why I sometimes drop a book and say, I'm going to pick it up later. And I think that's true of probably most people.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I think so. And I think that obviously—

Aisha Subramanian: Well, I don't know about you. Obviously.

Dan Hartland: No, well, my rule about not finishing a book doesn't mean that I have to finish it quickly. I find ways to bend the rule!

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Do we think, then, that to refer back to our conversation with Abigail about negative reviews, there is a point, isn't there, where we decide that this book is not good, that however much work we put in, it's not going to reward our effort? What does that reward look like? How do we decide that we are not being sufficiently rewarded for reading a book?

Aisha Subramanian: So for me, I think that's basically the moment where you sort of go, “oh, okay, so that's what this is doing. Or that's why this matters.”

Dan Hartland: Yes. And if the answer to the question, “What is this book doing?” emerges and we don't like it, we just go “No!” and move on.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah, but even that no can be, “Okay, I can see what this is doing now, and I can see why this author maybe thought it was worth doing this, but I don't agree that it was worth doing.”

Dan Hartland: And I wonder whether sometimes—because there are such things, we're talking about sort of how the context in which a book is written helps us to reach that point of, “okay, this is what this particular text is up to”—I mean, there are such things as literary trends, right? So there are moments where a lot of books try to do a particular thing, and that can be difficult if that thing isn't for you. It must be twenty to thirty years ago now that there was a real vogue for the big book, and I'm thinking of Crimson Petal and the White, or Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which were huge things with footnotes or dramatis personae or just lots of pages. And what's interesting about that is that since then and before then, both of those authors, Michel Faber and Susannah Clarke, have written really beautifully wrought slim books as well—Piranesi, Susannah Clark's recent novel, is just awesome. And the authors prove that they can do both, which again speaks to intent, right? That they have chosen to write this big book. It's not that, Dickens-like, they kind of just wrote a lot of episodes until they ran out of time or space or commissioning editors, and just it got bigger and bigger over time because they hadn't planned it. They had planned it to be large in the first place, partly because that was a trend, maybe not even consciously because it was a trend. They're part of a cultural moment, partly.

Aisha Subramanian: Presumably because there are stories that benefit from that kind of telling.

Dan Hartland: I mean, sometimes there are, and sometimes ... yeah.

Aisha Subramanian: I mean, I'm personally not a huge fan of the big book, but in theory!

Dan Hartland: I mean, I'm looking at a big book. I've just cast my eye over to my bookshelf, and I'm looking at a big book now, which is The Overstory by Richard Powers, which didn't work for me as well as his more recent, very slim book. But The Overstory could not have been told without being a big book. The sort of expansiveness of it is part of the point. And that comes back, of course, to authorial intent and figuring out what that is. But the reader, I guess, has the right to say, “Well, I understand what the author intended to do, but I ... “

Aisha Subramanian: “... personally do not like big books.”

Dan Hartland: “I do not like big books, and I cannot lie.” Yeah, no, that's right. Sometimes critics can seem quite sort of forbidding characters, right, because we put down these strictures that we should read books and try to understand them on their own terms. But some people don't have time for that, right? Like, it's okay not to take a book on its ... well, is it okay not to take a book on its own terms? Is it okay to approach a book, not like it, and kind of nope out without even trying to figure out why?

Aisha Subramanian: I think that, for example, if you don't like big books, your criticism is going to come down to, “I don't like big books, and this was a big book.” A couple of months ago when we did a podcast with Abigail and we talked about negative reviews. One of the things that we did talk about was the idea that you can fundamentally disagree with a certain kind of literary project with a certain style of book, and still have valuable things to say about it. And I think that's still true. I'm not disagreeing with what we all said a few months ago. But I think that there are times when, if you know that you're not going to be able to settle into a book, if you're not going to be able to give it the space to do what it's doing and judge it on that basis, then it is probably a good idea if you don't read it—because you're not necessarily going to have things to say about it that are honestly that valuable.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Obviously as commissioning reviews editors, we make these kinds of decisions all the time about who would be best placed to write most usefully about a given book. And yeah, you're right, if there's a thousand page epic, we don't give that or shouldn't give that to someone that prefers novellas. Although sometimes I wonder, is there a purpose to someone that doesn't like a particular type of book being asked to read it anyway? Is there value in understanding why you don't like a big book? Or is it just a fact of life and accept it and stop wasting your time on them?

Aisha Subramanian: I think it also depends on the critic. Because if you feel that you've got legitimate ... if you've got an argument for why you don't like this type of book, and you're willing to see whether this particular book falls foul of your theory about how books like this work, and you're willing to give it the space to do that—and it turns out that actually, no, this book has exactly the same problems as the rest of the genre—I think that that's a valuable thing to say. If it's something like, “I do not have the patience for long books, or I do not have the time for long book,” then maybe that space could be given to someone else who might have slightly deeper things to say about it.

Dan Hartland: Yes, I think that's right. And I think what we're getting towards is the idea that a book is not just a text that must be approached and inspected. It is a thing in the world, our reactions to which are affected by other things that also exist in that world.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah. I mean, I can't—and this is a thing that most people around me know, because people keep recommending things to me and it goes wrong—I can't do long TV series. It's just not a thing I can do. I can't do that kind of sustained narrative over a long period of time. And so, anytime anyone recommends a TV series to me, that recommendation is not going anywhere. I will hear you out and then I will not watch the thing. For someone like me to decide, “Oh, I'm going to review, I don't know, Succession”: I don't think anything of worth would come out of that. I don't think I would have anything worthwhile to say except, “Why is this still going?”

Dan Hartland: Yeah, that makes sense. Just out of interest—and this is germane to the discussion, because sometimes we don't know that a TV series is going to be long, because sometimes we start with the first episode and we like it, and then it just keeps getting commissioned for more seasons; and sometimes we start a book and we don't know that it's a big book or something else that we tend not to like, we just start it and we realize we don't like it as the show gets longer and gets recommissioned for season 42—do you at some point say, “No.” Do you at some point say with the book? No. Or if we start a text without this contextual knowledge that we've said is so important to interpreting it, do we somehow short circuit our own prejudices? Do we just keep persevering because we haven't been given the opportunity at first to say no?

Aisha Subramanian: I'm not sure. Because I've definitely had the thing where I will read a book and I'll be thinking of it as a unit, right? It's a book, it had a plot, it did a thing, and my critical understanding of it is all in the context of it being this one thing and then—surprise!—it's a series. I think at that point I tend to just be more, if it's something I really like—again, if it's a question of I really trust this author, or I am genuinely curious to see what they decided to do with this—I will explore further, I will read the second book. But I don't think that the first reading of the book, the one where it was just a thing, necessarily becomes invalid. And I'm not necessarily going to let go of that reading to formulate a new one that encompasses the whole series, because I don't really think that there's necessarily a need to—unless, of course, the whole series ends up somehow magically hooking me into staying long enough.

Dan Hartland: Has that ever happened?

Aisha Subramanian: No. [laughter]

[musical sting]

Aisha Subramanian: One thing that I did think about was ... So, we talked about context as a way in, as something that maybe gives you the kind of tools that you need to try and work out what a book is trying to do and whether what it's trying to do is worth doing. I think, though, that there's also a kind of potential disadvantage to having classified a book in its entirety before you start actually reading it, and before you actually sit with it. I have several English literature degrees at this point, as we know, and I think sometimes, as much as I like having context for things, the ability to purely take a book on its own terms, to encounter it as if it was something completely strange and then try to meet it completely on its own terms, is something that I actually really miss. And it's something that I don't think any of us has been able to do since the advent of the Internet. But it's particularly hard to do if context sort of takes over. And what this ends up doing is that thing where a reader—because they know what they're expecting from a book—ends up sort of projecting certain ideas and certain details onto it, rather than seeing the text and taking the text for what it is and taking what's actually there and building from that.

So, yeah, I just kind of wanted to undermine a thing that we said.

Dan Hartland: It's always worth doing. I encourage all listeners to undermine things we say.

Aisha Subramanian: So, yeah, take books on their own terms, except don't.

Dan Hartland: Here to help! I think that's the reality of reading books, though, right? That you're constantly balancing out those two things.

Aisha Subramanian: I think so. I think that there's the text, there's the thing in front of you that you're supposed to be having hopefully a relatively honest encounter with. And there's everything that you bring with you, both as a critic and as a person existing in the world who maybe has other things to do and has a day job and deadlines to meet and all of that.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I think that's one of the themes that has emerged in this discussion: that we can't pretend that the text does not exist within a wider context or is not affected by other things we've read, other things we're doing just other demands for our time.

Aisha Subramanian: And yet at the same time, we need to treat it as a thing in itself and demand a certain integrity of it. So, basically, criticism is impossible.

Dan Hartland: See you next month on Critical Friends! [laughter]

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: At least one thing that we've realized in the course of this discussion is that our next gift for each other is sorted. I'm going to get you a box set of a twenty-four-season TV series and you're going to send me a novel that has dubious climate politics.

Aisha Subramanian: Can you even get box sets anymore? Is that still a thing?

Dan Hartland: Well, for you, I will make an exception. I will find it.

Aisha Subramanian: That's very sweet. Please don't.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. Our theme music is “Dial Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can hear more of their music at Grande Valise dot Bandcamp dot com.

View Details

In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, we air an interview with the reviewer, editor, and critic Niall Harrison which Dan conducted at Conversation, the 2023 UK Eastercon, at which Niall was a Guest of Honour. Through a series of books from various parts of his life, Niall talks about how he began reading SF, why he started reviewing it ... and where criticism might or should go in the future.

Niall Harrison is author of All These Worlds: Reviews and Essays (Briardene Books, 2023). Eastercon 2024 will be Levitation, hosted in Telford; Eastercon 2025 will be Reconnect, to be held in Belfast.

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Critical-Friends-Episode-6-FINAL.mp3TranscriptCritical Friends Episode 5[musical introduction]

Aisha Subramanian: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Aisha Subramanian.

Dan Hartland: And I’m Dan Hartland. In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be discussing SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

Aisha Subramanian: In this episode, we air an edited version of an interview with the reviewer, critic, and former Strange Horizons editor Niall Harrison, which Dan conducted at Conversation, the 2023 UK Eastercon, where Niall was a Guest of Honour. Through a series of books from various parts of his life, Niall talks about how he began reading SF, why he started reviewing it ... and where criticism might or should go in the future.

Dan Hartland: Niall chose a number of books. In this edited version of the interview, we discuss in turn a Dragonlance novel, The Test of the Twins by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman; Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson; The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell; Hav by Jan Morris; The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi; and a story, “Regenerated Bricks,” by Han Song (which appeared in Mingwei Song and Theodore Huters’s The Reincarnated Giant).

Aisha Subramanian: And so, without further ado ... Niall Harrison’s life in books.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: So at some point, Niall Harrison—doyen, critic, reviewer, reader, very patient friend of mine—you weren’t a science fiction reader, as difficult as we may find that to believe. When did that happen ... and why?

Niall Harrison: I mean, yes, the first thing I remember reading in terms of series are things like Swallows and Amazons, Willard Price's animal adventure books, those sorts of series. It wasn’t until probably nine, ten, eleven that I feel that I remember getting into science fictional fantasy series. And there were a couple of routes into that. One was my dad would occasionally read to my brother and I and he read the one I remember is an R. A. Lafferty story called “The Seven Day Wonder,” which is about a kid who just creates a tube and looks at it and makes things disappear and baffles all of the adults. And on his bookshelves he had ... I remember seeing Dune and occasional Heinleins and Foundation, which I read my way through several times. And then the first thing I remember kind of getting into that I then pursued was a series called Dragonlance. My parents bought me a couple of omnibus anthologies, I think for birthday or Christmas one year.

Dan Hartland: Do you know why? Like ... why?

Niall Harrison: I don’t remember why, no.

Dan Hartland: Fascinating, isn’t it, these things?

Niall Harrison: I don’t think I’d made it all the way through The Lord of the Rings. So they might have been trying to find something else that ...

Dan Hartland: “Maybe he could do with this one.”

Niall Harrison: Yeah, but this is one is a spin off of Forgotten Realms D&D thing. And it’s one of these series where there were initial trilogies which were based on, I think, an actual role playing campaign and then lots and lots of other books. And at the time, and certainly in my teens, we would go to the US on holiday fairly often. And I sort of have memories of going into bookshops in US malls and coming back with armfuls of Dragonlance books that I would then spend the rest of the holiday reading.

Dan Hartland: So they had that glamour.

Niall Harrison: Dragonlance Legends, which is the second trilogy, deals with with a pair of twins, very stereotypical. There’s a handsome, kind of noble warrior brother and a weaker, frailer, but ambitious and powerful wizard brother. And when the wizard brother studies to pass the exams, the examiners are so terrified of him, they curse him and they give him sight, which looks at things and sees them decaying. So he looks at an apple and sees it rotting away. He looks at a person and sees them ageing. And the symbol of this is that his pupils are turned into hourglasses. And the second trilogy is all about essentially his lust for power, his quest for power, and eventually going on to because this is a fancy trilogy going on to challenge the gods themselves.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, it’s that moment of sort of dizzying conceptual shift that science fiction fantasy can deliver and which you had previously not encountered. So at ten, that must have struck you pretty hard.

Niall Harrison: Yeah.

Dan Hartland: So where did that lead you to? If you were, like, at this book, where did you go from there? How did you try and get that fix from elsewhere?

Niall Harrison: Fifty more Dragonlance novels!

Dan Hartland: That’s a lot of US trips!

Niall Harrison: They were over here as well, but none of them quite hit the same highs, obviously, because they never do. But the other thing was when we were on those trips, we would start to pick up other things. So I’d pick up occasional issues of Asimovs or Analog. And it’s interesting that that was the route through which I think I ended up then going into the local library and picking up more stuff. So that’s when I started discovering Stephen Baxter, Peter F. Hamilton.

Dan Hartland: And at this point, it starts to be embedded in your daily life, your regular reading, because it’s not just happening over there in the glamorous US.

Niall Harrison: No. At this point, I’m in my mid teens and I’m subscribed to SFX and I’m kind of starting to follow along. I don’t know anyone else who’s really reading science fiction written at school. I don’t have any friends who—Games Workshop a little bit—but they are not reading the same writers I am.

Dan Hartland: So it’s a purely solitary pursuit at this stage.

Niall Harrison: It’s fairly solitary, yeah.

Dan Hartland: So how do you experience the books in that case? Because, of course, right now we’re here because you’re a Guest of Honor at an Eastercon where people talk about these books constantly amongst each other. But you’re not talking about these books to anyone right at this point.

Niall Harrison: It was all pent up and came flooding out years later! Yeah. No, pretty much. I mean, I probably must have talked to my family about them to some degree, but I don’t remember having passionate conversations over dinner about what I was doing.

Dan Hartland: Well, I’m sure your parents were relieved.

Niall Harrison: Yeah. And at the time, when I was fifteen, the school library had a shelf and the town library as well had a shelf of Kim Stanley Robinsons. And I kind of worked my way through and Pacific Edge, which is the third of three alternate future Californias that he wrote and is the kind of positive utopian one, is the book of Kim Stanley Robinson’s that I’ve returned to more than any other. Although the Mars ones were the ones that really shaped kind of me at that time.

Dan Hartland: I just wondered whether we could linger just briefly on that separation between the Mars books and this book that you say you’ve returned to more than the Mars books. And could we drill down just a little bit as to why that might be? What is it about this book that has become stickier for you? Do you know?

Niall Harrison: There’s a clarity to it. There’s a simplicity to it, I guess. The Mars books are doing many, lots of, things: a huge story over centuries with a cast of dozens. This is a handful of people in a small town in California. I think, the California aspect itself—I mean, obviously there’s a lot of California in everything, Kim Stanley Robinson writes—but given that it’s somewhere that I’ve traveled to quite a lot, both growing up and subsequently on holidays and for work, it’s a place in the world that kind of means quite a romantic place for me in some ways. And so it embodies that and lets me live in that place a little bit.

Dan Hartland: That brings us back to the biographical, this idea that the books that we critics and reviewers try and pick apart really are having an emotional impact on us, which we sometimes try and obscure in our work and come up with all these very smart sounding phrases like overshoot to describe to coin a word. Yeah, to describe books. But really they’re hopefully hitting us somewhere where we feel it. But to return to this idea that you’re feeling these books, but you’re feeling them alone because when you’re at school, no one else is reading them, were you aware of a wider community that you didn’t have access to?

Niall Harrison: Because by this point, again, I found Asimov’s, Analog, Gardner Dozois’s Best Ofs and his enormous summaries of what was going on. And through that I got some issues of Interzone. I never actually really subscribed to Interzone, probably until the late 90s, so that wasn’t the main route for me. SFX was part of the route in. We didn’t have the Internet at home, so I didn’t get the Internet until I went to university in 1998.

I went off to Oxford University and went to the Fresher’s Fair and went into the Fresher’s Fair with a single mission, which was to find the science fiction group. There was not a science fiction group, there was a speculative fiction group. And the table was staffed by two women, Jo and Ruth, who I think is over there, and they were signing up every Fresher they could possibly entice. Deliberate strategy on the part of the group, and quite an effective one.

And part of the enticement was that people who joined could pick a book to add to the society library. I had not actually read The Sparrow at the time, at least I don’t think I had. The reason I picked it is that I knew it had won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. And I’d been aware of the Arthur C. Clarke Award because my uncle had bought me a copy of The Star Fraction the previous year, and it came with a little logo on that said, “Runner Up for the Clark Award,“ which is not something that is routinely done. But so I thought The Sparrow, Clarke Award, want to read that—that’d be a good, impressive-sounding addition. And then I did read it, and it absolutely bowled me over. It’s not, interestingly, one that I have gone back to again. Again, I don’t know how well all of it holds up, but that prologue is etched in my mind. And that last line of “they do no harm,“ it just lands with the force of ... well.

Dan Hartland: I mean, that line, “they do no harm,“ is absolutely central to the whole book. But let’s linger just briefly, because yet again you’ve chosen a book that had an emotional impact on you, rather than one that is big and clever, although some of them are that too.

Niall Harrison: The other one that would have been for this period was Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others, which is an extraordinary collection that I love dearly, but is very different in tone. Kind of plays into what you’re saying.

Dan Hartland: But at this point, whichever book you chose, you’re reading it within a community.

Niall Harrison: Yeah. The speculative fiction group met twice a week. There were kind of discussion, meetings and other things on Wednesdays and then just hanging out.

Dan Hartland: Does this have an impact on your reading?

Niall Harrison: Absolutely.

Dan Hartland: In what way?

Niall Harrison: Reading authors that I had not ever read before, that people were directly recommending to me; me starting to recommend things to other people; going off to the first conventions I went to. So PicoCon, the Imperial College SF event that is a sort of one day event every February ... so small cons. So feeling part of a community, feeling part of a discourse, a conversation to coin a phrase. And yeah, just enjoying it at that point.

Dan Hartland: So at this stage, you’re starting not just to receive recommendations, like finding a sticker on a book and looking for something else. You’re starting to develop your own tastes and wishing to inflict them upon others. And you’ve been doing it ever since!

Niall Harrison: This is not an infliction! Yes. By that point I’d graduated, but not lost touch with a group of friends. And we’d started the habit of every so often, once a year, every couple of years there’d be about a dozen of us, maybe up to sixteen or seventeen, going to a big house somewhere with a big pile of books. And we would just sit around and read, play occasional board games, cook big meals. Some adventurous souls would go for an occasional walk. But mostly the reading. And a habit developed that there would quite often be something that someone reads early on in the week and then says, everyone else has to read this, and it goes around the room.

Dan Hartland: But we get towards the community thing again, which is that you’re not just responding to it. There’s a second thing going on here which not everyone does, which is proselytise as well. So you’re handing it round to all these poor people that are stuck in this barn somewhere with you and have nowhere else to go.

Niall Harrison: Somewhere in the Lake District, I think that one was.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. So tell me about that. Not necessarily just about this specific book or that specific experience, because at this point you are starting to review—that’s how I first met you, you were online, we were reviewing media.

Niall Harrison: That’s the other strand that we haven’t talked about, right? So also at university, the other community I got involved in was online on Usenet: uk.media.tv.angel, and to a lesser extent the Buffy the Vampire Slayer group. But the Angel group, very much so. You and I and a few other people over there. And there were what, half a dozen of us that would every week, write a little piece about whatever episode had aired and then we would go into detailed dissection. That’s probably where I practiced kind of my reviewing chops, if you like. And that community aspect of it was central. The fact that we were doing it as a group and that we were reacting to each other’s takes was what made it compelling.

Dan Hartland: But there were more people than the half a dozen that did the reviews in the group. There were many more people who commented on the reviews. So we still haven’t got to the heart of why you were doing one of the reviews. Why are you handing these books around? Why are you writing about Angel episodes (by the way, “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been,” Season Two of Angel, is art) ... Why are you doing this? Is there a compulsion in you? Do you even know why you’re doing it?

Niall Harrison: At that time, I don’t know now, to some extent. It’s just something I do, it’s something I watch, something I read, something ... To some extent I listen to things and I want to talk about them, to share them. And that’s the mechanism through which I do that.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Now, you’ve gone from not knowing anyone to being asked for university and knowing a relatively small group of people that for some reason call themselves a speculative fiction group. Then towards having a wider circle of friends that you’ve met through the Internet. And now with this book that we’re about to hear a reading from, unless I see a scared wave from the back of the room. Awesome. You are in an even bigger community, indeed, the biggest in your field in the year of the 2005 Worldcon. How does that feel?

Niall Harrison: Terrifying, obviously. So I’d got in touch or made kind of contact with the BSFA, as it were. Some of us had started going to the monthly London meetings and I’d written a couple of reviews for Vector and for Alex McClintock’s site, Diverse Books. I did a few, nothing longer than sort of six or seven hundred words at this point. And as the Worldcon kind of approached, I found myself getting sucked into the maw of involvement with it. I think Farah Mendelsohn recruited Gene Melzack and I to help with some aspects of the program. And suddenly there I was deciding which of these authors that I had read stuff by but never met might be on a panel together, like playing with action figures and getting to make them talk to each other.

Dan Hartland: Is anyone else disturbed by that? And this was a time when you were moving from your communities to, as we said, a bigger community. But not only that, you were very rapidly getting a pretty prominent voice in that community.

Niall Harrison: Yeah, because Gene Melzack and I took over the Features Editor role in Vector in 2005. And we set up Torque Control, which was the first time there had been a BSFA blog, I believe, which became the kind of platform for a lot of the next five years for me at the same time, pretty much. I volunteered as reviews editor for Strange Horizons, which ... It’s weird to think how Strange Horizons seemed like it been around as an institution already at that point. It’s five years, right, starting 2000, and now it’s twenty-three years and counting. And so I had a platform not just for me to write things, but for me to tell other people to write things. And that was exciting.

Dan Hartland: It’s just getting worse and worse with you, isn’t it?

Niall Harrison: The egomania is uncontrollable.

Dan Hartland: And you’re also one of the other things that you’re doing at this absurd time is you’re judging the Clark Award.

Niall Harrison: A couple of years later. Yeah.

Dan Hartland: And that brings us to Hav by Jan Morris. I remember I was one of the people being inflicted a book upon by Niall at this time, and I remember him giving me this book, and I’m afraid to say that I really enjoyed it and I was a bit disappointed not to be able to argue with him about it.

Niall Harrison: This came in as a Clarke Award submission, I think, in the first year that I was a judge. And I had no idea who Jan Morris is. For anyone else who doesn’t know, she was an extremely well regarded travel writer, historian, journalist, just an extraordinary life, if you go look her up on Wikipedia. And so it came in the pile of Clarke books. And when you’re a Clarke judge, you have some eighty, hundred books, with five minutes to get through them. I just picked up and started reading. It has no conventional plot to speak of. It is a travel book about a fictional place that Jan Morris has inserted into the history of somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, and done so with such thoroughness. The story goes that when the first part of it was serialised in the London Review of Books in the 80s, that some people wrote letters asking how they could get to have because they were assuming it was travel writing because it was Jan Morris. And I was entranced by it.

Justifying it as science fiction was made a lot easier by Ursula Le Guin reviewing it in The Guardian and insisting that it was science fiction. Science fiction is what we point what Ursula Le Guin points to, and we just trust her judgment on it. It’s one that inspired me to go and read a lot more of Jan Morris’s work: she had an enormous bibliography. I’ve probably read a book a year pretty much by her since coming across this one. So it’s a book that unlocked a whole area of literature.

Dan Hartland: It’s really interesting because, again, these books are their personal artefacts. It’s very easy for reviewers and critics to be accused of, often rightly, of being cool and rather sniffy about things. But ultimately, the reason that I write reviews—and I think you’re the same, Niall—is because these books have an effect, and we want to understand why. And the effect they have is primarily personal. But—

Niall Harrison: If you ask me today, that is the thing I would say. If I’m trying to write a review, the thing I want to convey is the effect the book had on me. If people can get an emotional sense from the review that’s what I meant.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, they have impact on our lives. But! Hav is an interesting case because you were desperately—not desperately, but seeking a community. So you start reading these books, and you slowly build up, and you’re completely isolated. Then you’ve got a little community, then you got a slightly bigger community, then you got a massive community. Then you’re King of Fandom. And immediately you are admitted to the inner sanctum, more or less, you start picking books like Hav and telling them, telling the genre, “No, no, this this is what you need.” Were you conscious of that? Were you deliberately trying to cause trouble?

Niall Harrison: No, I was not deliberately trying to cause that. No, I was not deliberately trying to cause trouble. I was conscious that it was not I’m trying to think what else was in that year that people were upset was left off. But I guess I was treating the Clarke like an extension ... I mean, obviously I wasn’t the only person on the jury arguing for it to be included, it’s a group discussion, of course. So I wasn’t the only person that ...

Dan Hartland: But Hav is not core genre, is it?

Niall Harrison: No.

Dan Hartland: Were you conscious of not wanting to read, of moving away from, of pushing the boundaries of—quote unquote—core genre? Because this is a book. I mean, this is a book.

Niall Harrison: It’s literature! Yeah. It wasn’t deliberate. I was conscious by that point that ... I think that happens to critics, right? When you read a lot and write about it and do that routinely. I certainly heard film critics talk about this. I’ve heard music critics talk about this. You start to look for the things that are a bit different than the things you have seen before, and this stood out in that way, and don’t think we should be afraid of exploring that. It’s interesting how things have changed over the last fifteen or sixteen years, right? Because the debate then was about, are we claiming that for our territory? I think if it came out now, that wouldn’t really be part of the conversation. I think both sides are much more open to books moving across.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, sure. But that doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because of people like you.

Niall Harrison: Okay ...

Dan Hartland: So if you don’t make the argument ten years ago, then ten years later, someone’s still going to say, “That’s not SF!”

Niall Harrison: Take it up with Ursula LeGuin!

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: But we do need to talk about moving forwards into sort of ... where are we now? 2009 with The Windup Girl. This is a point where if we’re talking about genre fandom, the community, the discourse, and where it finds itself, how it shapes itself, how it understands itself, we’re in a tricky place, and this book is part of that tricky place.

Niall Harrison: When you think about these two things happening at the same time, it’s a very interesting juxtaposition, right? So the first thing is that The Windup Girl comes out, it wins pretty much every award going, and it’s a book that the field had been waiting for because his stories had got a lot of attention in a few years before that. It’s a book that is doing things that the field had been increasingly focusing on. Like, it’s set in Thailand, it’s very near future, it’s globalized, ecological SF. And at the same time, 2009 is the year of RaceFail, right? It’s the year when all fandom descends into ... I don’t want to trivialize it. But it was a traumatic and challenging year for a lot of people.

And I wrote a review of it, of this book, for Strange Horizons, and the review came out in November. The book came out in, I think April or May. I must have written three or four versions of that review because I was trying to work out how to resolve exactly this tension of “this book got under my skin and did things to me.” And probably up until that point, I guess my critical thinking had been: “As long as I am honest and accurate in relaying that experience, then that’s how you write a review.”

And suddenly part of the discourse was, maybe that’s not enough. Maybe you’re not actually the right person to review this book, to talk about this book, or ... maybe I’ll say the next bit in a minute. But so there was a great anxiety that went into that review, and the review is in my new book, which is in the dealers’ room, so I’m not unhappy with it. And I think it says some things that I’m glad to have been able to. One of the things that reviewing does is it lets you articulate things, work things out and get them down so that you understand what you think. And I’m glad it helped me do that, but it was definitely a pivot in how I approached reviewing and thinking about reviewing.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Towards a more self-aware approach.

Niall Harrison: I don’t think I was entirely unself-aware before that. I had been schooled at various times in various aspects of feminist SF, for instance. But this was certainly another level in that.

Dan Hartland: So we went from Windup Girl girl where you sort of started to think, who writes, who should write? Then in 2015, and I know for various reasons, you’re very busy with work ...

Niall Harrison: Yes. So I stayed with Strange Horizons up until early 2017, I think it was. By that point I was Editor-in-Chief of Strange Horizons. So then I stepped down and pretty much at the same time, I more or less stopped reviewing for about five years. There’s kind of two intertwined things. One is I’d taken on a new role in my day job, which was a managerial role, which kind of ate up a lot of the same brain space. For some reason, I just found myself without the time or energy. The other was, I think, not run out of things to say necessary, but run out of how to say them for a while.

Dan Hartland: How do you mean how to say them? I mean ... interpretive dance? What do you mean?

Niall Harrison: What do I mean? I mean getting a little stale, perhaps, and also by that point ... so when I became Editor-in-Chief at Strange Horizons, I asked Abigail Nussbaum to come be the reviews editor. She passed on to you and Aisha and Maureen Kincaid Speller in ... 2014?

Dan Hartland: 2015.

Niall Harrison: And you, all of you, did a much better job than I did, following on from RaceFail, of broadening the pool of reviewers and bringing in a much wider range of perspectives into that space. And for a while, I think I felt that was just the necessary thing. And now I sort of feel ... I guess I feel able to return in a way, because that’s happened.

Dan Hartland: You’re welcome!

Niall Harrison: And I’m in a slightly smaller part of a bigger pond. But the first substantial piece that I’d written for about five years was an essay on Chinese SF that appeared in Vector. And I kind of read a whole bunch of short stories and then organized them into a chronology. And Han Song was the writer I kind of most enjoyed discovering as a part of that process.

Dan Hartland: I have to say, I’m glad you’re writing again. But why was it The Reincarnated Giant or the Chinese SF essay? What was it about that that was, like, the thing that made you come back? Because on one level it’s counterintuitive, right? One response to the situation you found yourself in was, ”Okay, I’m only going to write about British SF. That’s what I feel qualified to write about.”

Niall Harrison: It’s astonishing to me that I put this list of books together, and I think the only British author on here is Jan Morris.

Dan Hartland: Exactly.

Niall Harrison: No Baxter. I mean, how did I put this this together without including Stephen Baxter? Yeah. How did that happen?

Dan Hartland: So why the Chinese SF? What is it about that means you’ve returned to us at the turn of the time?

Niall Harrison: I don’t know. I just felt like there was a gap that there was all this work coming through from China and from other places that I wanted to understand better. And I just remember, I think it was Jo Lindsay Walton sent the email, who was vector editor at the time, commissioning articles for a specialist on Chinese SF. And I thought, actually, yeah, I would like to get into that and look at that and find out what’s going on in that part of the field.

And the way the essay came out ... So I had, like, six anthologies. I read all the stories in them rather than reviewing them anthology by anthology. I took all the stories, arranged them by their original publication date in Chinese, and worked my way through them in that order to try to get a feel for what was happening in China over these two decades that I’ve been writing all these reviews. And then the essay is structured in that way. So it’s kind of a parallel chronology, which was just an interesting exercise in bridge building and finding where the links were.

Dan Hartland: And is that the future for your work, do you think? Is that the method you’re going to approach or the mission you’re going to set yourself moving forwards?

Niall Harrison: It’s the main thing I’m doing at the moment, yeah. The main project that I’ve started is a new columnist at Strange Horizons, as you know, which I’m calling Depth of Field, which is going to be quarterly. And there will be some new books, some old books, some genre books, some mainstream books, just putting them together in different configurations and trying to find links continuities between them to try to make it feel more like one field.

Because I think perhaps one of the things ... you know, is it’s a very exciting and necessary thing that we have all this information about all the different traditions of SF in the world now. And I don’t want to try to reify everything into a single sacred timeline, but I also don’t want everything to fly apart into 19 different timelines that don’t talk to each other. So I want to try and bridge between that a little bit.

Dan Hartland: I think that is a laudable mission and something for us all to be logging onto Strange Horizons every quarter to read about. Thanks for being Niall Harrison! Give him a round of applause.

[applause]

[musical sting]

Aisha Subramanian: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends. The Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. Our theme music is dial up by Lost Cosmonauts. You can hear more of their music at Grande Valise dot Bandcamp dot com. See you next time. Our.

View Details

In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Reviews Editors Aisha Subramanian and Dan Hartland are joined by Abigail Nussbaum to tackle one of the thorniest issues in criticism: the negative review. What makes for a good bad review? Why do reviewers feel driven to write them? And are we now in an age where the hatchet job has had its day?

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Critical-Friends-Episode-5.mp3TranscriptCritical Friends Episode 5[musical introduction]

Aisha Subramanian: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Aisha Subramanian.

Dan Hartland: And I’m Dan Hartland. In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be discussing SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

Aisha Subramanian: In this episode, we’re joined by ace critic and former Strange Horizons Reviews editor, Abigail Nussbaum, to tackle one of the thorniest issues in criticism: the negative review.

Dan Hartland: What makes for a good bad review? Why do reviewers feel driven to write them? And are we now in an age where the hatchet job has had its day?

Aisha Subramanian: We began our discussion with Abigail by trying to define our terms.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: If we are talking about negative reviews, is there a point at which a good but sort of skeptical or an agnostic review becomes negative? When do good reviews go bad?

Abigail Nussbaum: I mean, to start with, there’s the adage that a novel is a work of fiction with something wrong with it. And I have actually written in the past that the hardest thing to write about is something that’s just completely good because you have no access point. It’s like a completely smooth surface. So there’s never been a review that I’ve written where I haven’t found something to criticize, because there is always something to criticize. But there’s definitely a balance for me, at least. There’s a point where the tone of the review changes, where my goal is not to engage with what the book does, right or wrong, but just to say, “I’m sorry, guys, there’s nothing worth saving here.” Though honestly, that’s maybe not true, because even in books that I dislike, I will usually find something worth praising. But the final conclusion is, “No, sorry.”

Dan Hartland: That’s interesting, because on one level, we can easily spot a negative review. It’s a review of a book that the reviewer finds totally irredeemable. But I would suspect that the readers of reviews experience negative reviews across a wider spectrum than that, that they may find a review negative that does exactly what you say, Abigail, which is find some redeemable qualities, but still, on balance, decide that the book is too fundamentally flawed to recommend.

Abigail Nussbaum: Well, that’s really more about tone, isn’t it? It’s about the performance of the review, because you can write a negative review that’s fairly measured, that concludes that the book is bad but isn’t terribly heated about it. And you can write a negative review that’s a work in its own right, and what it’s doing is this almost operatic condemnation of the work in question. It’s like it’s taking pleasure not in the work, but in telling you how bad the work is. And obviously readers will perceive those two actions very differently because they are different and they’re trying to achieve different things. And a lot of that depends on what feelings the work evokes in you. Like, did you just think it was bad or did it make you angry with how bad it was?

Dan Hartland: I would agree that a lot is about performance. Is some reception of negative reviews, or let’s not say reception, let’s say perception—so when a reader approaches a review and experiences it as negative, some of that is about tone or performance. Is some of it about intent? You just mentioned feeling so angry about a book that you just want to really shake it. A good review recommends a novel. Even a middling review might say, “Well, there are things here that might be worth your time.” Is the purpose of a negative review to say, do not read this book?

Abigail Nussbaum: I think, yes, to an extent, but also I think it’s about personal anger. I’ve been sort of thinking about this since you raised the topic with me when you invited me. And I was thinking about this phenomenon of young reviewers who are often very angry, people who are just starting out, and they often have these very, again, operatic takedowns. I don’t know how common that is anymore these days, but when I was starting out, that was a very common thing to see. And part of that is just, you’re new to this. You get a lot of attention by being mad. But some of it is just genuine.

It’s anger that you spent this time. And a lot of that is that you’re young enough and new enough to the field that you don’t know how to find the things that are going to work for you. And you read this work that everyone is telling you is great. It’s been nominated for awards and it sucks. And you’re mad about that, and you want to express that anger.

I definitely write fewer negative reviews than I did when I was starting out. And part of that is just that I’m older and I’m a bit more mellow. But part of it is I’ve gotten a lot better at spotting the books I’m not going to like and not reading them in the first place.

Dan Hartland: I think that’s really interesting. I was thinking along the same lines in, sort of, I won’t say preparation that makes me sound far too professional, but pre-thinking about this podcast, which is that I definitely wrote negative reviews, not even when I was just starting out, to be honest. And I write fewer now, but I think that is because I am choosing better, but also choosing. So I was commissioned a lot. People gave me John C. Wright to read.

Abigail Nussbaum: Oh, God. I’m so sorry.

Dan Hartland: Thank you! I won’t name names, except for the authors. They gave me Neal Asher to read. So I don’t choose those books for myself! Which sometimes I worry isn’t the right thing to do. Is a reviewer’s sort of negative side important to their personality as a reviewer? Is it just as useful for their readers to understand what they hate as what they like? Is choosing good books so that you write nice reviews necessarily a good thing?

Aisha Subramanian: I wonder if this is also partly about venue and what kind of relationship a reviewer has with their readers. Because if I’m writing for, say, a newspaper where it’s not a venue where I publish a lot, the readers of those reviews aren’t necessarily going to know that there’s a body of work by me that they can look at, then that’s one thing. Whereas if I’m writing for somewhere like Strange Horizons, there’s that sense that if I’m going to hate this thing and if I know I’m going to hate this thing, I’m going to hate it for reasons that I’ve already articulated before. And why repeat myself? And why just keep saying, this continues to be bad?

Abigail Nussbaum: No, absolutely. There does come a point where you’re in definition of madness territory. And I thought about this a lot, not so much in book reviews, but when I was writing about TV, about shows like Battlestar Galactica or Game of Thrones, and these were shows that made me very angry. And at some point, especially with Game of Thrones, I had to say to myself, you know what? You knew what was going on here. You have chosen to continue to watch this show. So whose fault is it here? And that has to be reflected in the review. I mean, if you keep saying that something is bad but you keep writing about it, whose fault is it here? So, yeah, I think that that’s definitely a part of it in what you choose. And if you’re constantly choosing things that are going to make you angry, that not only feels like a waste of your time, that is maybe a waste of the reader’s time. And honestly, it is a lot more fun to write about something good and have people come back to you and say, I read this because you recommended it and it’s so great. That is just so much more satisfying.

Aisha Subramanian: Or even write about something that you feel ambivalent about, but that ambivalence is this text specific and you’ve got to tease that out.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah, something that’s complicated and thought provoking, especially if that can trigger a conversation, which unfortunately doesn’t happen so much anymore with the death of blogs and whatnot. But that was always something that I really enjoyed, that you write about something and someone responds to your post and you end up having this long conversation and that’s just a lot more fun.

Dan Hartland: So I wonder because we’re talking about intent and picking books that you know you’re going to like, because that’s just you’re—you’re picking books for yourself. You’re reviewing books that you just happen to have read, maybe on a blog, or because you have a relationship with a particular publication where you can pitch a particular book. What happens when you think you’re going to like a book? You pick it, thinking, “This will be great, I will write a good review of this book,” and then you don’t like it.

And I’m thinking here of Wesley Osam’s recent review of Legends and Lattes, which literally he picked up because so many people have been saying good things. It’s now been shortlisted for a Nebula and it’s not good. So what responsibility do you have then, if any, to write a negative review of a book that a lot of other people have been recommending?

Abigail Nussbaum: Well, to be honest, I’ve actually been fairly fortunate in that I have definitely chosen books for review. I mean, I’m talking about for Strange Horizons, not just for the not the blog, but something that I’ve committed to review. And I’ve definitely chosen books where I thought I was going to love this and it ended up just being fine. But for the most part, there has not been an incident where I thought I was going to like this and I hated it. There’s been one incident—I was going to say one case—where I accepted a book for review that I was really looking forward to and I just had no way of dealing with it at all. It’s not even that I thought it was bad, it just did not work for me on any level. And I came back to Maureen and I told her, I’m sorry, I can’t write about this because and again, if I thought the book was bad, I would have written a bad review, but I just did not have an access point to it. So I told her this is not for me to write about. And she just said, yeah, sure, that sometimes happens and found someone else.

But for the most part, I’ve been fortunate. I mean, there have definitely been reviews that Strange Horizons commissioned me that have ended up negative. And, you know, that happens. And that’s you know, you have to say what what you think, but you also have to recognize that sometimes you’re just not the right reviewer.

Dan Hartland: This gets onto a really interesting set of questions here about the presumption of a reviewer, really, that their opinion matters. So if they don’t like a particular book, there is the easy retort from fans of the book. And as we’ve discussed, there are books that lots of people are recommending that a particular reviewer won’t like. The retort is easy. Oh, well, you’re just not the right reader for the book. Is there a way to respond to that?

Abigail Nussbaum: This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, actually, in the last month, and the retort is those are two different things. The reaction of this is a bad book and this book is not for me are different reactions. And part of being a good reviewer is knowing how to distinguish between them. And like a long time ago, this was when Neil was still the Reviews Editor for Strange Horizons, he assigned a book to me. It was called, I think, The Strange Tale of the Brothers Grossbart. And I read this book, and I remember that one. Yeah, I genuinely disliked it. I did not enjoy reading it at all. And I wrote a review that was a total pan. And what I usually do is I write the first draft and I put it aside, but as soon as I finished it, I told myself, this is wrong. I’ve done the wrong thing here. This book is not bad. I just didn’t like it. And those are two different things. And I went back and I just wrote a completely different review where what I was saying was, this book does what it was trying to do extremely well, and I do not like what it was trying to do, but maybe you will like it. And I think at some point, the author, even we were speaking on something else, and he said, I really like that review!

But it is part of the essence of being a good reviewer, to recognize those two reactions. And sometimes the response is to write a total pan, and sometimes it’s to write a review that says, this is a book that succeeds, but it’s not for me. And sometimes the reaction is just, yeah, I’m not going to write about this. I’m not the person who should be writing about it, but these are different things. And this tyranny of niceness thing of if you don’t like this book, then I guess it just wasn’t for you. That is confusing. Different reactions, I think, in the name of suppressing criticism, because that is simply not always the case.

Dan Hartland: So I entirely agree with that. I keep leaving space in case Aisha wants to come in, just so people don’t think that I’m just shocked that you’ve just said something.

Aisha Subramanian: No, I was just nodding along.

Dan Hartland: Reviewers need to have the space to call out bad books because sometimes it isn’t just an aesthetic judgment, sometimes it is. So sometimes a book will just be, it might make us cross, but it’s just clumsy or poorly wrought. But sometimes it will be actively malicious, either in intent or more commonly, effect. And there is a real danger of closing the spaces in which reviewers are able to say those sorts of things for fear of the retort. Oh, well, it just wasn’t for you.

Aisha Subramanian: Drawing from what Abigail said about, okay, sometimes this book is bad and sometimes this book is doing what it wants to do very well, but that is not for me. There’s also the response that is, this book is very good at what it wants to do. And I fundamentally disagree on a moral level with that project.

Dan Hartland: Exactly.

Aisha Subramanian: Which I think is where this then comes in, where we’re like, okay, so what is this aesthetic project? What do I feel about that superstructure, and then, how do I feel about this book in the larger context of that? And I think that if we, only speaking as a reviews editor, if we only place books with people who already agree with the project of the book, then we’re losing something really important from a critical perspective.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah, I mean, just in general, I think it’s sometimes useful to have someone come in and say, what is the value of this project? Not even from trying to tear it down, but simply, like, kicking at the foundations and trying to figure them out. I think that that can be useful, not for the specific work, then for the field as a whole to just take a step back and say, what’s going on here?

[musical sting]

Abigail Nussbaum: I honestly think that a lot of times when you have a work that you’re saying, yes, it does what it’s trying to do, but what I think it’s trying to do is not worth doing. A lot of times I find that those works fail on their own terms. To go back to Wesley’s review of Legends and Lattes, one of the points that he made in this review is that this book that is supposedly so benevolent and kind and wholesome involves the heroine making common cause with a mobster who is carrying out a protection scam against everyone else in the city. That’s not wholesome.

Dan Hartland: Wesley makes a really great point that the book lacks all … I think he uses the phrase “literary turbulence.” And this is an attempt, of course, to make a very quote/unquote “cozy book.” But the problem is that by removing all friction from the book, you make some category errors morally. And one of the category errors is this gangster that smashes up people’s businesses if they don’t pay money is fine if you just give us some cinnamon buns, that’s good! I’m not sure you can let that go!

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah, sure, there’s work that works completely on its own terms, but is morally abhorrent. Everyone will tell you that Leni Riefenstahl was a great film director, but I think there’s a lot more work that tells you one thing about itself, and when you look at it, it’s actually doing something very different.

Aisha Subramanian: And I think it’s especially true and especially worth pointing out in genres that are so inherently about comfort, which is, I think, again, something that Wesley talks about a lot in that review, the idea of coziness and where that coziness is coming from and what we’re having to smooth over or ignore to access it. And I think that’s true of a lot of subgenres of the field that we all read in.

Dan Hartland: I’m immediately starting to think now of Clark Seanor’s piece recently, for the criticism special that Strange Horizons did earlier in the year, on the Becky Chambers books, where he does exactly this, reads the entire series and looks at the things that it is smoothing over or the things that it is doing or the centers of gravity that it’s choosing and critically reads these. And it struck me as a really important thing to do, particularly for a series that has been otherwise so lauded and has such a large following.

But what’s interesting is Clark was under no illusions when he started that piece. He knew that he was setting out to, if you like, do battle with that constituency that they wouldn’t like to read or hear these things about this series. And sometimes a reviewer doesn’t just stumble on a book and accidentally have an opinion that then they, alas, feel the need to expound upon at great lengths. Sometimes they are setting out to have that fight. I remember, Abigail, you mentioned Maureen, and Maureen’s last piece for us was “The Critic and the Clue” about Treacle Walker by Alan Garner. She just says, “Yeah, this isn’t going to be popular amongst the Garner community. I know what I’m doing and I’m going to do it anyway.”

I just wonder what we think about that approach to negative reviewers, negative reviews: the “sorry, I know this is going to be negative and I don’t care” approach.

Abigail Nussbaum: Well, I kind of wonder how possible it is to provoke on that level anymore because the environment is so different from what it was. I mean, it used to be that you’d post something and it would spread like wildfire and there would be so much conversation and argument and it doesn’t work that way anymore. I mean, the things that will go viral are just completely different. No one’s reading a 2000-word review to get mad about it. If you really want to provoke people, you have to do it with a tweet or something, or a TikTok. Sure, there’s definitely situations where you say to yourself, yes, I’m going in, but what are you going into anymore? I mean, maybe people are not going to like what you write, but the opportunities for them to get big mad are just not there anymore.

Dan Hartland: I think that’s true certainly in the genre or at a certain readership level. But I’m thinking as well about reviewing perhaps more generally. I don’t know whether any of you have seen that A. O. Scott, the film critic for the New York Times, stepped down recently, and one of the reasons given for this was fandom was the impossibility of critiquing, specifically, superhero films, which feels a too easy target when the community around that text, let’s call it a text, is so resistant to that critique. So, yes, at a certain level, no one’s going to read your stuff and it doesn’t matter so much; but at a kind of, if you like, either at the top level or just theoretically the general perception of criticism, whether or not you actually—as an individual reviewer who’s written a particular review—feel the blowback from your review … Has there been that shift?

Do you think that there has genuinely been that shift away from criticism as a cultural activity? Or is it just that people have never really liked critics but that it’s easier for them to make that known now?

Abigail Nussbaum: Well, I think really it depends on where you’re looking at and what field you’re looking at because film criticism in a venue like the New York Times, and especially when the critic in question is so accessible—they’re on Twitter, they’re interacting with people on Twitter. That’s just a different world. And yeah, if you critique superhero movies, or if you’d like this company’s superhero movies but don’t like this company’s superhero movies, that’s going to get you a lot of attention from people who … well, y’know. Who the hell wants to talk to them?

But that’s one world and it’s not the world that most of us move in. Whereas if you look at fandom, I definitely feel like the shifts in it are very different and the position of the critic is very degraded within genre fandom, that the conversation is much more dominated by authors and by fans. Like you said, it’s not so much that you get people mad at you as that people aren’t really listening.

Aisha Subramanian: I’m thinking about someone like Stitch, who has written for Strange Horizons, but also writes for places like Teen Vogue, where obviously there’s a much wider audience and the kind of blowback that they get for writing about media franchises that have these massive fandoms, particularly Star Wars in their case. So I think that there is some overlap because obviously critics do work in multiple different venues as well. Between the critic who can write the long, thoughtful piece that no one will read enough to get angry about and the critic who writes the long thoughtful piece that then has 2000 people trying to get them fired.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah, I mean, that overlap obviously exists. But again, I think it’s relevant that we’re talking about media criticism here then when we’re specifically talking about one of the biggest franchises in the world, that’s what gets people mad. Whereas if you write about a book, even a very popular book, I just don’t think that there are that many people who care unless you’ve written something incredibly stupid and offensive and somehow people catch on to that, which does happen. But if you’ve just written a negative review, my experience is that most of the time not much happens.

Dan Hartland: Do you think, Abigail, that reviewers are aware of this? Because speaking as … as Aisha said, we’re sort of wearing several hats in this conversation and one of them is as reviews editors who commission reviews like all the time. And I don’t know whether you have, Aisha, but I’ve noticed over the last few years in particular a more pronounced nervousness about writing a negative review. A reviewer will still do it, but they will email you first and say, “This is going to be really negative.” Or they will say, “Do you think that’s okay?” And on one level this is really good because I think perhaps even more than a positive review, a negative review needs to be copper-bottomed. You need to be certain that the reviewer has done their work if they’re going to be that negative. So that extra element of being careful, I think is really good and to be encouraged.

But we are all part of the same culture. So I hear what you’re saying, Abigail, about, “Oh, well, it’s only if you’re an extremely visible critic talking about an extremely visible franchise that you’ll really get the blowback.” And I think that’s true. But we all live in the culture where we see that blowback happening and that may have a chilling effect on reviewers and reviews that won’t get, practically speaking, get that blowback because we’re all seeing it. We’re seeing the cultural move away from critics, as you say, in action. Even if in reality we’re not going to be victims of any pile-on, we still know that the culture isn’t that welcoming towards that kind of opinion or that kind of expression of that kind of opinion.

Abigail Nussbaum: I think that’s definitely there. I think that I’ve definitely had that reaction myself, even though there was no reasonable expectation of it happening. But I also think that there’s something else going on. That there is perhaps a growing mentality that there’s something wrong with writing a negative review, that it’s being unkind, that it’s hurtful to the author. And I think that maybe the self-censorship comes from that. That you’re not trying to avoid being dogpiled so much as you’re trying to think of yourself, “I’m a good person, I’m not mean, and therefore I shouldn’t write a negative review.” To be clear, I don’t think that that’s 100% a bad thing. Thinking about the fact that there’s a real person who has written this work is not a bad thing. I mean, it’s never bad to be kind. But at the same time, you also have to remember that the author is not your audience, that you’re not writing for them. The time for someone to critique their work in a private setting has passed, and you’re writing for readers. You’re writing for people who want to know if this work is for them, and you’re writing for the field as a whole.

And I definitely think that we kind of need to push back against the mentality that there is something wrong or unkind about writing a negative review while still acknowledging that a negative review can be wrong or unkind.

[musical sting]

Aisha Subramanian: I think there’s that sense as well of, and this is obviously partly the Internet, and we can see authors having negative reactions to things. You can see authors posting their Goodreads reviews and being sometimes with the names of the people edited out, sometimes not, and talking about how sad it made them feel. And so there’s both on the one hand, yes, there’s that sense that we as critics and reviewers are aware of that person to a much greater degree than we would have been. But there’s also that kind of performance of sadness and vulnerability that becomes then very easily weaponizable against the critic. I’m thinking about the Kate Clanchy case, where, again, there was no reasonable expectation on the part of that reviewer on Goodreads that this was going to blow up the way it did. That was entirely the doing of the author. But it very much went through that cycle of, “Oh, this poor, sad, vulnerable person facing this completely unjustified criticism. Oh, wait, the criticism was justified. Well, anyway,” and it just sort of snowballed.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah. And I think that what’s sort of in the background, I mean, it’s rarely spoken, but in the background is this presumption of power. Like you say, the author is a poor, vulnerable little guy and the mean reviewer, and at some point you get into this whole punching up, punching down conversation and it just makes me incredibly angry because no one here has any power. Okay? We’re a bunch of people who are writing reviews as a hobby and a bunch of people who are writing books while they keep a day job, okay? No one here has cultural power, though obviously, in the Kate Clanchy case, she was able to weaponize tremendous institutional power and get media and more famous figures in the literary sphere on her side. So I say no one here has any power. There are obviously exceptions. But I think in general, there’s a tendency to phrase this conversation as if it’s the strong against the weak. And who you think is the strong and who you think is the weak depends entirely on which party you are. Whereas I think it’s worth remembering that there’s no power here. There’s people who are speaking their mind and who are putting parts of themselves out into the world, and we should try to maintain decorum and civility about this. But at the end of the day, this is not a fight. And if you start treating it as a fight, then you’ve already done something not on.

Dan Hartland: I wonder if we need to talk about positionality, because I completely agree with you, Abigail, that the idea that there are significant power relationships between a lot of the players in this arena feels untrue. I mentioned my negative review of Neal Asher earlier in the podcast. Asher did respond and did suggest that I simply had axes to grind, which was why I didn’t like his book, which was fine. But the idea that Neal Asher was in any way, shape, or form threatened by Dan Hartland’s agenda felt to me, again, untrue. But there may be situations, may there not, where the positionality of the reviewer does have some effect on how their opinion on a particular book or a particular author can be read. Let me use myself as an example, because then I’m not abusing anyone but myself. I’m a straight, white, Western guy, and I choose to pan a debut novel by a writer from the Global South. Is there not some power relationship there, however less pronounced than it might be? Do we not need to think about which reviewers get to pan which books?

Abigail Nussbaum: Well, I think absolutely, though I tend to think of it less in the sense of my situation, “My privilege gives me power.” Not that I’m saying that’s not true, it does. But I think that the issue is more of whether I’m able to engage with the work in a way that’s useful, or whether I’m just coming to it from a place where I can’t understand it or understand where it’s coming from. I think that’s a more important way of looking at that question, because, yes, there is the issue, of course there are more Anglophone venues for SFF criticism, and people from the Global North will have an easier time getting published in those venues. You have to work. You both know this. You have to work to find the critics who are not from your own mainstream. So there is absolutely an element of that. But I think the more important question is, are you finding the person who can engage with the work where it’s at and who can open it up to readers in a way that helps them engage with the work, as opposed to a critic who is either alienated by it or is unable to grasp what it’s trying to do?

Dan Hartland: Yes, I would agree with that. And I think that as editors, I would like to think that Aisha and I spend quite a bit of time thinking about those questions. Of course, a curated venue like Strange Horizons or any other magazine that carries reviews is one thing, and then we come back to blogs, of course, where people can choose to give their unsolicited opinions at any point, but of course, readers can also choose not to read them. So I think that the responsibility of the curated venues is quite high here, I think.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah, with curated venues, there’s that sense as well, of ultimately the responsibility is with us. Right. If we’ve paired together a review with someone who is clearly not going to have useful ways to access that book, or who’s going to pan that book because they just don’t understand what it’s doing, that’s on us. If their criticisms aren’t adequately backed up by any sort of evidence, then that’s also on us. Whereas, yeah, I think it’s less that there is a power difference and more that there are multiple power differences. There are multiple axes of power at play. If you were to write a critical review of an author from the Global South, yes, there are some ways in which you’d be taken more seriously than another critic talking about what the book was doing. Well, but obviously this is also a book that’s being published, that has a marketing campaign behind it, that has a publisher’s weight behind it.

Abigail Nussbaum: Well, I know that writing on my own blog, I’ve become more aware of the way that some books are coming to me from a very different world, from a very different frame of reference, and that as a reviewer, I need to take that into consideration when I’m writing. And you know what? That’s not just for negative reviews. I remember I wrote about Han Kang’s Human Acts, which is about the Gwangju massacre, I think. I think Guangzhou is the correct name. And this is an incredibly famous incident in South Korea’s history that I was completely unaware of before I started reading the book, because I know nothing about South Korea, and it really changed how I reacted to the book and how I ended up reviewing it. But at the same time, I was cognizant when I’m writing this absolute rave, because it’s a wonderful book, that I’m also coming at it from the perspective of an idiot who didn’t know about this event. So that matters.

And I was thinking about it more recently when I was writing about The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which I also think is a brilliant novel. But again, I know nothing about Sri Lanka. Not only is that the case, but the book has sort of been written with that in mind, because there’s like, inserts in the book that are explaining it to stupid Westerners who know nothing. About the country’s history and can’t tell the different factions apart. So that’s definitely something that you have to be aware of whenever you’re writing positively or negatively about a work that’s coming from completely outside your frame of reference, but it also affects when you write negatively. And I’ve had the experience where I was reading a book that was about the Global South experience, about colonialism, about racism, and in some cases, it doesn’t work for me. And I think to myself, how much of this is this book just isn’t working? And how much of it is my inability to bridge the gap? And I think, okay, on some level, I’m never going to be able to fully answer that question. On some level, that’s going to be something that someone else is going to have to tell me, but you have to at least engage with the question. It has to be part of your reviewing process.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I think this comes back to something that we were saying—particularly that you, Abigail, were saying at the start of the conversation—which is that the reviewer needs to be open to the idea that the book isn’t for them and that, in fact, that can be one of the book’s positives—that the book has been designed for a different audience. And as long as the reviewer has the humility or frame of reference to acknowledge that a book that is not for them can actually be a great book.

Aisha Subramanian: I think as well, though, and again, this is something I’ve done as a reviewer and had to scrap the work. Or this is something that I’ve seen reviewers do as an editor and have often had to scrap the work. There’s also the difficulty of then making the entire review about what you didn’t know. So if you are reviewing The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and you fixate on how much you didn’t know about Sri Lanka, or you spend the entire review explaining the history of the country to your reviewer, like, “Guys, did you know this happened?” You’re not going to end up with a useful review, and at worst, you’re going to end up with just a sort of naval gazing, I know nothing, please come and condemn me for how little I know. And at best, you’re going to end up with a useful history of a country that could possibly be done by someone else. I’m thinking about something like Shiv Ramdas’s “And Now His Lordship is Laughing,” which is a really good short story that we published and where a lot of the reviews that it got were basically, “Guys, did you know about the Bengal famine?” Yes, actually!

Dan Hartland: There is an element to which the self reflexive reviewer thing is just as much of a performance as the angry, negative reviewer thing and is a sort of … you’re getting your defenses in early, and it does misshape the review. I’ve had an experience of this, so I wrote a rave review for Strange Horizons of Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, which is awesome book, but I was also conscious that it was doing things that … weren’t for me is the wrong phrase, because they were totally for me because I loved what it was doing. But it was written from a very particular perspective. And yeah, I didn’t dwell on this, but I mentioned it. And I think that you’re right, Aisha, to say that there does need to be a balance here between feeling that, “Oh, I’m going to write a negative review, so I need to explain, or if I just say that I don’t have the right to have an opinion, no one will hurt me.”

Aisha Subramanian: Again, it has to work from a position of, “Oh, here, let me explain to you and give you more background about this very interesting work.” Not as Dan said, “I know nothing. Please don’t hurt me.” Because if you know nothing, then why are you writing? There is a degree of arrogance in being a reviewer, and the solution to that isn’t to run away from that, it’s to own it and to say, yes, I am claiming a position of certain authority here and I’m going to try to earn that. And yes, humility is one way of trying to earn it, but also you can take it too far. And at some point you have to say, “I have chosen to speak. I have chosen to make myself heard, and therefore I’m going to try to earn that position to make this worth your time.”

And ultimately, anything that you add to your review has to be in service of discussing the book. Is this a good book? What is this doing? How well does it work? If you need to add information and context so that your reader can see how the book works, that’s completely justifiable. If you’re just giving context for “I didn’t know this, this is interesting, or I didn’t know this and this is my disclaimer for any further criticisms that you might have,” then that isn’t in service to the discussion of the book?

Abigail Nussbaum: I think that there can be reviews that are very personal and that bring the reviewer into the work and that are useful, but they have to actually bring yourself into the work. You have to actually expose yourself, whereas what you’re describing is defending yourself. It’s like a defensive crouch.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: I wonder whether we should just briefly, because we’re three diligent, conscientious reviewers, so we like to assume that all reviewers are diligent and conscientious … but they’re not. And it is true that there are negative reviews or negative writing about books which are in bad faith, which give good and diligent and careful negative reviews a bad name. And I just wonder whether we need to mention that or acknowledge that.

I’m thinking it wasn’t a review, but there was critical content. I’m thinking of the recent Wired profile of Brandon Sanderson, for example, which—right, because he salts his ramen, and that’s bad! And because the community was up in arms about this critical piece about a writer who probably deserves some sort of informed criticism. But maybe this wasn’t that piece.

Abigail Nussbaum: I thought that the most useful commentary I saw about that piece was saying, look, there is so much that you can say that is legitimately negative about this guy, and you fixated on all of the most pointless stuff. You’re basically saying this guy’s bad because he’s cringe. Who cares? And I think that’s true. I think it is worth calling out reviews that don’t engage with the work on its own terms. And I see that a lot when mainstream critics write about genre, write about science fiction, and you can just tell that they haven’t got the language for it, that they haven’t got the terms you want to say to them, “This is not your lane. You don’t know what you’re doing here. And by all means, trash this work if you’re able to engage with it and you find flaws in it, but if you’re not able to engage with it, then find someone who can.”

Aisha Subramanian: Having said that, I read the piece. I didn’t have strong feelings about it. But I think the thing that I found very interesting about that review that ties into this discussion was the extent to which it was read as a criticism of the community.

Abigail Nussbaum: Well, I definitely think it’s a move that some authors and some fans will make of collapsing the difference between the work and not just the work and the author, but the work and the fans. This person didn’t like X. That must mean he’s attacking all the people who do like X. Sometimes that’s true, okay? Sometimes people do that, but most of the time they don’t. And if you’re trying to get your fans riled up by doing that, that’s not nice.

No one ever complains about reviews when they’re good. No one ever says, “Well, that’s just your opinion, man” when you wrote a rave. If that’s legitimately their stance, then it should be like, if I write, “Well, this is the best book ever,” someone should come back to me and say, “Well, that’s just your opinion.” But they never do, okay? And no one ever says, “The reviewer is arrogating power to himself, and he thinks he knows better than the rest of us, and who let her be the arbiter of good and evil?” when you write something good. It’s only ever when you write negative reviews that you get those responses. And I feel like that’s telling.

Aisha Subramanian: Taking notes to go and troll Abigail’s blog.

[laughter]

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Well, I think everyone’s going to love this episode.

Abigail Nussbaum: Once again, I feel like you’re anticipating an outrage that will probably not materialize.

Aisha Subramanian: Are you suggesting that not everyone listens to this?

Abigail Nussbaum: I would never suggest that. I would never suggest that this is not the most popular podcast ever.

Dan Hartland: Such a good answer. You can come again.

Abigail Nussbaum: I would love to. Thank you so much for having me.

Dan Hartland: Absolute pleasure. Thanks, Abigail.

Aisha Subramanian: Thanks, Abigail.

[musical outro]

Aisha Subramanian: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. Our theme music is “Dial Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can hear more of their music at Grande Valise dot bandcamp dot com. See you next time.

View Details

In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Reviews Editors Aisha Subramanian and Dan Hartland talk to novelist, reviewer, and Strange Horizons’ Co-ordinating Editor, Gautam Bhatia, about how reviewing and criticism of all kinds align—and do not—with fiction-writing and the genre more widely.

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Critical-Friends-Episode-04-FINAL.mp3TranscriptCritical Friends Episode 4Aisha Subramanian: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF Criticism podcast. I’m Aisha Subramanian.

Dan Hartland: And I’m Dan Hartland. In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be talking about SFF criticism: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

Aisha Subramanian: In this episode, we’ll be talking with reviewer and critic, Strange Horizons’ Co-ordinating Editor, novelist, and superstar lawyer Gautam Bhatia, about reviewing, novel writing, criticism, and the genre.

Dan Hartland: We began by asking him about his first contact with the reviews department at Strange Horizons. Gautam Bhatia speaks to us from a park in Berlin where there were many dogs.

Gautam Bhatia: I was writing a whole bunch of reviews on my blog, and I wanted to write a little more formally. But there didn’t seem to be any venue for writing science fiction and fantasy reviews. All the magazines that I checked—and I checked on Wikipedia and just Googled around—they all seemed to be accepting only solicited reviews. And Strange Horizons was the only place I found that just said, “Send us a review!” So I took my chance.

I wrote a review of Howard Jacobson’s J and I sent in that review to Abigail Nussbaum, I think, who was the Reviews Editor back then. And she just got back in a day saying, “We’d like to use this,” and sent me edits. And that’s how it began. It was surprisingly informal and easy, which I think really has been—is—a characteristic of Strange Horizons over the years. You know, there’s none of that standoffishness. And that’s what I have come to love about Strange Horizons, and that’s how it began. So, yeah.

Dan Hartland: So I have so many questions. So the first is: you talk about wanting a venue in which to write more formally; what were you writing before you wrote a review of Howard Jacobson’s J that was informal? Like, what was the shift there?

Gautam Bhatia: So I was writing on my own blog. So I, you know, I think I began with what everyone used to do in the 2000s, which was LiveJournal. So I used to write on my LiveJournal account and, and then I shifted to a dedicated WordPress blog—which, again, was my own blog. But the thing is that when you’re writing reviews on your own blog, I mean, the the only person really pushing yourself is you, because ultimately it’s you writing for yourself, and—sorry about the dogs! —and your friends. But the moment you shift to writing for a magazine, you get the sense that people reading it will be strangers. And in that sense you have to be, in a certain way, more rigorous and more careful about the claims you’re making.

And of course, there’s no reason why this should be the case. I mean, ideally, even if writing for yourself, you are holding yourself up to the highest standards you want. You know, that you want, you want to, you wanna do. But at least for me, it doesn’t quite work that way in practice. So I feel like if I know that I’m being read by unknown people I feel a lot more, I guess the word is responsibility: to be careful about what I’m saying, which wasn’t coming with my own blog. So I think that was the reason why I was really keen to write for a forum that wasn’t my own blog.

Dan Hartland: So, last episode, we spoke a little bit about that, the idea that when we’re talking about trusting a review, we’re talking about trusting a review to sort of be testable—so to have, as you say, a rigor that you can inspect and it doesn’t kind of fall apart when you look at it a bit more closely. Did you find the editing process—because you mentioned Abigail got back with edits and all that sort of stuff—did you find that the editing process, although not intimidating and all of those sort of Strange Horizons things you mentioned, helped you understand how to achieve that, that kind of testability? Or did you already kind of know how to do it, you just wanted the audience to force you into it?

Gautam Bhatia: So I think that, again, when you’re writing for your own blog, you are editing yourself. And I think whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, that process has limits. There are things you just can’t see that an external eye can see. And that was definitely the case with that review. It’s been eight years, so I don’t entirely recall the specifics of what Abigail said! I do remember, you know, her kind of gently pushing on certain claims and saying, “Okay, maybe you need to substantiate this point a little more. You know, this doesn’t entirely follow from what you’ve just said.” And I think over the years you become better at identifying those things on your own. But nonetheless, you always need that external eye telling you, “Okay, look, here is a place where you may have been a bit too quick. Um, this is not entirely convincing. This needs a bit more substantiation.” All of that.

Aisha Subramanian: Just sort of agreeing with the Gautam here, because I also had that experience of sort of writing for a blog first and then eventually being edited. And I think my understanding of structure has really changed since other people started editing my work. So I’m now able to apply a lot of those ideas myself, but I really needed other people—a kind of audience of other people—to be able to make that switch in my head. So this sounds really familiar to me.

Dan Hartland: It’s quite interesting, isn’t it, that a review—because we see a lot of reviews, there are reviews everywhere, but what we’re talking about is, I’m not gonna say the next level, but a kind of review which is tested. So it’s not just an opinion, it’s something else as well. Is that right?

Gautam Bhatia: I think that it’s, it’s basically, and I guess with all the caveats that you bring to bear on a claim like this, it’s basically someone else telling you that. So both you and the editor both agree that there is a certain kind of rigor that has to accompany a review, and that, you know, certain claims have to be backed up, you know, by various other things. And you start with that common ground of agreement, and then your editor is telling you that, look, here are the places where you haven’t quite gotten to that level of rigor and you need to get there, and this is how you might do that.

Dan Hartland: I wonder whether, when you submitted that review, did you have in the back of your head the idea that you were also eventually going to write novels?

Gautam Bhatia: Oh, oh, yeah. Yeah. So I’ve been writing novels way longer than I’ve been reviewing actually. It’s just that I happened to get published, after—substantially after! I think like many people, when I was a teenager, I had like ten unfinished novels. I did NaNoWriMo every year. I used to do this fiction roleplaying on Dragonmount, in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time fandom. And in fact The Wall, which was finally my first published novel, the first draft was written in 2008. So I always knew that I wanted to be a fiction writer, but I also really enjoyed analyzing texts and writing reviews. So when I was reviewing J and then reviewing more after that, I didn’t actually think of the two as connected. Now in various ways I do, and we can talk about that. But at the time it seemed … there seemed to be two way-different things that I enjoyed in their own right, but were not in any way connected.

Dan Hartland: This is really interesting and I do want to talk more about it. So, um, so, at least initially, in your head, or at least consciously, the two things were not connected at all?

Gautam Bhatia: No, no, in the sense that I, in fact, I had shelved my fiction writing because I was practicing law at the time, and it was taking up a lot of headspace. I was writing nonfiction, I was writing a book on the Constitution. So I knew that there just wasn’t … I didn’t have the time to give to writing fiction at that point of time. But I also felt like I needed to stay in touch with the genre, as well. And so to that extent, yes, there was a connection in that this was a way of making sure that I was, you know, in touch with what was being published and thinking critically about what was being published. And so not losing touch with the genre. But that was it! I mean, the main motivation was still that I just enjoyed reviewing. It made me think more closely about what I was reading, and it was just a fun process.

Aisha Subramanian: I’m interested in—and this may be quite a frivolous way of approaching this—but I’m interested in the idea sort of how you then think of yourself. As you’ve always been a novelist, which is something you said earlier. Do you then define yourself primarily as a writer of fiction? And then the criticism thing is something else that you do as an aside? It’s … it’s an interesting hobby?

Gautam Bhatia: Oh, no, no, no. I think I’d say that I’m separately a writer of fiction and also a critic or reviewer or whatever the term is that, that is most appropriate. I think that both those things are challenging in their own distinct ways, but also equally important to me in my engagement with science fiction and fantasy. So I think that if you were to take out either of them, I’d feel incomplete. I think there is a larger point to be made about how if you achieve, say, a certain kind of public prominence as a writer of fiction, it becomes a little dicey to continue being a reviewer because then you are effectively reviewing your peers. But I think I don’t quite have that kind of public prominence at this sort of time. Maybe at some point it might be a choice for us to make. Uh, but I think right now, I see both reviewing and criticism on the one hand and writing on the other as being equally important to me and as being equally important to the way I position myself within the community and the genre generally.

Dan Hartland: We’ve spoken before on the show, I think in episode one, about how science fiction, the genre “SFF,” is quite a small ecosystem for reviewers, fiction writers, readers: they all inhabit it without overlapping. So I’m really interested, Gautam, that you are aware of the difficulties perhaps of that, and I’m entirely on board with the idea that reviewing your peers is really difficult, and it is something that we at SH Reviews try to navigate within the confines that this is a small area of literary activity. But that aside, is there a process now by which you go for texts to review: are they just books that you read and have something to say about?

Gautam Bhatia: So I think first of all, there is a process of elimination where I wouldn’t review friends—you know, because when I began back in 2014, I didn’t know anyone in the community and now I know many people. So I wouldn’t review books by friends. I think, you know, that a) the optics of it are wrong, and b) you tend to overcompensate because then you start second guessing yourself: okay, am I being, you know. So ultimately you’re not quite sure about yourself in that kind of an equation, so I wouldn’t do that.

As far as picking, I think it’s basically now, I look at the blurb—because, you know, Strange Horizons sends its list of books to review to reviewers every few months. So basically, when I get that email, some books I’ve already, you know, heard about, some books, you know, I’ve asked you if I can review. So for example, I had read, A Memory Called Empire, and I knew that there were a range of themes in that book that really interest me, and that I think I would have something to say about, so I asked you if I could review A Desolation Called Peace, and, you know, very kindly said yes, and I did that. Um, so that, that’s one, that’s one approach.

The second is I look at the blurb, I look at what the book’s about, and if I think that it’s … again, if it’s something that has themes that I would, you know, be interested in. And again, if I think I have something to say about that, I ask to, to review that book. I mean, I think, for example, recently I asked for, uh, for, for Suyi Davies’s Son of the Storm. And that’s again, because I had read Davies’s David Mogo, Godhunter, and I really enjoyed that. And when I looked at some of the themes that Son of the Storm was about, I thought to myself, “Okay, this would be fun to review and interesting.” So I, I picked that! So I think that’s broadly what my process is.

Dan Hartland: Are your reading habits in any sort of focused way related to your novel writing? So would you, in the process of this elimination or the approach to books that interest you—that have themes you feel you can say something about—presumably those are often themes that find their way into your fiction as well. So do you try and put a—haha—wall between the two things? Or are you okay with themes bleeding over, if you like, from the review writing to the novel writing?

Gautam Bhatia: So it’s not a conscious wall, but I think there is an unconscious wall because when I pick up … let’s say there are three reasons why I read something. One is reading purely for pleasure. The other is reading to review a book for Strange Horizons, or another venue. A third is reading because there are themes in that book that are relevant for my writing and for the state of, you know, that state of play in the subgenre. Right? The thing is, when I’ve noticed about myself that the third … when I’m reading in the third category … I end up doing, taking a very almost a detached, almost clinical view of that book. So for example, presently my work in progress, a lot of it involves the collective consciousness, dissolving minds and so on. So I was reading a book by Peter Hamilton that had to do with that theme. And I was reading it just purely to understand how other writers have dealt with the idea, to make sure I’m not, you know, copying something too bluntly and just to kind of have a sense of the layer of the field. But that’s not how I read when I’m reviewing. When I’m reviewing, I’m obviously, you know, as I said, I pick a book to review if I think I’m going to, you know—independently of its relevance for my writing—enjoy it, if I have something interesting to say about it. And often of course—I mean, I’m not saying that I did not enjoy the Hamilton book, it’s just that my approach to it was very different from my approach to a book I’m reviewing. So I think that that automatically then creates that little wall where I don’t end up normally reviewing books that are directly overlapping with what I’m presently working on, because the approach I have to those books is different.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I would certainly say that I do not associate detachment with your reviews. Some reviewers I do, and it works for them. Your reviews are empathetic. Definitely. So the wall … the wall holds. It may be a subconscious wall, but it works for you.

I wonder whether we could move a little bit over to the other side of the wall. So we’ve talked about how you approach reviewing. You mentioned at the start that when you began reviewing, there didn’t seem to be much of a link between your review writing and your novel writing, but that over time you have seen one develop. So I just wonder whether we could sort of look from the perspective of the novel writing part of you and how that person is fed by the reviewing. Like, what is that link that you now perceive to exist?

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah, so I, I knew this question would come, so I actually prepared an answer for this. So I was thinking about this and the example I actually have is in The Wall and The Horizon, which are my two books, a lot of it has to do with changes in power structures that flow from popular acclamation. So, you know, various factions vie for power, and they need the support of the people to do that. So it’s less of, you know, conquest in battle, and it’s more town-square debates that lead to those power shifts. Now, when I was writing and my editor, whose name is Naomi, when I was writing she of course was editing. And, and she at one point observed that what you’re doing here is you are really treating the people as a category, as completely passive and as people who could just be swayed one way or the other by eloquent speakers.

And she had a point, and this was completely correct, and I tried to change that. And I also began noticing at that point of time that a lot of fantasy I was reading that involved appeals to the people in this way was doing the same thing where, you know, the people became this mass. Individual people in the crowd didn’t have individual agency. It was almost too easy for the aristocracy or whoever it was to really, you know, move them under the other. And so it was … I was trying to improve that part of my books and also noticing how it was, how it seemed to be a prevalent thing in the genre more generally. I came to call it the Mark Antony Syndrome. I think I wrote this in Strange Horizons , a review, you know, where it’s basically … the origin story of this whole scene is Mark Antony, you know, coming up to the stage and just giving this one speech that completely turns the crowd after Brutus has turned them one way.

And what you have is like Pleb 1, oh we’ll go one way, and Pleb 2, on no we’ll go Caesar, Pleb 3, oh, you know, bloody, bloody traitors, and then the whole crowd … and so it’s basically even literally like Pleb One, they don’t even have a name. They’re like Pleb 1, 2, 3, and 4. And it just seemed that that, first of all, a lot of fantasy and science fiction, you know, ignores the people first, you know, altogether, a lot of it is elite power conflict, right? Uh, some fantasy goes beyond that and does involve the people, but there again, it seems to be a very common trap. And I think that in that way, I saw it in the books I was reviewing. It reinforced the weakness I saw in my own writing, which I tried to plug, I don’t know with what success, but I tried. And then it kind of fed back into reviewing, where I began to be even more aware of it having grappled and struggled with it in my own writing.

So I think in that way, the two became almost symbiotic, where I began to see things in my writing that I then saw in books I was reviewing. And as I was grappling with them as a reviewer, I began to develop, you know, terms for them, thought about them more closely, and that then fed back into what I was dealing with in my own writing. And this, the Mark Anthony Syndrome, I think is kind of the starkest example of that that I can think of. I’m sure there have been many others that really established this in a certain sense. It’s a very interesting feedback loop. Things you see when you put your reviewer hat on, then you tend to see in your own writing, and then it goes back and forth in this really interesting way.

Dan Hartland: So I will put my critic hat on really briefly and say you did achieve it—because for me, The Wall in particular is a novel as much about interior shift—as like an individual person changing their mind—as it is about structures. So in that sense, you absolutely embedded the process of how an individual changes their mind into the novel, rather than just Pleb 1, Pleb 2: “Oh, yeah. Sounds a good idea. We’ll follow that guy.”

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah. Yeah. It was at least even more in The Horizon, because that’s when a lot of the power shifts take place. And it was much more of a challenge because the people so to say are, yeah, they are involved in the world, but they’re involved a lot more as actors in The Horizon. And that we’ll actually begin to see that, you know, subconsciously we’ve all been so influenced by that Mark Anthony scene that, you know, we don’t really know it, but we end up rewriting that scene, I think, whenever we feature the people in this kind of a context. And I think, again, being a critic really helps you to analyze that and then perhaps think about how you might solve that. I think, again, just to add, I guess as a caveat, it’ll always be limited in that way given the class position that most of us SF writers occupy. We are far more likely to be in the position Anthony was, or his cohorts were, than we are likely to be Pleb 1, 2, 3, or Pleb 4.

But in that sense is always a limit to what you can do. But yeah, it’s always, I guess, about trying to work within those limits.

Aisha Subramanian: The Mark Anthony’s speech kind of reminds me in a way … that idea that there’ll just be this one person with an argument that—well, with an inspirational speech—that just blows everyone away. It reminds me very much of sort of bad courtroom dramas and just the idea that there’s just going to be this one figure, and this person is just going to have this narrative and everyone’s just going to go, “Yep, sounds fine.” But as you say, they’re not the protagonists of that scene. They’re just sort of the audience cheering.

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if this is where you’re heading, but I think that that is really a problem with—I guess “problem” is too strong a word—that is the feature of a lot of science fiction that has law and courts as a part of the story.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to ask you where you stand on that as a lawyer as well as a critic and a writer, but I feel like it’s sort of … they are connected in that sense that … that idea of, again, that sort of relationship between the individual and the sort of larger social structural narrative.

Gautam Bhatia: No, I think that’s completely correct. And one piece of science fiction that falls into this trap is one you wouldn’t expect, which is the “A Measure of a Man” episode in Star Trek, where the question is, “Does Data have rights that you afford to human beings?” And it comes down to this really stirring courtroom scene, effectively a court martial, that has four actors: the Judge Advocate General—and I’m really annoyed, by the way, that in this far-future Communist utopian society you still have Judge Advocates General in the military, I can rant about that—but has the Judge Advocate General, Picard as one lawyer, Riker as a second lawyer, and Data, right? Just like, it’s great theater. And, you know, I think it’s very entertaining and the drama caused is immense.

Uh, I just think like, that’s just not how—and I don’t want to be that lawyer who says, “This is not how it works in real life”—but I think that … it’s not how it works, you know? That’s not how the legal process works. I think it romanticizes the legal process a lot, which would in itself be okay, but I think it does link up into what you said with larger … I think, again, problematic is a strong word … but the focus of the genre, even in an era where we talk about, you know, being progressive and being anti-colonial and anti-capitalist, so much of fantasy and science fiction still depends not on collective action, coalition building or that messiness, but still depends upon heroic individual or group action. And even Star Trek! It’s supposed to be, it’s all about how people working together have eliminated the worst kinds of capitalism. But you still come back to the heroic Picard making a heroic argument that convinces the judge and saves Data’s life.

I think that does reflect about how so much of the contemporary genre is still stuck in that very capitalist, individualistic paradigm. And there’s still … it also explains why unions play so small a part in modern science fiction. Teah, there are all these things. So I think, in that the individualization of the legal process in these pieces of science fiction, I think you’re right, reflects you know, a broader issue with the genre right now.

Aisha Subramanian: I was thinking a broader issue with the world right now as well. But, but of course, the genre is part of the world.

Gautam Bhatia: For a long time, the genre, or the dominant works in the genre—popular works in the genre—were unapologetically on the side of power in certain ways, right? This is science fiction’s long and troubled history with colonialism, racism, and so on. Right now, the way that science fiction wants to position itself is in opposition to power, right? And I remember recently the letter that was opposing the Chengdu Worldcon, and I don’t want to get into like a specifics minefield, but I do remember being struck by how one of the things that that letter said - it was signed by a lot of prominent writers in the genre - was that, as science fiction writers, you know, we stand in opposition to power centers, we like to imagine alternative worlds or alternative forms of power where oppression doesn’t take place.

I think, again, going back to personal Ursula Le Guin’s famous speech where she says that the task of science fiction is to imagine alternatives to the way we live and to capitalism. I think that presently the self-image of the genre is that—that’s the way it wants to be seen, and I think therefore we have to take that claim seriously and to therefore hold up the genre to what it aspires to be in its outward-looking identity. Then this question does arise: why are so much of the prominent works still so focused on individual heroism, individual tragedy, and still don’t have unions, you know?

Dan Hartland: Yeah, we spent a lot of time on this show and just in our unrecorded conversations trying to figure out what reviews and criticism are and, and how they’re different if they are. But we started this conversation with you, Gautam, talking about how a review needs to be testable, how its claims need to be checkable, and I think you’ve just made a really passionate case for how criticism can check the claims that the genre makes about itself. And I hope that’s what we try and do at the Reviews Department, because I would agree that—yeah, the, the ideals sometimes expressed aren’t always met in the texts as they are published.

I just wonder whether, talking about texts when published, we could talk briefly if you’re at all interested in doing so talk about once you have a novel out there. So you are a novel writer, forget these reviews things, and then someone writes a review about your book. So this thing that you’ve been doing to other people for years gets done to you , and I just wonder how that feels as a reviewer: so someone who reviews gets reviewed, is that odd? Is it easier? And then b) how, if at all, the reviews affect the next novel or the novel after that?

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah, so I mean, I think that first of all, when, at least when starting off, right—this might change over time!—you’re just very curious to know what people have to say and how they’re responding to your work. So in that sense, when you get a new review … and I guess I must mention of the fact that, uh … So I know that many people say that they don’t look at Goodreads because, you know, various reasons. But that’s a real luxury because, for various reasons, if you’re published outside of the US and the UK, the reach that say Harper Collins India has is minuscule compared to the reach that Tor and Orbit has. So you don’t really have the luxury of ignoring Goodreads because, you know, you probably have like, 70-odd maybe reviews after a year or so.

And I think at that point, at least I was—speaking for myself!—I’m just so curious to know what people have to say that I just am not in my reviewer hat at all when I’m reading those reviews. I’m just very, very curious and very eager to know what people are responding to. So I don’t look at those reviews as a reviewer. I look at them just as a very eager writer, really keen to know what people think. And I think that that one thing, though, that reviewing does teach you is that it really helps you to know when a review is criticism and when it’s bad faith. So I think that you can distinguish that. Being a reviewer helps you make the distinction. Because you know what a fair critique looks like because you’ve read so many reviews, you’ve written so many of them, and when it’s spilling over into a person who clearly has a problem, like with you personally or something else. So you can, you can tell that, that that the difference I think pretty clearly.

The second question that I think is really interesting. For me at least, it really, really informs writing going forward. And I found Goodreads really helpful there because people on Goodreads pointed out a whole bunch of things with respect to The Wall while I was writing The Horizon. And I took them on board because, you know, there were points people made about the main character, points about certain kinds of dialogue, that when I thought about them were really fair points and had escaped, both my notice and the notice of my editor. Because again, you as an editor, I guess it becomes so closely involved with the book that, you know, you, even the best editors, I guess tend to sometimes miss some things or, you know, just a fresh pair of eyes, right?

And so I took them very seriously and, and I really changed things about Book Two that were based on Goodreads reviews. And I think even going forward in what I’m working on now, many of those comments, you know, are are still informing how I tweak writing style and this is the way I to improve as a writer. Because again, I mean, people are responding and you are always writing for people, right? So, what people’s responses are, pretty much—I mean, what as a writer I think I personally would live for? And if people are saying that, “Look, this is something that is perhaps, you know, not working as it should work, given if that’s what the author intention is,” then that’s something that I think is really important to take onboard.

Of course, if somebody gets the intention wrong, then of course that’s a more fundamental disagreement. And then it’s more of a function that they want to be a certain way. And that of course is perfectly fair. But I think as a writer you don’t really change that about yourself. But if the reviewer or the commentator has got what you’re trying to do and is then saying, “Look, in that context”—and I think for me personally, that that’s the reviewer’s task, the reviewer’s task or the critic’s task is to say, “Look, this is what the author is going for and here’s why I think it works at X, Y, and Z places and might not entirely have worked at A, B, and C places.” And if that is … if you are on board with that, then I think then that’s good advice to, to take going forward.

Dan Hartland: The really interesting thing about what you just said was the respect that you gave to Goodreads, because it is so easy to dismiss Goodreads. And I’m sure that we’ve been guilty of it in the past, because it’s just like a sort of knee-jerk response. But it’s really interesting to hear how reviews that aren’t like the ones that SH publishes or the New York Reviewer of Books publishes or whatever else, can still have an impact upon writerly practice.

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah, and I think, like, I think Goodreads did a lot for me. It still does a lot for me. And I think I really am grateful to Goodreads again. I think, you know, I think I understand … I think writers who are like, you know, very, very well marketed, very well sold, you know, if they see … If you have 10,000 Goodreads reviews out, which like a thousand are full of reviews, I get it, right? Like, you don’t want to see a thousand abusive reviews, right? I’m lucky enough that I think only two, three people really cared enough to write an abusive review. So I could compartmentalize that, but the majority of the reviews were, you know, like, they were really helpful.

I mean, there was one person who said, “You know, I found the main character so annoying,” er, which is kind of the point! I mean, the main character is meant to be annoying , but also not annoying enough to be alienating, right? And so where the … I think I was kinda figuring out where the balance is between annoying and alienating and those comments really helped me to figure out how to try and at least turn the right side of the annoying/alienating divide. So in that way, I think that those kind of—I guess, to use the word in the beginning of this podcast—those informal reactions that people have put on Goodreads, I think sometimes really help because I guess … again, in a Strange Horizons review, you are filtering your reviewing, your writing, through a certain kind of formalistic lens. You aren’t saying entirely what you … you aren’t saying everything you think, right? Whereas in Goodreads, you are saying more of what you’re saying in a direct way. I think SH’s form of reviewing is really important in the sense of, you know, locating a book within the genre, as communicating what an author is trying to do to readers. I think the Goodreads form is more helpful to an author, you know, in that—okay, you’re just getting that reaction directly to you.

Aisha Subramanian: And now I’ve been curious enough that I’m now looking at the Goodreads reviews of The Wall. There, there is, there’s a wide range, as you said, between on the one hand some quite substantial reviews, and on the other end of the spectrum is someone who doesn’t like you because you were abusive about Harry Potter on the internet. .

Gautam Bhatia: There was a one-star review that was pissed off about my Harry Potter views. I remember that one, yes!

Dan Hartland: I should say that I wrote a review of The Wall! I was asked to write one by BSFA, and it was a very positive review—very, very positive. I just said one thing about your use of dialogue, and the way in which dialogue was used to sort of power the novel. And I was rightly, I’m sure, picked up by a friend of the podcast and Strange Horizons reviewer, Maggie Clark, on Twitter, who said, “Yeah, side-eye on that. It’s a novel of ideas for goodness’ sake!” So the reviewer got reviewed and I was happy with that. But, yeah, I just wanted to mention while we’re talking about people reviewing your book, that I did!

Gautam Bhatia: That point on dialogue actually was something many people made. So your review unfortunately came out too late to influence the writing of The Horizon.

Dan Hartland: Not unfortunately!

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah! But the substantive point you made did influence writing of The Horizon. So, uh, so yeah.

Aisha Subramanian: Partly bouncing off Dan being critically reviewed by a critic and reviewer (!): just that idea of community. One of the things you talked about was the shift between reviewing for your blog and for Strange Horizons at the beginning of this was that sense of being read by other people, right? And there’s this sense that once you start reviewing for a venue beyond the one that you are in full control of, you become part of a wider conversation and part of that conversation. And part of your responsibility within that conversation is to do with making your ideas testable in a way. But it’s also about things like context, rather than, as you said, the kinds of reviews, the kind of things, that you can add in an informal review, where it can be quite impressionistic. And I was just thinking about that idea of criticism and community, and the structures of critical community in science fiction, and how much being a part of that has affected you as both as a writer of fiction and as a critic.

Gautam Bhatia: I would say that the structures are there, and I wish there were a lot more of them. I mean, you know, I wish that they could be conventions for example, that were like critics’ conventions, you know? Like we have, you have seen I think, more attention being paid to reviews in recent cons of FiyahCon, even Worldcon last year there was a panel, like, if I remember correctly, on reviewing that I was perhaps moderating, I can’t remember now. So I think that conversation is increasing now, but I think it should be even more. But I do think that to a certain extent it’s been good because specifically with a place like Strange Horizons that publishes three reviews every week, most weeks, you’re constantly seeing other people engaged in the same enterprise as as you are, and you can learn a lot from them.

And, I do sometimes see that other reviewers like M. L. Clark or John Folk-Williams, you know, they kind of actively read reviews and share their thoughts about them. I remember for a while, Nina Allan used to, I think at the end of the year, talk about the reviews she’d liked reading a lot. I don’t know if she still does that, but she did do that for a while. And I think that that sense of community is really important because you sometimes feel, in the very, very heavily marketized world of genre today, that a lot of the attention is being focused on raves, you know? People raving about books. And that is important. And, you know, it feeds the world and I think it’s great.

But you do feel that what ultimately ends up getting shared much more, amplified much more, are raves, you know? That all this, “This book was phenomenal, X, Y, Z,” which again, I’m not complaining about, right? I think that there’s a space for that, but it tends to take up, I think, space that could otherwise also be shared with a more critical form of reviewing. And so I think that in that way, having this small community is important. Because it does give you a sense that there is a point or a purpose to this kind of reviewing and criticism as well. And I, and I obviously could see it, you know, perhaps a little more. And I think Locus is another space that does it, that really pays a lot of attention to reviews. I think that perhaps you could think about going forward, more structures where reviewers can come and talk to each other about, about the craft.

Dan Hartland: I was just briefly horrified by Gautam’s suggestion that I’m gonna have to talk to other reviewers and have social occasions with people.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah, I was just thinking when, when you said “a convention of reviewers,” I was just thinking that sounds amazing. And I would not go.

Gautam Bhatia: I feel like it would be OK if they would all be like you?

Aisha Subramanian: Would it?

All:

[theme music]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. Our theme music is “Dial Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can hear more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com. See you next time.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents the poetry of the 30 January issue.

View Details

In this special episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, reviews editors Aisha Subramanian and Dan Hartland introduce audio from a 2018 recording for Jonah Sutton-Morse’s podcast Cabbages and Kings which included Maureen Kincaid Speller discussing with Aisha and Jonah three books: Everfair by Nisi Shawl, Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan, and The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar.

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Critical-Friends-Episode-3.mp3TranscriptCritical Friends Episode 3Aisha Subramanian: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast.

Dan Hartland: I’m Dan Hartland.

Aisha Subramanian: I’m Aisha Subramanian.

Dan Hartland: And it’s been several months since the last episode of this podcast. Some of our listeners will know that Maureen Kincaid Speller, with whom we started this thing, passed away in September of last year. This episode is being released as part of a special memorial issue at Strange Horizons, where the two of us with Maureen have been reviews editors since 2015.

Aisha Subramanian: Back in 2018, Maureen and I took part in a long conversation with Jonah Sutton-Morse for his podcast Cabbages and Kings. That episode was never actually published, and Jonah was kind enough to dig out the recording for this special issue. We’re so glad that this means we get to include some of Maureen’s own critical work in this tribute to her. Here’s Jonah introducing the episode.

[musical sting]

Jonah Sutton-Morse: I don’t remember exactly when I became aware of Maureen’s Speller, but I first met her in 2015. My name is Jonah Sutton Morrison. At the time, I hosted a podcast called Cabbages and Kings, and in my first episode I said that I had read The Buried Giant and not really known what to do with it or what to make of it.

And soon thereafter I had an email in my inbox from the senior Reviews Editor of Strange Horizons, which published the reviews and criticism that I most envied online and who I knew only as a person with a very intense-looking osprey as her virtual representation. And the email said, let’s talk about The Buried Giant.

And those who knew Maureen will know that saying there is this interesting book and I don’t quite know what to make of it, is kind of sending up a bat signal for her. But I didn’t realize it at the time, and so I was somewhat trepidatious. And we had an absolutely delightful conversation that spanned grief and memory and discussion of landscapes and Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and how funny people still are about genre.

And during that conversation, she shared with me a version of her notion of what the critic’s job is.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I love books where you’re constantly arguing. I suppose there is a level on which I read novels kind of like a detective story. There’s always a sort of process of analysis and attempting to unpack the novel. I often feel quite uncomfortable about that. It’s the critical practice I’ve been taught, and at the end of it, I still need to be able to knit the novel back together and let you make it into a whole, because otherwise I feel like I failed a novel of myself.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: And it was splendid, and I published it, and we became more and more friends after that. And we chatted sometimes and had various zoom conversations and slack conversations and also sometimes recorded episodes for the podcast. We went over the Clark Award shortlist nominees at one point and later had a book club discussion that included both Watership Down and The Stone Boatmen. And it was wonderful because Maureen was wonderful and what she loved, as far as I could tell, above all else—other than maybe taking care of the cats and Mort’s escapades—was talking about books that were worth talking about with other people who wanted to talk about books, and I got to do that.

And a thing, I think it’s easy sometimes to think that critics are interested in criticism and therefore not interested in joy and celebration. And I hope that hearing this other brief excerpt from our discussion might persuade you that Maureen was always interested in joy and celebration.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I know what we need to talk about, Jonah. Yes, we need to talk about The Boatmen.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: We did talk about the boatmen that day and we talked about The Stone Boatmen, and much later we got together with Aisha and talked about three books: one epic fantasy, one steampunk alternate history, and one collection of contemporary short stories with a magical realism inflection. We talked about Everfair and The Winged Histories and Temporary People, and we did that in 2018, at which point my podcast was already mostly on hiatus. And by the time I got it edited into shape, the podcast was entirely on hiatus and life and work and family were happening. And then Maureen was sick. And then it was very clear that I was never going to be able to have another conversation like that again. And it was not really very clear that the conversation that we had would ever really have a home anywhere, but it does. And I’m very grateful to Strange Horizons for making the space to include this recording, which is a little over an hour of Maureen getting to talk about books that were worth talking about with other people who like talking about books, and I hope that it may bring you as much joy as it brought me. And so, without further ado, my conversation with Maureen Speller and Aisha about Temporary People, Everfair and The Winged Histories.

[musical sting]

Aisha Subramanian: It’s 09:00 in the UK, which means it’s something like two in the morning in India.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Ah, 02:00 is about the time Mort will decide it’s time for another meal or something and come in and wake Paul up.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: [My daughter] has been having a very interesting sleep schedule recently and so, yeah, yesterday it was one in the morning.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Climbing into bed with you is kind of engaging when it’s a cat, not so much, possibly when you’re ....

Jonah Sutton-Morse: I mean, it’s cute every once in a while! But I was thinking maybe, Aisha, this feels like it’s sort of right up your alley. So I was thinking maybe we could start with just a little bit of musing on empire and violence and colonialism and whether you saw threads there that you found particularly interesting and maybe you could kick us off a little bit with what you saw between the three books.

Aisha Subramanian: When I picked Temporary People, I wasn’t expecting it to have exactly the same links to the other two books as it turned out to do. But with all three, I think the thing that really stood out for me was the sense of these quite polyphonic narratives in telling the story of a people. And obviously what a people means changes depending on which book you’re talking about. Sometimes it’s a subgroup within a nation, sometimes it’s a story of a nation and so forth. But it felt to me that all three books were really interested in multiple voices and in putting those things together into some sort of larger narrative in very different ways as it pans out. But those were some of the things that I found really important.

And obviously with Everfair and The Winged Histories, the way that that is interpollated by empire is a lot more obvious, in that Everfair is written within a history that we recognize and understand. And The Winged Histories is about an empire that says it’s an empire and is very clearly thinking of itself in ways that we recognize as imperial. I don’t know that that’s necessarily true of Temporary People, but again, there’s still so much to be said about power and who wields it, and nationhood, and also citizenship.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I’d also like to pick up the point of the sort of polyphony of voices. The first time I read Everfair I had a certain amount of trouble getting to grips with it. Until Aisha raised it just now I hadn’t really thought about the way in which it occurs in Temporary People and also in The Winged Histories. I’m wondering now if the idea sort of polyphony of voices is a condition: can a novel actually successfully discuss topics such as empire and colonialism if it doesn’t actually use that polyphony of voices? So I shall leave that there for us to think about.

[musical sting]

Maureen Kincaid Speller: The basic idea behind this book is that it’s effectively attempting to write an alternative version of the reign of King Leopold II over the Congo Free State. It’s really quite hard to describe exactly what King Leopold II and his people did to the Congo Free State. But if I quote from the beginning of the novel the historical note ”the exact number of casualties is unknown, but conservative estimates admit that at least half the populace disappeared in the period from 1895 to 1908. The area thus devastated was about a quarter of the size of the current continental United States. Millions of people died.“ I’ve been particularly interested in this having read [Adam] Hochschild’s book; it’s a pretty grim read, unsurprisingly but also intensely moving, the way he explores what went on and writes about it. I found it very powerful when I first read it.

But what I was also interested in—I have this kind of love hate relationship with steampunk. I’m still not quite sure what steampunk is for, but I was interested in the idea of actually tackling a historical issue like King Leopold’s reign of the Congo Free State and trying to write an alternative version of it in which King Leopold was defeated. In the end, I found that the steampunkiness of it was much more subtle than I’d expected it to be. And I think I’ve just read some of the steampunk I’ve read has been sort of lavishly fondling the machinery in a narrative in a narrative sense, it dwells so much upon the machinery it doesn’t actually think about the ways in which one might use technological developments. The first time I read it, I was not very sure what she was actually doing with the narrative structure. Having come back and read it again, my head is in a better place for dealing with this. One of the things she does is to actually go from somewhere in the mid, er, actually starts off in 1889, but goes all the way up to pretty much 1916, which, of course, in our world is part way into the First World War. And although there is something that’s analogous to the First World War in Everfair, it all turns out rather differently. But what I was very struck by was the way the narrative was structured as a series of almost snapshots dipping into developments and we sort of drop back in each year or over a period of months and see what’s going on. But it does not actually engage in lavish explanations. It’s left to the reader to put things together. There’s a series of glimpses which I actually found very, very interesting because it makes me work as a reader. But it also means that the novel is actually able to cover a fairly broad range of not only period of time, but also multiple viewpoints and a lot of different issues. And it’s sort of left for the reader to sort of actually think through and work it out for themselves.

It’s quite surprising, actually, in that I think it’s very quick-fire in one way, almost the same kind of technique you find in certain kinds of thriller writing. Kind of boom, boom, boom, moving on to the next thing, but spread over a period of time like that. You’re sort of dipping in and out. You’re able to see how people’s attitudes change or don’t change. But what I particularly liked was the ways in which she was exploring multiple approaches to, I suppose what we call issues of diversity now, but also micro racisms. The way that people regard themselves on the one hand, as I suppose, what we’d say now is woke. And on the other hand, they’ve got all their little prejudices that they can’t quite bring themselves to address. The more as I’ve read on the second time, the more excited I became with the whole thing, seeing how it fits together. It’s so beautifully done.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Yes, I felt like this definitely rewarded a second reading, in part because I struggled with finding a sort of coherent shape to the second half of it the first time through. And I think the second time I was more conscious of sort of the project and what was being shown, but it wasn’t the story of Everfair, the nation state as I had initially imagined. But I’m going to put a pin in that for a minute and say: Aisha, what resonated from what Maureen said for you?

Aisha Subramanian: I think one of the things that you said, Maureen, about the number of things that it manages to touch on because of that format was really important to me when I was reading it. A couple of years ago, I reviewed a book by, bizarrely, Kevin Costner, which was that it was a sort of pastiche Boy’s Own, adventure novel thing set during World War I, so really quite close in time to this that had many issues, to put it mildly. But one of the things about it that I really enjoyed and that I kept coming back to and thinking about was the way that novels set in imperial context are able to be so big in terms of their geography, in part because they’ve got that sort of imperial superstructure that makes a really obvious link between what’s happening in this corner of the world and what’s happening in this corner of the world.

And I think that that aspect of its setting is something that Everfair really uses beautifully. You’ve got these wonderful shifts both in time and perspective and in geography. You’ve got things happening in Britain, you’ve got things happening in France, and they are directly relevant to what is happening in and around Everfair. And Everfair, in turn, affects what’s happening in those countries. It’s one of the things that I think we lose in the 20th century. And it is good that one of the reasons we lose it is decolonization, obviously! This is not a plea for Empire to come back! But I think that sense of the bigness of the world is something that a science fiction writer is in a really good position to exploit. It’s just that sense of how lots of things come together and fit together and bump up against each other. And just the amount of research in this is incredible.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes, it wears its research very lightly. I think in some ways.

Aisha Subramanian: It just feels like deep, vast knowledge.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I remember how when we all read Hild at some point, I think, didn’t we do that for a Strange Horizons Book Club? We were all sort of overwhelmed by the amount of research. And then I suddenly thought, yes, but this is a book that does not wear its research very lightly. Which is not to say it’s not a remarkable book, but I found I became quite tired because there was so much in it being pushed at me. Whereas in Everfair there was a really wonderful balance between the story sort of narrative pushing it on all these people. We kept encountering over and over again and everything around it. I think this is what I actually feared about the steampunk elements of it. I was going to be invited to admire the ingenuity of the ways in which the inventions have been sort of retrofitted with steam or something. And yet it’s been done much more carefully than that. I was striking you as sort of the Bar Songai, Their Mysterious Earth, and I’ve been reading this for a while and I said and I thought, oh, God, we’re talking about nuclear, aren’t we? Radioactivity.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Yes, exactly!

Maureen Kincaid Speller: But it was there, but not there. And then at the same time, the sort of thing that struck me about that example in particular, the knowledge was exactly the same as the scientists of this world have sort of gathered, but it was just cast from a different perspective. They’d all reached the same conclusion that this stuff is really dangerous and you had to be really careful of it, but it wasn’t being heavily signalled. It’s like when you get alternative worlds and they’ve all got coffee in them and they all want to frantically signal to you that that’s the coffee analogue, because you need to know about the coffee analogue. And you just want to say: oh, no, please, not again.

Whereas this was never in your face and you could read the whole thing quite happily and maybe miss the cues, but you’d still get the same effect. You still sort of understand that this was another form of energy and there was something unusual about it. And I liked a little bit towards the end where one of the characters recognizes as this what sort of European scientists would call pitchblende, same thing. So the connection was actually made, but almost in passing. Two different societies, two different cultures, had found the same substances, had come to the same conclusions about them, chose to express their understanding of how they worked in slightly different ways, but the end result was the same. I really, really like that. You read those novels where we’re back in deep history and a person has suddenly figured out agriculture, or a person has suddenly figured out steam. And you know that it’s standing in for the fact that probably lots of people are coming to the same conclusion, but it always feels very yes, extremely artificial and contrived. Whereas this seemed to be, all the way through there was this natural exchange of ideas, different groups of people bringing ideas together. And you could see the anxieties at times as different cultures wondered what this would mean for them. But there was always this sort of consistent thread of people being interested in working together to improve what they’d got by utilizing other people’s ideas rather than dismissing them because they thought it came from somewhere else and therefore it’s inevitably going to be inimical to us. Of course, that was sort of set up against various people’s prejudices, like Martha Alban’s conviction that Bibles, we needed Bibles before anything else. I thought actually she was very interestingly presented all the way through in the way that she was struggling with—she wanted to keep bringing it back to the need for Christianity above all else, but she was constantly being ... not quite undermined, but confronted with alternatives that she really didn’t quite know how to process.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: And I think I’d like to jump off that a little bit because she was not the only character and in fact very many of the characters brought a strong ideology and sense of the world with them. I mean, not only is there the utopian socialist founding and then the hymn; I have to take a moment and just say that I, despite being a very bad singer, really enjoy communal singing. And so I was won over by Everfair, by the national anthem and the formation of the national anthem. But then, yes, Martha is bringing her religion and Christianity; the King has very strong ideas about how he’s supposed to be making decisions. So I felt like a lot of what was going on in Everfair was that it was very honest about the ways that diversity can be really hard because you can bring very strong convictions. And even if you are bringing both very strong convictions and a lot of goodwill, you can make mistakes on the micro level and you can make mistakes on the macro level in how you are treating other people, and how communities and societies can work together.

Because it turns out that if you spend your time working on socialist ideology and working class, then you miss the power of saying "let’s form a community together." And if you say "we are all going to be equal now," then you miss the fact that you have just displaced the King and all the people who used to live here, and they have strong ideas about the fact that they should really be in charge. And those conflicts, I feel, really played out on both the macro and micro level and I think that that was some of what I struggled with the first time I read it because I wanted the unified story of Everfair. And I think part of the point is you don’t get the unified story of anything because it is not.

Aisha Subramanian: Of anything!

Maureen Kincaid Speller: No, exactly. I love the way she was still pushing this right at the end, that point where you think, oh, everybody lives happily ever after is what you’re expecting after all their travails. No, it’s going to keep on—not disintegrating, but there will be dispersal. It felt true. I don’t normally go into fiction looking for truth in that way, but this felt true in a way that extended beyond the novel, if that makes sense.

Aisha Subramanian: I think as well that it’s quite rare to have characters in a lot of science fiction but also in a lot of literature in general who live in their worlds in ways that I recognize as being engaged. I mean, you can absolutely imagine these characters having these massively fraught arguments about the news, the causes of the war, et cetera, because that is the sort of people they are. They live in the world and they’re aware of what’s happening around them and they have thoughts about those happenings.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I think that what I had was the sense that in the gaps between our various sightings of them, you have the sense of that going on. They’ve had the discussions, we’ve been away as the reader, we’ve been away and we’ve come back to catch up with what they’re doing. Then we have to figure out what they have done while we’ve been away, because obviously, when you sort of meet somebody, you don’t have a massive info dump of what’s been going on in one another's lives, so you’re having to sort of constantly figure it out from things they say and what’s going on around them. As you said, they’re quite definitely having those arguments just around the corner. I found in the end, actually, I cared about them all very much.

Aisha Subramanian: I think I cared about them more than I would have in a more conventional narrative structure where I’d actually been walked through their relationships and their ideas and their experiences over that period of time.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: It’s interesting to actually be able to contemplate what they’re trying to do as individuals and they’re all sort of driven by the same sort of earnest conviction that they’re doing the right thing. There’s actually very few people you meet in the story who are outrightly bad. Possibly Thornhill the assassin. Very few of the other people are actually bad people. They’re all very focused and motivated, but they, in some instances, are so focused on the one thing, like Martha, that they don’t actually find it very easy to see anything from anyone else’s point of view.

In a way, actually, I find the same of Daisy Albin. She’s still, at the very end, fretting about the fact that Fwendi and Matty might actually marry. [Fake gasps.]This would be too terrible. Have you not learned anything during this? No, you haven’t really, have you? This is going to be your persistent prejudice. Whatever happens, you’re not actually going to be able to dig that one out, you’re not going to be able to deal with that. And fortunately, they appear to live happily ever after without her interfering. It’s like your gently racist mum or your gently racist aunty, isn’t it? What do I do?

Aisha Subramanian: There’s a really beautiful moment that is quite near the end where Daisy once again brings up her whole plan to have a day to commemorate Jackie. Once again and again, you get the feeling that this debate has been going on a lot more off the page as well. But once again, Lisette is not in favor, for obvious reasons. And then there’s a moment where Lisette is just feeling utterly defeated by the fact that Daisy is never actually going to get this.

Yeah, there’s this lovely bit about where Lisette "[sobs] inwardly with the fear that there would never be anything more between them than these meetings fraught with the sight and scent of love, but not its touch." And it’s just that thing where everyone means so well and everyone is trying so hard. But there are some ways in which these people are never going to be able to fully understand each other and fully come together and fully commit to each other. And it’s both completely understandable and deeply tragic.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I found it interesting, too, the number of these characters, like Daisy Albin, appears to be quite closely related to E. Nesbit in some respects, there seem to be some similarities of situation. I did wonder whether Matty was some kind of—I wasn’t quite sure who he might be, but I had a sense I was supposed to know who he was in another world.

Aisha Subramanian: The obvious one is Thomas, the Reverend, who is some form of George Washington Williams.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes.

Aisha Subramanian: But not—obviously alternate-universe.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes. And it’s quite fascinating the way those little resonances .. did you notice, too, all those odd little sly references to Peter Pan?

Aisha Subramanian: I noticed a couple. I don’t think not that many, though.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: There’s White Bird, that thing that JM Barry wrote, but it’s talking later about Wendi-La. And there were sort of other things I suspect are lurking in there—this interesting idea of also never and ever playing off against one another. And I may be going way too far now.

Aisha Subramanian: No, but I really like that as a possibility.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: It’s just quite intriguing, isn’t it? Was there ever a more problematic concept than Never Never Land? I mean, of course, Too, we’ve got all sort of the H. Rider Haggardy bit. Young George Albin wanting to prove himself, you think, oh, this could turn into a disaster. He’s going to try and be Allan Quartermain or whoever.

Aisha Subramanian: I thought about that bit in part because one of the things that you keep getting with the Haggardy sort of book is the concept of little bits of Africa that are unexplored and still claimable and the ways in which those books, that whole genre uses the geography of all of Africa to keep making more bits of it that can be imagined into new kingdoms. Because obviously, Everfair is partly writing back to that tradition, but also writing in that tradition.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Well, shall we turn from Everfair towards a more realistic setting and one also grounded in real world history? Because I need help with Temporary People.

[musical sting]

Jonah Sutton-Morse: I remember passages of it that I very much enjoyed and passages that I was very lost in. Aisha, can you introduce us to Temporary People? And some of the things that you particularly connected with?

Aisha Subramanian: Temporary People is a collection of short stories that may in some ways link to form a larger narrative, but in some ways also don’t, that are set in and around the experience of laborers from the south of India, so from Kerala, Malayali workers who go to the Persian Gulf. And it’s very hard to explain this to other people, really, because if you’re Indian, this is just a phenomenon that you know about, that there is this huge ongoing movement between Kerala and the Gulf states. So people move to these countries usually because the job prospects are better, but then also find themselves frequently abused underpaid, legally quite precarious. In one of the stories in this collection, a man literally transforms into a passport that allows another man to escape the country because sometimes you lose your passport, as in your employer will take it and then you’re stuck there. And one of the things that I found really interesting about this, apart from the polyphonic nature of it, again, was that it uses language in really complex and interesting ways. It uses reality in really interesting ways. When I started reading, I wasn’t entirely sure how the stories were linked together. Obviously, they are about a similar experience being retold in different ways. But do they exist in the same universe? Are they subject to the same natural laws? They’re not, as far as I can tell.

So you do have these common threads and these common themes that just that keep recurring through the stories. I just thought it was a really fascinating collection in the use of not quite genre, but just the freedom to do whatever with those stories, the ways they go between quite science fictional, quite magical realist. I don’t want to say Kafkaesque because the Internet will hate me.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: That’s only because there’s a cockroach in there somewhere!

Jonah Sutton-Morse: There is, there are a few different stories that center around the cockroaches.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah, cockroaches are very important to this text/ collection of texts.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: One of my favorite American novels is John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer. It’s that sort of idea of you’re kind of walking down the street and each story is handing on to another piece of story. And it’s not quite the same as that, but there’s a sort of sense of it’s like you’re standing in the middle of a group of people and sort of turning around gradually, and everything they’re thinking or experiencing is being broadcast at you, and you’re having to try and disentangle it as you go. It’s almost like you’re not meant to, or you can’t make complete sense of it. I think I read it more like a novel than a series of short stories. Sort of taking that Dos Passos pass idea of the story being handed off from one person to another as you move through a place.

I like the idea that it comes at me in so many different ways that I can choose to interpret through genre perceptions. I mean, like the story with the lift. Well, that’s a great out-and-out horror story. It’s really quite astonishing. It’s formally so exciting, too, the way in which it’s constructed and playing with language and then basically the end of it. This is this lift that’s eating kiddies and doing things to them. It’s really quite extraordinary. Wonderful thing. And then you saw something like chapter three, "Pravasis," that list of things that people might be visa keeps coming into it. Non resident worker, non citizens workers. Workers, visas, people visas, workers, worker. I love the way that it’s—there's something very reductive about it, what people are.

Aisha Subramanian: One of the reasons I find it so difficult to talk about is because the experiences it’s getting at are of people who—it’s in the title. They are temporary people. Their personhood is sort of in this constant state of negotiation. They’re not citizens. They are temporary workers. In some cases, they don’t have ways of proving their own identities or their identities are stolen from them. Sometimes they’re not real people at all. Sometimes they are literally manufactured to be labor.

I think particularly in the context of the other two books that we’re talking about, which are very specifically about nation and nationhood in quite direct ways, this one sits really uncomfortably because they can’t be members of a nation. They’re not real people in the way that the nation understands people.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: It’s like it’s constantly you know, identity is constantly dissolving. Whereas in Everfair, and I think, too, in The Winged Histories, there’s a constant movement towards consolidating identity.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah, I think, so in Everfair, a lot of the time, people’s identities are consolidated partly by bouncing off each other.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes.

Aisha Subramanian: And in Temporary People, people sort of dissolve into each other.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes. I mean, actually, one of the things that strikes me in various places is the informal support systems that exist. Like the story “Birds,” the one where Anna Varghese worked in Abu Dhabi, she taped people specifically, she taped construction workers who fell from incomplete buildings. And there’s that sort of idea that she’s been doing this for a long time and she’s developed a kind of little community about her around herself, and she’s involved. People know that she’s the person to go to, the person who will sort of bring some help in some ways.

Aisha Subramanian: And even there the solutions and those support networks are very much about patching things up. Again, they’re temporary.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Something really quite amazing about that story. I really, really like it.

Aisha Subramanian: That is an incredible story. And having that right at the beginning is great for the book. But also … it’s just a really good short story on its own, as well as the way it stands in relation to the others.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yeah, I think it’s actually … some of these I think if you took the collection apart, they don’t stand on their own and they cannot stand on their own. And I suspect they’re probably not intended to stand on their own. But there’s various stories, and that is one of them, that do have a life apart from it. It’s like when you’re the only child and you marry into a massive family and this is great. And then suddenly you go, who are all these people? How do they all fit together? It becomes overwhelming. You spend ages trying to figure out everybody’s stories and how everybody is related to everybody else, and you probably never quite figure it out.

Aisha Subramanian: And if you’re at, like, a wedding reception or something, they’re all talking at once anyway. So again, you’re just getting bits and pieces of what’s going on around you.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes. Actually, that idea of a babble of voices, I think is quite important for this one. The reader is actually put in a position where everybody contained within this collection has a chance to tell their story, and they all want to tell their story at once because they don’t actually get that chance very often. So the reader becomes a kind of captive audience and everybody’s vying for the reader’s attention. Does that work?

Aisha Subramanian: That does sort of work

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Very much, yeah.

Aisha Subramanian: One of the things it reminded me of was a book that I read and evangelized about that was both unavailable in most of the world and completely impenetrable. So almost no one actually took me up on this. But there was a book by a, I think, Bangladeshi-Canadian writer called Ghalib Islam called Fire in the Unnameable Country, and it’s in some ways very different to Temporary People, in that it’s mostly one person’s narrative, though with many caveats. But it’s got the same sense of being about a particular experience and trying to tell that experience in ways that are quite slanted, quite metaphorical, quite unreal, and also in the sense of the languages it plays with and the ways that knowing the languages in question enriches your reading of the text.

Because I know that there’s definitely I’m probably missing some of the Malayalam stuff because I don’t actually speak Malayalam, but I have family members who do. So there were definitely little bits and pieces that I picked up on and saw what he was doing, but there’s also some Hindi in there. Somewhere he’s introduced his book by talking about it as "Malayalam slang finessed in an Indian school on Emirati soil, jazzed up thanks to American Arabic and British television," which makes sense, obviously it makes sense for him as an author, but also you can see echoes of all of those things in there.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I’m very mindful of the fact that there’s a lot of this I’m not getting, because no familiarity with any of the languages that aren’t English, because, of course, not as monolingual as some, but I’m definitely quite monolingual. But I’m very conscious of the fact that there’s areas of this book that I cannot access. It can only ever be hinted at. Some awareness of the fact that groups of workers are coming from other parts of the world to work in the Gulf States, particularly the controversy about the conditions at the moment of workers building the stadiums for the World Cup.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah, that was one of the things that really did make it to international news.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Again, that drops away, doesn’t it? It’s there for a little bit and then we think, what’s happening to these people? What’s going on now the news isn’t focused on them anymore? I’m very struck where he talks about the United Arab Emirates, "where foreign nationals constitute over 80% of the population. It is a nation built by people who are eventually required to leave."

Jonah Sutton-Morse: One of the stories is specifically about requiring people to leave. Right?

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yeah.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: There’s one where the idea is everyone is going to have to.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: It reminded me terribly, in a way, it was almost like it was a riposte to the Ray Bradbury story, the title of which is I’m now blanking on. But in The Martian Chronicles, where all the African Americans take a ship and they all go to Mars, I think they go to Mars and there are people trying to stop them. And there’s a sort of glorious moment where it doesn’t matter because they are all going to go together and everybody’s leaving. And it’s almost like it’s kind of riffing off that. But at the same time, they’re not leaving because they want to leave.

I’m sort of struck by this thought, what is the end effect, the net effect of that departure, the effect it has on those left behind? Or so suddenly they’ve got to do the things themselves. There is nobody there to do it for them. I find something quite interesting about that idea of mass departure and what it actually says to those who are left behind and having to sort of face the effects of the choices and decisions they’ve made about how the country is going to be organized and put together. I mean, literally put together.

Aisha Subramanian: I’ve just opened that story, chapter nine, “Akbar Exodus.” But I’ve just opened it and opened it at the page:

"A reporter from the BBC puts the spokesman on the spot. Our understanding is that many of these men came here in the '70s. Will the government acknowledge their contributions before they leave?"

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Oh, my God.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah, exactly.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: This is Windrush, right?

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah, it feels that way. It wouldn’t have occurred to me when I was reading it, but this week it’s very hard to think of anything else.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes, very much so. I’m old enough to remember some of the groups of West Indians coming to Oxford. I was quite little, but I remember how a lot of them in Oxford were bus drivers. And we still had conductors in those days, so we had bus conductors, so we had all these guys with different accents collecting the bus tickets and selling the bus tickets and things like that. They’re very vivid in my childhood, so I’m sure they were in lots of other places as well, but they were there. And I just cannot believe now. But, yeah, that really, really does resonate.

Aisha Subramanian: It really does. Again, I think one of the things that drew me to this was specifically questions of citizenship and precariousness and immigrants and their precarious positions legally and in every other way. At the point when I suggested that we read this, I wasn’t entirely sure whether, when we talked about it, I would be in the UK or in India. I’m not entirely sure where I’ll be six months from now. It all feels a little close to the bone in some ways. And obviously I am extremely privileged compared to the majority of the people in this book in the kind of legal and generally what does one call paperwork apart from legal?

Jonah Sutton-Morse: I think it is an ideologically freighted term, no matter what one ends up choosing.

Aisha Subramanian: Exactly.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Well, I’m actually going back to Everfair. That’s one of the interesting things there the ideological freighting of the whole thing, and even more so here because in many ways in Temporary People, it’s less articulated, but actually more vividly expressed in experience, if that makes sense.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Yes, I think that experience is a very key piece of this. I am remembering advice that I got on reading Annihilation, which was to read carefully … “careful attention without mastery” was the phrase, because the points where I had difficulty with it were the points where I started saying, okay, how do I stack all of these stories up? And the parts that I think I was most successful with were: first of all, some of the stories are just amazing and the images are amazing. But also, I think, maybe rather than trying to stack the book into a structure, seeing it as jumbled together and enjoying the ways that all those jumbles can fit together each time.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes. Having sort of read it once and then sort of come back to try and read it again the second time I read it, actually thinking, I have just got to let this wash over me. I have to let it sweep me away and sort of carry me on the tide of the words and images and see what I have with me by the time I get to the shore. And then if I do it again, I’ll bring different things with me. And those are the things that are going to be most important to me at that particular moment.

Aisha Subramanian: I want to mention—though not necessarily talk about it because I don’t know that I have much to say about it—the moment in one of the stories, sort of midway through the first part, I think, where we discover the attempted creation of this sort of subaltern nation state; that we discover that they have an anthem and everything. Partly because the other two books that we’re talking about do think about nation states, and also because in this case the nation state gets shut down quite quickly. But it was just very pleasing to me when I was reading it to have that sudden thread pop out.

Oh, and I also want to mention the story where the tongue runs away. Because I’ve talked about the use of language and playing around with multiple languages and so on. And I think that particular story literalizes so much of what’s happening in the other stories and is just completely brilliant to read.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: But also, actually, it sort of really brings out that idea of the people involved as bodies that it’s okay to sort of break them apart. You don’t actually see them as people. It’s like at the beginning of Anna Varghese’s taping people back together, when the tongue runs away it’s this sort of vivid expression of the fact that these people are just a series of parts.

Aisha Subramanian: But also that early story where the three men run away and they turn into a man, a passport and a suitcase. There’s just a lot in it, and some of it is honestly quite brilliant.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think it’s an easy read, but I think it’s a very rewarding read. And again, it’s much more overtly even than Everfair inviting you to look at the structure of narrative as well. Test your expectations of a narrative, what a narrative should be. And I’m always up for that. I also love the idea—I’m going back to the horror lift one—the idea of a child bearers being called manufacturists. “Normally, manufacturists comprise two parents!” But it’s interesting, that, because it’s a very vivid glimpse into how a world is defined by construction, this is not a natural process. It’s become even something like conception, gestation, birth of a child has become a kind of mechanistic thing. It’s got no existence as something natural. They’re manufacturists, you know, they make things.

Aisha Subramanian: That also feeds into what you said earlier about the thingness of bodies in this world and also to that story where new labor is literally being manufactured rather than born.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Yes. Imagine how well, not even imagine how convenient that would be in so very many ways for some of the group of people.

[musical sting]

Jonah Sutton-Morse: All right, I think I’m going to turn us to The Winged Histories, which is Sofia Samatar’s second book in the world of Olondria. And it is a story of four women during a war. And I think it’s the same war that we saw in Stranger in Olondria.

Aisha Subramanian: I think so.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: There’s Tavis, the swordswoman who is very closely related to the emperor and runs away to go be a soldier. There is then Tialon, who is the daughter of the priest of the stone and grew up in the palace, but very, very isolated. There’s Seren, the singer and the poet, who is in love with Tavis for a while. And then there is Siski, Tavis’s sister, who went off to fall in love, and then it didn’t work out as she had planned. And I have to admit that the first time I read this, I have a very vivid memory early on of reading The Winged Histories, sort of in, Trump had been president for almost a year, and yet it still felt like in the wake of him coming to power and Tav is coming to grips with the fact that she has lived a very privileged life in an empire that she has come to not want to be part of and in fact, lead a rebellion against. And that’s complicated. She lived this life of privilege, she has lots of nice memories and also the whole thing is sort of crumbling and coming apart and that is very difficult for her.

And I was feeling like I have lived a privileged life in something that I am increasingly becoming aware is a very dangerous and harmful empire and many things are coming apart and that’s very hard for me. And I was reading The Winged Histories and seeing myself in the swordswoman and I fell in love with the book and I enjoyed many other parts of it. And that is by far my strongest memory and reaction, even having read it twice now. So I’m curious for either of you, what clicked and connected for you?

Aisha Subramanian: For me, there’s little sort of incidents within all four narratives that suddenly just jump out and feel intensely familiar and real. So, for example, as you say, Tav is, on the one hand, one of the people who benefits most by the empire as it stands. But her breaking away from it also involves a huge amount of privilege. Her relationship with the other people who are breaking away from or who are trying to break away from the empire involves a huge disparity in power. And I just thought that that was really interestingly and complexly dealt with; the ways in which in which she does understand, to a great extent, the destructiveness of Olondria, but doesn’t always fully understand herself within that, her own position within that. That part of her narrative felt very important to me.

And then, of course, you get to Seren’s narrative where she calls out Tav a lot.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Yes!

Aisha Subramanian: Which is brilliant and again, very upsetting because once again, you’ve got, as with Everfair, you’ve got a romance that is disrupted or shattered or somethinged by that inability for the characters to get past the power relations which they can’t get past, they exist within them. I also, as much as I love that this is a story told by four women I both do and don’t want Dasia’s story. That’s a really good narrative. That’s a really, really good arc. I want to see what that’s like from the inside. And I’m both quite glad that we don’t because I really like how in both of these books, the actual reality of war and rebellion is dealt with, but it’s dealt with at a remove in some ways, even though with Tavis you’ve got a literal instigator of the current political situation, it still feels like we’re at a remove from the action.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Yeah. I mean, most of her action that you see is the leading up to it and the aftermath. And I think even the aftermath is not it’s from Seren’s perspective.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah. And Seren’s position in this is, again, quite different and less immediate.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Yeah, I like that in some ways, it is saying that sort of the least interesting part of the civil war that crumbles the Empire is …

Aisha Subramanian: … the civil war that crumbles the empire.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: That crumbles the empire. It is instead the people that it happens to and the ways that it happens. And of course, there are all of those beautiful passages in Seren’s section where she is rethinking how you tell heroic stories. That’s just wonderful.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I think the story that actually I find most interesting is—I mean, they’re all great—but I’m very intrigued by the story of Tialon, Ivrom’s daughter. Her story is so terrible in so many ways. Her father is a monster, driven by his beliefs, which in the end, his entire life seems to be a disappointment to him. And she, meanwhile, has lost the only person she’s ever actually loved. And now, at the end of it all, she’s sort of sitting there as the war rages around her, trying to figure out what she’s actually supposed to do. She’s literally got nothing except what she’s got from her father, who’s spent his entire life pretty much oppressing her and trying to strip her life of any kind of pleasure in the name of his religion. I think what fascinates me so much is she’s so static. She’s just sitting in a room waiting, and yet there’s all this going on inside her head.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: And I think it’s interesting your comment that her father is kind of a monster is, of course, true. And also, it didn’t occur to me very much at first because it doesn’t occur to her, that it would be very easy to describe this life from outside of her experience and see it as horrible. And yet it is what she has known.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes, I’m trying to think of a way of encompassing that. It’s actually not easy because when you look at it, it actually seems quite straightforward. She’s never really had much of a life because of her father, and yet when you start looking at it in more detail, there’s a level on which she knows what has happened to her is wrong, but it’s at the same time all she’s got. And she knows that it’s all she’s got. She said, if only he would come back and stand over me again in the way I hated so much when I was a girl. The man is gone, but she’s mourning him because, of course, he’s her father. And there’s that attachment, however one sided it might be, because he did not behave like a father, yet he’s all she’s ever had as a father. That sort of contradiction, the tension between her desire to be normal and yet she can’t let go of her father. Then you turn the page and see, “When he had shed his name, left the capital, cut off relations with nearly all of his family and friends. When he had become this harsh young man, Ivrom, the mirror of the stone, he still remembered the pink peppercorn tree in his aunt’s garden in Bain.” And you think, oh, there's that terrible little moment of beauty locked inside him.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Yes. Aisha, is there another section, another direction that struck you?

Aisha Subramanian: So one of the things I think that really worked for me was, first of all, the stone itself and the ways that so much of our attention is on that question of text and text being overwritten with other text and what is significant and what isn’t, and is this an important religious message, or is it just something someone wrote, the equivalent of a shopping list? So that sense of meaning just piled up and interpretable and the way that that bounces off the other uses of text throughout the book.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: There is a passage, I think, relatively early on about the various noble families that have come to be in the empire and at least one of them being descended from the sort of vampire monsters and the notion of that sort of coming back to haunt them later. And I’m going to give a spoiler here, so readers beware. But of course the monsters come back. And yes, there are so many parts of this book in which the texts and the stories and the ways in which they are significant. There are many ways in which they are significant in much the same way that you can read the stone and wonder how much significance to attribute. What does it mean that there is the founding myth of this empire and that the truth of the founding myth is related to the different ways that various families have connected and also the founding myth turns out to be literally true and a real problem.

Aisha Subramanian: There’s a wonderful moment where Seren, I think, points out that the myth of the noble ancestors who rode giant birds and the myth of the scary vampire people are in her language, they use the same words because death coming from the sky is pretty much the same if you’re on the ground. Here we are:

You came out of the sky. A legend. They have begun to call you Shastuen now. "The Winged." And in Kestenyi, the word for "vampire" is shasladhi. It means "the flying Lath." You draw a distinction between the Drevedi, whom you call monsters, and the ancient Laths riding on great birds. We do not. All of them come from the sky and all of them kill. I do not want to remember this, winged predators from the Valley, and at the same time, I don’t want to forget.

I love the idea of even within spoken language, at the level of the words itself, there’s this sense of contested meaning, depending on who’s doing the speaking.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: So what about Siski? I was prepared to be very angry with her before we got her story, which is probably the point.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yeah, I think you may be right, yes.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah. I think we’re definitely invited to read her in certain ways that are again informed by a lot of our reading of genre that get undermined as we actually encounter her.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Siski is the one who ends up sort of marrying in order to help save the family, isn’t she?

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Her family has planned for her to marry the prince.

Aisha Subramanian: And something happens.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: And for Tav, that something means sort of the end of the idyllic childhood. And for Tav, when she returns, Siski is being very determinedly, the society sister, without any real morals or kindness or understanding, just sort of flitting among her privilege.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: When I was reading, I kept thinking of sort of late nineteenth-century Russian novels when I came to the bits of Siski in them. Not necessarily Anna Karenina, I think maybe more sort of bits of War and Peace. There was a kind of distinct flavor of people stuck with, I suppose, with a sort of unsustainable lifestyle. But their position demands that they keep on doing this. They can’t actually walk away and do something else, even though they are supposed almost literally bankrupting themselves because that’s what they’ve been trained to do. That’s the way they’ve been taught to live in a way that Tav hasn’t been. Tav has been able to walk away from it and go and do what she wants to do and be a warrior, whereas Siski is somehow I don’t know. I find it interesting, actually, that Siski makes me think of the bird Siskin, that fluttery quality of being trapped somehow in this beautiful cage.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: She is constrained almost as much and in many of the same ways as Tialon. Yes. I can’t imagine what it would be to be outside of that.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: It’s quite hard to engage with her. And then as time goes on and you sort of see her caught in this, you feel a kind of sympathy, or you cannot help but feel a kind of sympathy. It’s just trying to do what she can, but at the same time, there is no way out of it.

Aisha Subramanian: I think that when you see her from outside so when you see her from Tavis’s perspective, it’s easy to think of her as being oblivious to what’s going on around her. And the minute you realize that she isn’t that she’s well aware of what’s happening but isn’t necessarily in a position to do very much about it, she suddenly becomes a much more sympathetic character. And also, there is obviously a period in between where she is quite a mess. But you also start seeing her using the rules of the world that she is trapped in ways that are conscious and deliberate.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes, that’s the point when she becomes Anna Karenina. I find it quite interesting when a novel is working quite determinedly in one area and then you see these kind of these resonances with things you’ve read elsewhere. It reminds you that things resonate across genres and how artificial those ideas can be. When I read this, it did speak very strongly to me of bits of War and Peace and indeed bits of Anna Karenina and that sort of same sense of being caught in a system that is long past, its long since ceased to have a useful purpose and to actually be viable. But people are sort of desperately continuing to perform it because that’s all they know how to do. And there’s a sense of inevitability that this set of structures must pass. And do you keep going right to the end hoping you can maintain what you’re used to because it is all you’re used to? Or do you have the strength and are you forward looking enough to be able to let go of it? Of course, the truth is, whatever we’re in, we very frequently tend to cling to that with which we are familiar, even if it’s no longer working, because it’s what we know.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: It’s funny, Maureen, I remember in one of the early book clubs that we did and of course, those also had fairly obvious resonances and yet there was a certain amount of exercise of sort of how do we see if these books talk to each other? And I think that these three talk very directly to each other. And I think it is interesting the point about the polyphony of voices and I think also the ways in which they talk around power structures in much the way that The Winged Histories is not actually talking about the war when it tells the story of the war or not actually telling the story of the war when talking about the war, because it’s very much talking about the war. But I think that it’s interesting to see those very similar techniques.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: And I think interesting too, to see how they can be taken in such different directions as well, how many different ways there are of talking about these kinds of issues, which I always appreciate.

Aisha Subramanian: From a purely genre perspective, if you said you were going to read an epic fantasy, a nineteenth-century alternate history, and a collection of modern-day, magical-realist-y short stories, you wouldn’t necessarily be expecting them to be thematically coherent in quite this way.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: And yet I think they turn out as a group to actually have a great deal to say to one another, which I think is really awesome. It’s actually been very satisfying to read the three of them.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Yes, I do wonder how I’m going to feel the next time I read an essay or I’m talking to someone who says, “Oh yes, genre does this. Fantasy is well equipped to do this. Science fiction manages that so well. Because I think that one thing about these is that they do sort of explode the myth that genre determines …

Maureen Kincaid Speller: More and more, the more I read, the older I get, I really don’t think that I think it’s a useful way of exploring practically any subject. It’s a lens through which to examine a subject. But I do not believe any more that genre does determine.

Aisha Subramanian: I still think there are specific things and specific effects that particular genres can do that nothing else quite can. But, yeah, I think in terms of actual subject matter, no.

Jonah Sutton-Morse: Well, thank you both very much. I have really enjoyed this.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: No, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I’ve really, really enjoyed this. I’ve been looking forward to this for ages. I’m so glad we’ve been able to sit down and do it. It’s great. I always enjoy a book club discussion.

[theme music]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to this special episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. Our theme music is dialup by Lost Cosmonauts. You can hear more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com. Thanks again to Jonah Suttun-Morse for allowing us to use this audio, and again to you for listening to it. And most of all? Thanks, Maureen. We miss you.

Editors: Reviews Department

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents the poetry of the 2 May issue.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents the poetry of the 18 April issue.

View Details

In the second episode of Critical Friends, Aisha, Dan, and Maureen discuss the role of trust in criticism: how it is built and lost, and how can the reader decide whether a particular piece of criticism is worth paying attention to?

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents the poetry of the 14 March issue with readings by the poets.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents the poetry of the 7 March issue.

View Details

In this first episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, reviews editors Aisha Subramanian, Dan Hartland, and Maureen Kincaid Speller present a discussion on where, if anywhere, we can find this thing called SFF criticism.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents the poetry of the 14 February issue, including a reading by poet Gretchen Tessmer.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents the poetry of the 7 February issue.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents the poetry of the 24 January issue.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents the poetry earned in this year's Fund Drive.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents the poetry of the 3 January issue.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents Merie Kirby's “Mother.”

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents Freydís Moon's “NAMED THINGS.”

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents C. S. E. Cooney's “Werewoman” with a reading by the poet.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents Madeline Grigg's “The Giantess Angrboða Drowns All the Mirrors in the House When Her Husband Loki Leaves.”

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents Allison Parrish's “Variational Sestinoid Spiral Seeds 281698895 and 510616808.”

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents Liam Corley's “Frame of Reference” with a reading by the poet.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents K. Ceres Wright's “Mission: Accomplished.”

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons fiction podcast, editor Kat Kourbeti presents Lisabelle Tay's "Surat Dari Hantu".

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents Anthony Okpunor's “Insomnia.”

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents Mary Robles' “Corazón Oculto.”

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents Courtney Skaggs' “The Little Death After the Apocalypse.”

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons fiction podcast, editor Kat Kourbeti presents Clara Ward's "Motivation Augmentation."

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents Steve Castro's “The suck-up.”

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Kat Kourbeti presents B. Pladek's "All Us Ghosts."

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents Yuna Kang's “Funeral for a Star,” with a reading by the poet.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents the poetry of the Southeast Asian Poetry Special Issue.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Courtney Floyd presents H. Pueyo's "Cocoon."

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Courtney Floyd presents Melanie Harding-Shaw's "Data Migration."

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents Hannah V Warren's “Ode to Women’s Arms in SF Television.”

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents Bryce A. Taylor's “Cartilage” with a reading by the poet.

View Details

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Kat Kourbeti presents P. H. Low's "The Loneliness of Former Constellations."