Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 21: On Style

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by Paul Kincaid, a returning guest of the show and most recently author of the excellent review collection Colourfields, and by the poet and critic Dawn Macdonald, whose Northerny was published last year by the University of Alberta Press.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we tackle the question of style. What is it? How do we know it when we read it, and why does it have such a tense relationship with SFF authors? And reviewers. Dawn and Paul talked me through prose and poetry criticism and close reading, and together we poke around a bit at the thorny question of what style in science fiction and fantasy might mean and how those of us who write about SF might do so with more attention to the words themselves.

We began by trying to define our terms. When it comes to style, it turns out this ain’t easy.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Thank you both for joining me for this conversation about style, and especially style in SFF—although we can discuss whether that’s even a separate topic of conversation.

One of the reasons I was really pleased that both of you have written about style recently for Strange Horizons is because it seems to me that so few do. I mean, we will now get so many letters of comment in telling me that, in fact, loads of people write about style and I’m just not reading the right reviews or whatever it is! But it feels to me that we write, in science fiction criticism especially, but elsewhere too, much more about content than we do about form.

So your two reviews coming so close to each other made me think, okay, this is probably the only opportunity I will get all year to do an episode on style. But it struck me. And, while we were talking just before we started, I know that you both agree that can be difficult even to know what style is.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah it is.

Dan Hartland: So I thought we might start with that. Paul, why don’t you kick us off? Because it was you that said most vociferously before we began that no one knows what style is. So why don’t you tell us?

Paul Kincaid: My take on style? Any work of fiction, poetry, drama, whatever has a lot going on in it. You know, you’ve got characterization, you’ve got setting, you’ve got the story itself. You’ve got meanings and references and all sorts of other things, but that’s all below the surface. The surface is style. Style is what takes you from the words on the page into what is going on within the story.

Dawn Macdonald: Everything has a style, but the style is not always calling attention to itself in a really obvious way. And so there’s an anecdote that I was thinking about on my way over to my office here. Isaac Asimov talks about somewhere a fan letter that he received where the gentleman said, “Dr. Asimov, I love your stories. I usually hate reading, but when I open one of your books, I don’t feel like I’m reading at all.” And Asimov thought this was an amazing, wonderful fan letter because really his goal was not to have the linguistic interface standing in the way of the story or calling attention to itself separate from story. So almost an anti-style.

But at the same time, when you read Asimov, it sounds like Asimov. Like, he has a voice, he has a style. You do have a sense of him as distinct even from other writers from that era, like Arthur C. Clarke, who are writing very plot driven, very transparent type of prose.

But each of them kind of has their unique way that they do it. But when we are talking about the works that that we reviewed recently—C. F. Ramuz that I reviewed and, Paul, the verse novel that you reviewed—I think those are works where style of the prose really calls attention to itself as a significant part of the experience of reading this text.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah. You couldn’t discuss either of those books without talking about style because you are missing fifty percent or more of what is going on on the page. They are rare, though. It is all too easy not to mention style when you are reviewing books. So many books try to be transparent, which is itself a style, but there’s also, let’s face it, in science fiction so much absolute flat writing that could be an office memo as much of the story. I read so many of those.

Dan Hartland: I’d really like to get into science fiction’s relationship with style specifically, because feels to me to be the greatest push-pull of relationships. But let’s stick briefly to this idea of what style more generally is.

I’m really struck by what Dawn says, that everything has a style, right? But that some things are stylier than others! We talk about stylists sometimes, don’t we, by which we mean, I think, writers that, as Paul says, call attention to their style, that use their style in a very ostentatious or visible or clear way.

John Keene, the writer, has defined literary style as kind of the material articulation, I think he said, of whatever the author’s trying to say, right? So whatever the author is trying to write down, style becomes the kind of materiality of how they do that—their choice of diction, their syntax, all of this stuff.

And as Dawn says, some of these choices, some of these material articulations, are more kind of textured than others. Let’s dig in briefly, then to the reviews, to try and get a sense of what that means in practice. So, Dawn, talk to us about the Ramuz. I mean, your review of this book was itself a beautiful exercise in style, I thought it was so, so well written. But yeah: Let’s talk a little bit about why you were so attracted to the style of this book and so struck by how it behaved.

Dawn Macdonald: Well, it’s an interesting book because not only is it a work in translation—so we’re looking at how the translator dealt with the style of the original (and I did not read the original, I do read some French but not well enough to really make that comparison for myself and I don’t have it on hand), so we get the layers of how the translators worked with the style of the original, the style of the original, the style of the translator—we’ve also got the fact that it’s an older book.

So, it came out in the 1920s and I’m a big fan of writing from that era. There’s a lot of really cool stuff that went on in that era—a bit nascent for science fiction, but I felt like this book really situated itself within modernism, it had some aspects that related to other writers of the period, like Thomas Mann. It wasn’t Jocyean in exactly, but it had some of those elements of being a bit experimental in how it approached narrative. I felt like that was an aspect of what was going on, kind of as much as any story that it was telling.

And this was in particular a book where there was not really much of a plot. Like, the plot kind of happens on page one, right, where they give you the premise and then it’s just kind of the unfolding of that premise and you could probably predict everything that’s going to happen. So it’s more about situating the reader inside an experience of being a person who is in the last days of the Earth, where the end is inevitable, and facing mortality—facing not just your own mortality, but the mortality of the planet, of the species and what that might feel like. So it’s more experiential, I guess, as a book rather than story. It’s trying to put you inside and let you get into a mind-frame or almost a spiritual frame, and it’s doing that by kind of casting a spell.

Paul Kincaid: By coincidence, I’ve just read a book called Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank, which is … well, its subtitle is Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.

And it makes very interesting point about Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway, that style of writing at that time—the 1920s, just post-First World War—where the emphasis was on the sentence rather than the whole thing. It sounds like that applies to your book, Dawn. In Frank’s book, he made the analogy that it’s like you are doing a painting and the artistry is in the brush strokes not in the finished picture.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah. And I would say that the emphasis is on the sentence and also the emphasis is on inhabiting a consciousness. So if we think about Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway, right, where it’s stream of consciousness or Ulysses, where it’s stream of consciousness, I would not say that Into The Sun by CF Ramuz is exactly stream of consciousness. It isn’t that, but it is about situating you inside of a consciousness, a conscious experience, kind of inhabiting fragments of moments that piece together.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, it’s when you say that there is no real story in it. It’s trying to put an experience into words rather than trying to put a narrative into words, which is also what I felt was the case in the verse novel I reviewed, because I find that absolutely fascinating. But you can do things with words rather than just do a straight story. I’ve been writing something recently about the New Wave, and the big controversy when the New Wave was going in on the mid-sixties was: They were bringing in literary style. They were bringing elements from the novel, from the modernists and so on, and the traditionalists were saying, “We don’t want any of that. Science fiction is all about just the story. We don’t want any of this fancy stuff going around it. We just want the story.”

And actually, when you look at some of the things, the stories that they were extolling, they’re virtually unreadable now.

Dan Hartland: The modernism thing I think is really important to the reasons for and the ways in which science fiction began to have this kind of difficult relationship with style. And it’s partly because the modernists themselves aligned themselves against the so-called realists, the H. G. Wells and the Jules Vernes. And so the inheritors of that tradition were like, “Well, OK, we’ll do our thing and it will be different. It won’t have this style stuff.” And so there’s kind of a mutual chauvinism going on there.

Paul Kincaid: Yes.

Dan Hartland: Which I think persists, for all the improvements in the position, shall we say, since that time—the New Wave being being one of the big shifts—there remains, I think, a kind of skepticism of style.

Dawn Macdonald: But I do think anything that has a really distinctive style that’s so noticeable to the reader is polarizing, right? So readers will love it or hate it, but it’s a strong flavor. It can be like cilantro, where half the population loves it, half the population just genetically hates it.

Someone I know is a big reader of a kind of action-driven fantasy, and the way that she would characterize a good book is mostly about pacing. Right? That it pulls you in, that you stay with the story, that you enjoy it, you get to the end, you feel satisfied and good. Something that has a really pronounced kind of style might feel like it’s standing in between you and that experience that you’re looking for—like, it’s extraneous. It’s in the way, it’s unnecessary.

And I get that and I think that can be done poorly, where it really is extraneous and it really is standing in the way. But it can also be done as experimental literature. And I think that science fiction is such a capacious genre that it has space for a lot of experimentation on almost every level of … what even is a book, what even is a story?

It’s interesting you mentioned the New Wave. Like, I grew up in a bit of an isolated situation, and so kind of reading whatever I could get my hands on. And sometimes that was a box of mouldy paperbacks that someone had in their shed, right? And you’re like, “Hey, can I have those?” And so there was at least one of those boxes that was New Wave, but I didn’t know that it was. I didn’t know what that was! All I knew was that this was some weird, fourteen genders, every possible kind of thing that could happen socially from that. And some very interesting kind of styles of writing.

And in some ways I think that probably set me off towards longer term path towards experimental poetry and really seeing that range of what words can do.

Dan Hartland: Paul, your most recent review was not about a prose novel at all. It was about a verse novel. And you talk a little bit in there about how those two forms or mediums work differently. And of course, Dawn, you’re a poet, so I thought we’d be remiss not to talk a little bit about poetic style as well.

The book we’re talking about here is Syncopation by Whitney French. Talk to us a little bit about that, because we went back and forth a tiny bit on this review where I was like, “Yeah, but Paul”—and it’s similar, actually, Dawn, now I think about it, to what you’re talking about the Ramuz—which I was, I kept saying to Paul, “Yeah, but Paul, what’s this book about?” And he was like, “It’s about the language.” Right? “I can’t say anything else.”

So unpack that a bit for us, Paul.

Paul Kincaid: The title says it all: It is syncopation in the way that jazz music is syncopation. It’s rhythm, it’s slight jaggedness in the rhythm, so that you are never on a smooth edge, are bouncing from one thing to another. It’s not straightforward.

It’s not going to be a book for everyone. And the reason I wrote the review the way I did was I was aware I was writing it for people who probably wouldn’t get a lot of verse stuff from it because it is an unusual form for science fiction and it’s trying to get across this idea—that the words matter. Because they do far more than just tell a story, but the pattern of the words can be integral to how that story is told and what the story is. If you don’t get that element, if you don’t get that rhythm. You’re missing part of the story. A key part of it, I think.

So that’s what style is, actually. Style is what tells you how to read the story.

[Musical sting]

Dawn Macdonald: Something that struck me in your review, Paul—which I checked out before we met up today—is that Syncopation, which I’ve not read, but that Syncopation uses Caribbean dialect. And so when we’re talking about rhythm, we’re talking about rhythm in a variant English and Caribbean dialects.

I’m not sure which one is specifically being used in Syncopation, but Caribbean dialects tend to have less metrical stress in the way that words are delivered, and just a little bit of a different emphasis—a different rhythm, different flow. And so, as readers, when we’re reading this in standard Canadian accent, your English accent, we are reading it with our own kind of overlay of rhythm.

And that affects the experience of reading. How much do you need to understand the variant English that it’s referencing in order to get the full effect? How much can you kind of come from outside of that, not know it and get introduced to it in the work?

Paul Kincaid: I came from outside of it, I have no idea how much I got and how much I missed. I suppose you’ve got the same problem with translation: You don’t read the original, you don’t know how much you’ve picked up and how much you’ve missed. I think we all do that with everything we read. There’s always that gap. There are things that everybody can pick up from every book if they open themselves to the patterns of the book, if they open themselves to the rhythms of it.

Dan Hartland: You’re making a really great argument there for accessibility. Paul, so of course what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna bring in Mikhail Bakhtin and make it all inaccessible again! As you speak about that kind of gap between the style and the reader, there’s, gotta be a bridge there somewhere. And as Dawn says, sometimes that gap can be larger and sometimes it can be smaller. And he felt that that the best style included in itself elements of the alien that it was trying to reach, right? Which is a lovely image. And he uses the word alien, which I think is ideal for conversation about, about SF.

I mean, that idea of the bridge seems really interesting to me. And I wonder whether, again, science fiction—and science fiction reviewers, perhaps we could start talking about this a bit—have fallen into that gap too often. Any separation at all between themselves and the style and they’re a bit like, “Oh.” And the reviewers of science fiction—in my view, as I said at the beginning—tend to avoid talking about everything we’ve just been talking about.

So, for the last twenty minutes or so, we’ve been talking about all this stuff: What style is, how plot can happen in style. I wonder why then, given that we all agree—the three of us at least!—that style is so rich, why we think SF reviewers—I don’t wanna pick on SF reviewers, I think a lot of reviewers do this, I think, often ignore it in favor of content, but let’s stick to SF for now. Why do we think we ignore it? Is it just because it’s hard? Is it that simple?

Paul Kincaid: Yes!

Dan Hartland: It is. OK!

Dawn Macdonald: I think it can be hard to talk about.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, and it’s easy to talk about content. It’s easy to write a review which is basically a plot summary or something like that. Practically everybody starts writing that when they start writing reviews. Picking up on style, picking up on anything beyond the very basics of the story … it’s something that comes cumulatively. Presumably, also you need to be aware of style in your own writing in order to be able to spot it, recognize it in another piece of writing. It calls for a self-consciousness that I don’t think probably applies to every single SF reviewer.

Dan Hartland: So let me ask a question, then. If it can be hard, why do you guys do it? Why do you make … why are you making your life hard? I mean, obviously we’re picking two books here, Syncopation and the Ramuz, which make it so we don’t really have a choice. We have to talk about the style! But I know that both of you often do anyway, in books that don’t call so much attention to themselves.

So. Silly question, but since we’re saying it’s hard, let’s look at why you do that. Why do you make your life hard and talk about style?

Dawn Macdonald: I mean, I don’t know that it’s uniformly hard, but I think that to start talking about style, you need a vocabulary—as Paul said, an awareness of style.

Like, some writers, they talk about someone who is a writer’s writer, that other writers like reading their work because other writers will get something out of the work that someone who isn’t involved in that might not care about. So having that kind of writerly orientation, maybe having some background where you would have some apparatus for being able to recognize different traditions, different linguistic traditions, different things that might be happening, how it fits into like the New Wave or, comes from that lineage, how something fits in with modernism, how it fits in with experimental poetry or whatever: There’s a lot of assumed background here, and it takes a while to reach that point.

For myself, it’s just something that interests me. Even in like the last one that I reviewed for you, Dan, which didn’t have as obvious of a style, it was Inner Space, and it was written by someone who is a video game designer, and it had very much like game feel of, there’s kind of a mystery almost that’s unfolding within like a locked room. There’re the rules, which are the rules coming from mission control. So it had a gamified feel.

But as I was reading it, some of the things that interested me about it was both how well that was done, doing something that was within kind of a game space, and then also how choices that the author made about point of view and about narrative voice locked him into certain situations that he had to work his way out of.

And so I find that interesting. I guess just what were the technical things that the writer had to do to get themselves out of the spots that they put themself into by the choices that they made. It’s like a weird game, and I think it’s interesting.

Dan Hartland: And of course, that was another work in translation, right? Yeah, yeah. Paul, tell us why you slave at the mines of style when you could just be off talking about content.

Paul Kincaid: But why do it if it’s so easy? It gets boring if you’re just taking the easy route. Every time I need to keep myself interested in what I’m writing, I look at the things that interest me.

I don’t know if this is true of you, Dawn, as well, but when I’m writing something, I read it aloud. I read it aloud to myself to get … partly to check that it works, because if you read it loud, you spot mistakes and clumsinesses far more easily. But you also develop a rhythm, a pattern, in the way you put prose down on a page, and that’s made me very conscious of my own style when I’m writing.

So I’m aware of what it is, so I move on and look at what it is in other people. It is fun. It’s fun to challenge yourself, but it also … it is just … it feels to me like it’s a natural development. It’s not something you can avoid. The more you do this stuff, the more invested you are in what you are doing. The more, the more you start going down these route.

Dan Hartland: Does that suggest, Paul, that when you first started reviewing—and it’s the question for Dawn too—did you work up to talking about style? Did you start off in a place similar to the one we were talking about? About reviewers begin by talking about plot?

Paul Kincaid: I mean, look, we’re talking about what, nearly fifty years ago. When I first started reviewing, they were four hundred words. They were basically plot summaries with “buy this book” stuck on at the end or something like that. I got bored writing so I started expanding it, making them longer. The more space I had, the more things I could discuss. So my response to books became more complicated. Therefore, the writing about books became more complicated. I think in some ways style is possibly the last thing you come to. I wouldn’t swear to it, but suspect in many cases it is. But it is a natural development. It, it is a natural place to come to for your own sanity trying to do something more interesting.

Dan Hartland: Dawn, does that match for you or did you start with style?

Dawn Macdonald: Well, it’s different for me because I’m a poet. And I started reviewing poetry collections, which don’t have a plot usually—some exceptions may apply with the verse novel, but yeah. So poetry, I mean, it’s ridiculous to say what poetry is, but I’m gonna say that poetry is the application of a style to a subject in a way that enhances both.

You cannot talk about poetry without talking about what kind of poetry is this. And you might talk about some technical aspects of that. You might talk about form, you might talk about the feeling, you might talk about to what extent is this kind of cool and distant or is this getting in and right into your emotions, into your heart; or is it something that’s very abstract, very experimental, something that’s quite wild, something that draws from the beats? What’s going on with poetry is you’re fundamentally talking about style. And so I think in reviewing fiction or nonfiction, I just kind of can’t help but notice those things and bring it over.

But there is something else I wanted to pick up on from earlier in our conversation. It’s a couple of things. So, referencing what you said, Dan—about Bakhtin and kind of that gap between self and other or self and yourself and what you’re seeing on the page—and then talking about the book you reviewed, Paul, Syncopation and the use of Caribbean dialect, variant Englishes: I think it’s important to signpost that when we talk about sort of non-style, transparent writing—where we feel like it doesn’t have a style—that it does and that the style it has may be grounded in whiteness, may be grounded in a cultural framework that has a lineage and has a background. And that what feels like transparency is familiarity and that what feels like transparency to a speaker of Jamaican Patois is gonna sound different.

Paul Kincaid: Yes. Excellent point, actually. So many of the—I hate the phrase, but—the Golden Age science fiction had that white voice going through it, and actually narrower: White American voice.

Dawn Macdonald: And male.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, male, white American. Even if it was written by British woman, it would have a male, American, white voice. And it’s intentionally plain. It is intentionally unfussy. Also, a lot of them have got about as much interest as office memo, but still it’s style is what keeps you bloody interested in the thing.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I completely agree with Dawn that what seems to be, or what is billed as, transparency is much more often hegemony, right? It’s just the thing that we’re used to seeing because we’re made to see it.

But the choices that are made within that hegemonic style, the ways in which that style is built, shut in and out things which that style can talk about or can talk to. When Paul says that the Golden Age SF was deliberately plain, that shuts out the … it has the effect of shutting out qualities of literature which at that time was seen as feminine, for example.

And this is why it’s so important actually to look at style—because style controls text. Dawn, you were talking earlier about Inner Space and being so interested in the tools, the stylistic tools, that the author employs to get out of the traps he’s set himself. But of course, style also traps. It’s not just a route out, it’s a kind of a locked door sometimes.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Do we think that the fact that a book is a science fiction book will necessarily have an impact on style? We started this conversation talking about how capacious SF is and that we should be interested in style. Do we think that there are certain styles, or that there are certain stylistic characteristics, which are natural to science fiction, which mean that the reviewers should think about style in a particular way when they read SF, or do we think that anything goes?

Dawn Macdonald: I think that they should be thinking about how the words are creating something that is alien. Not every SF story has aliens in it, right? But SF stories often put us into an alien setting, an alien situation, or a mind-space of someone who’s had some kind of mind-blowing experience that has changed their perception of reality or their perspective on things.

And to convey those kinds of things, to put you inside the mind of the alien, inside the mind of someone who has encountered the alien, we often have to take a step back from the way we ordinarily use words. And so I think that SF has an inextricable relationship to style in a way that maybe doesn’t apply as much to the other genres. Not every book is going to have this, but I think it’s fundamental to the genre in a very basic way.

Paul Kincaid: If you look at some of the best, well, what we tend to think of as the best writers, they often have a lot of style in what they’re doing: Joanna Russ or Samuel Delany or people like that, they put something into the way they describe the strange that makes it strange to us as readers.

And that is style. They use style. The ones who just write “the rocket ship came down on such and such a planet,” they’re not making that planet real. I think style is—it should be—a natural part of science fiction. That so many people say it is not is one of the great mysteries of science fiction.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Paul, in your review of Syncopation, you invoke the dread word “estrangement.”

Paul Kincaid: Yes. I do, don’t I?

Dan Hartland: You do. Yeah. Which is …

Paul Kincaid: I love that word.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Which is what we’re talking about here, right? And of course, to achieve that estrangement—totally agree with Dawn—it’s all style.

The way in which you evoke the alien—invoke the alien, provoke the alien, whatever you want to do with it—you’re gonna do that most effectively through style. It was Darko Suvin who came up with this idea of cognitive estrangement as central to SF. But he also thought—and, Paul, at this point I will yield to you as resident historian of SF criticism—but I think he also said that key to science fiction is a sort of quote-unquote factual approach to the subject matter, by which he meant it wasn’t like fairy-tale or fantasy, which had very little interest in quote unquote reality because in fact, I think he says fantasy is kind of inimical to reality. It’s deliberately setting itself in opposition to, whereas science fiction at least wants to create the illusion that it is real.

And I wonder whether in that kind of interest in granularity—like, again, rocket ships and planets aren’t coming out well from this conversation, but—in this idea that we need to know how the rocket ship works, dilithium crystals or whatever it is, you start to get some of this anti-style thing. Is there an element in science fiction that, because it wants to pretend to be practical—you think about hard science fiction, right?—that it thinks, “Oh, well, I don’t want any of that style stuff because that gets in the way.” Do we think that is a reasonable thesis?

Paul Kincaid: An awful lot of classic science fiction aimed to be indistinguishable from a technical manual, right? Which is a style! It’s not necessarily a very attractive, readable, or approachable style. They did not see it as style when they were doing it; they were seeing it as being … not necessarily an anti-style, just non-style.

Dawn Macdonald: Right. But now I’m starting to wonder. OK, so when you said pretend to be practical, I’m starting to wonder if this technical style is a kind of prestidigitation, a kind of magician’s patter to smooth over and obfuscate the fact that what we’re talking about is totally impossible. It’s an extrapolation off of, we have reality and then we extrapolate off of that in some wild direction. And, it’s I supposed possible, but probably not the way it’s being described. And so we’re kind of shoving that under underneath, aren’t we?

Paul Kincaid: Yeah. They were hiding an awful lot.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah. And by doing it in that very matter-of-fact, plain way, you can almost fool the reader.

Dan Hartland: Which makes it remarkably conscious, stylistic choice, right?!

Paul Kincaid: Oh, yes, yes.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Paul’s already answered this question, but I did want to briefly, before we kind of start to wrap up, think about the great SFnal stylists. So, Paul’s talked about Le Guin and Delany. Are there others? So, I might throw in China Miéville from the fantasy side of things. Are there others? I mean, even books that we’ve read recently that really struck us as stylistically interesting, engaged, whatever we want to say.

Dawn Macdonald: Cordwainer Smith. I gotta throw Cordwainer Smith in there.

Dan Hartland: Great shout.

Paul Kincaid: I reread some Cordwainer Smith recently and I didn’t get on with it as well as I did when I first encountered it. So maybe it’s just me.

Dan Hartland: Was it the style, Paul?

Paul Kincaid: It was a bit. It was a bit forced. The other thing about style is that you can … style is necessary, but it can be used badly and there are a lot of bad stylists out there.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah. Or not always bad, but just different people will vibe with it so differently. And so, Dan, I’m thinking, like … you asked me what I thought of Orbital. Which won the Booker, right? And because you’re like, “Dawn, you’re a poet, you probably loved Orbital!” and I did not love Orbital.

It was one where I kind of … I felt like it was sort of all style, nothing else going on for me. but I know people loved it. I know the Booker committee loved it, so it’s … I think it can just be so polarizing.

Paul Kincaid: I loved Orbital. I actually felt that it should have been on science fiction award lists, and it wasn’t. But I loved it precisely because it gave an appearance of plainness or a flat effect, but there was an awful lot more going on that wasn’t necessarily obvious. It was a very stylish piece of work.

Dan Hartland: I’d completely forgotten that Orbital conversation, Dawn. And you’re right, it’s such a good example of a book where it’s clearly doing a lot with style. Even two people that like style—much less all these other people that we’ve been talking about that can’t stand it—will disagree.

Yeah. And it’s almost the more pronounced the style becomes, as you say, the more likely it is for people to bounce off it. I was wondering, as we were talking … I was thinking about, as Paul said, plainness, and I was still thinking about which science fiction stylists, we should mention: Vonnegut! The remarkable paired-downness of his style, which I just couldn’t replicate if I tried. I don’t know how he did it really.

Paul Kincaid: Yes. But at the same time, you’ve got repetitions in Vonnegut that act like a sort of iambic pentameter, as it were: So it goes, so it goes, so it goes. And that puts you into a rhythm for reading him. So much of it is plain and flat and clear and simple, but you get these little breaking rhythms going around it which just lift it in a way that you don’t always notice you’re being lifted.

Dawn Macdonald: Vonnegut is so distinctive. Like, he has such a distinctive voice, you know it’s Vonnegut. There’s something that he’s doing that’s very deliberate. He does really experimental things like throwing artwork, very crude drawings, into the middle of his text. And, this is maybe separate from style, but he has an attitude. So when you’re reading Vonnegut, there’s like a view on the world, there’s an attitude that’s pretty consistent through his work.

Paul Kincaid: I think the only way to express an attitude is style.

Dan Hartland: So … [laughter] I would suggest that—and then this is a great example of what we’re talking about, which is that you need so many words to talk about this—I would suggest that what we’re talking about here, when we’re talking about the attitude that is created or applied to style, we’re talking about tone. And then the way that that tone and style make the reader feel is mood. And all of these kind of steps that we’re making, and words that we’re using, are so specialist in places.

And yet, I would note that, that my definition there is absolutely not set in stone. I know Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno wrote a book about tone recently where they said tone is atmosphere—which for me, like, we’re just swapping one word for another. But, they don’t agree with me that it’s about attitude, is my point.

So those are some of the good stylists. Do we wanna name names? Do we wanna say who the bad stylists are? We don’t have to, but if anyone wants to settle some scores, now’s the moment.

Dawn Macdonald: I don’t think I have a list. I mean, I think I just stop reading if I’m not into it, unless I’ve committed to a review and then I have to figure out something to say about it that’s reasonable.

Paul Kincaid: I actually read an academic book on John Wyndham recently, for review. It was so flat the whole way through. I got no sense of the author’s engagement with the text he was writing about there. There was actually, a lot of the time, a sense of being bored with it, or careless at least. So that was bad style. And I think Wyndham demands a bit more attention to style than this guy was giving it.

Dan Hartland: Academic prose in general, with some notable and laudable exceptions, is a good example of style that can be … yes, disappointing.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah.

This isn’t style exactly, but I will say that something that stops me from reading some book … so this is kind of a sad thing about science fiction, but I have a rule that if it’s a science fiction book and it’s by a male author, and if at any point in the text more than half of the female characters work in the sex industry or are victims of sexual assault as part of the plot, I stop reading. And this stops me from reading a lot of books.

So it’s not style exactly, but it’s attitude and tone toward female characters. And there’s a subtler version of like, how much physical description do you give your female characters versus your male characters? What’s the gaze? What’s the view? So not naming names, but it’s pretty prevalent in the genre.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And I bet that, although it’s not a strictly a style thing, I bet that those books have … certain stylistic aspects in common.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah, and I’m gonna call out William Gibson on this one.

Dan Hartland: And it’s so interesting that these canonical—quote-unquote—writers … we should call them out more. So I’m glad that we … I’m glad we picked a name. It is good! Yeah.

Dawn Macdonald: And it’s not that these things aren’t part of women’s lives, because they sure as hell are, but it’s using it for, like … that the majority of women in your book are defined by their sexuality. Or as victims in regard to their sexuality. That should not be the majority of women in your book, unless that really is what your book is about.

Paul Kincaid: Women as victims is far, far too prevalent and it’s one thing that stops me reading as well.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah. So I gotta go back to Asimov, who I do love. But, and he talked about when he first started writing and he was a very young man, that he did not include women in his stories. He didn’t like reading stories that had women in them because all the women did was get in the way and scream! And he eventually figured out how to fix that.

Paul Kincaid: When I was living and working in Manchester, the local SF bookshop was also a porn shop, as they so often were in those days. It regularly got raided by the police and for some reason they always took away all the Isaac Asimov books. I remember us sitting around trying to work out why Asimov? Because there’s no women in them!

Dan Hartland: Is it just because he’s “A,” and it was like the easiest thing to take so they could go back?!

Dawn Macdonald: They just wanted to read them!

I’m not sure this is a part of the style conversation. It is certainly part of the feel of a book!

Dan Hartland: It is, yeah!

If we were gonna try and encourage more of our fellow reviewers to talk about style in their pieces—if we were going to be so presumptuous as to do such a thing, which I guess we are!—what would we say? How would we suggest people that would like to, but kind of, like haven’t before, begin to do so?

Dawn Macdonald: I guess I would say don’t worry if you don’t have it, don’t worry about the vocabulary and the critical apparatus. But talk about how you felt while you were reading and if you can pinpoint some lines and some words that made you feel that way.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, I was gonna say something very similar. Look for what makes you engage with a book. Why do you engage with a book? Because what is making you engage with it is very likely to be something to do with style.

You may not recognize it as such, you may not have the vocabulary for it, as we’ve demonstrated all to amply over the last hour or whatever it is. There is no vocabulary, no easy vocabulary, when we talk about it. But look for what engages you in the book, and that will lead you into thinking about how the book works as a piece of writing and that’s style.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Is there anything we’ve missed?

Paul Kincaid: We have missed huge amounts of things in everything.

Dan Hartland: Of course we have!

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, that’s what the topic is: It’s all stuff you can miss!

All: [laughter]

[Musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-Up” by Lost Cosmonauts—listen to more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com.

After our last special episode, presented by Tristan Beiter and friends on the critical role of the book club, I reached out to that sage of contemporary fandom, John Coxon of the Octothorpe podcast, for his thoughts on the space for criticism within fandom.

Tristan’s group had not found many in-roads in fandom, and I wanted to find out if in John’s wide experience of its many corners this were true. Yes … but also no, he thinks.

“I found the deep dive on a specific book club as a tool for critical thought really interesting,” he says, “and it made me want to be in the club myself, which is I think a feeling that the best podcasts engender?” This is true, we are among the best of podcasts.

John is on board with all ideas around collaborative spaces making it safer to discuss ideas without feeling like they've got to be rigorously worked out. Providing a space to develop ideas is really valuable, he says, and for him not common on, for example, social media.

But, contrary to the group’s views, John thinks fan spaces are more friendly to criticism in general nowadays. This is a shift, he says. Traditionally, in his view, fanzines and fan writers tended to talk about the experience of being a fan rather than their experience with the works. But today the critical space occupies a much bigger piece of the fannish imagination than it used to, from Nerds of a Feather to the Coode Street Podcast. John urges us to read fan spaces broadly, and not confine ourselves to its particular expression on Bluesy, where microblogging can work against sustained critical discussion.

John thinks some fans do expect that you should have “done the homework” and should move past this: You don’t have to have engaged with every work in a franchise to engage with the franchise, and the same goes for notions of the canon. John likes the viewpoints from critics who are consciously choosing different lenses to look through. And, I hope, so do we.

Thanks to John, go and listen to Octothorpe, and ... see you next time!

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 20: On Book Clubs

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be ceding the floor for some very special guests; but more on that shortly. 

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

In this episode, and as part of our 2026 criticism special issue, Strange Horizons reviewer Tristan Beiter introduces us to the Ursula K. Le Guin book club he’s been taking part in for a couple of years. Alongside its other members, they discuss the book club as a forum for, and a practice of, criticism. How does it differ from the academy, from more formal venues, from fan spaces—and what kinds of critical activity and insight do those differences, equip it uniquely to deliver? 

The group—which also includes Emma Pernudi-Moon, Tymek Chrzanowski, and Jude Beiter—discuss what it has been like arriving at a particular reading of Le Guin’s work in the round, how being part of a book club has affected and influenced their reading—and what they’ve learned about books, community, and even themselves in the act of group reading. 

I found the whole thing such an interesting discussion. I think you will, too. So, let me hand over to Tristan Beiter.

[Musical Sting] 

Tristan Beiter: Hello, everyone. I’m excited to talk to you about the Ursula Le Guin book club that we’ve been doing. Let’s start by having everyone introduce themselves briefly. 

So I’m Tristan Beiter. 

Jude Beiter: And I’m Jude Biter. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: I am Tymek Chrzanowski.

Emma Bee Perudi-Moon: I’m Emma Pernudi-Moon.

Tristan Beiter: And we have, for the last two years, been engaging in an on and off, mostly over the summer, group read-through of the bulk of Ursula K. Le Guin’s work. 

We’d been talking amongst ourselves about the way that this book club has gone and how it’s shaped our experience of both her work in particular and speculative fiction more broadly. So where I wanted to start was by asking everyone to sort of chime in about what sense we have as a group about the book club as a thing that exists in the world, culturally and as an experience that we’ve been participating in. And how has that shaped how we’ve read Le Guin? 

I know one way into this is that, when we read The Left Hand of Darkness, we talked about our different experiences reading that book in a classroom setting versus in this setting. But I think we can address anything about how this has shaped our readings. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah. I mean, for me, the first thing that stands out about this endeavor of a book club is that it’s very … it gives a very concentrated direction to the reading. Like, normally, you know, I read a lot of speculative fiction, but it can be somewhat diffuse and move between different things in different series at different times. We’ll take large breaks, but when we have this sort of concentrated book club, for the three months or so in the summer while we’re doing it, it’s very focused.

And we’re moving through a lot of this material in a relatively short period of time and focusing on it, which gives a very concentrated look into it and really engaging with it. And, by the nature of having to, of bringing things to, a discussion with other people, you—I at least—find myself pulling on things to remember and bring up and discuss, more so than I do in just my personal reading as I’m just, you know, enjoying the story on its own.

It gives a deeper level of engagement. Because I want to have something coherent to bring to the group.

Tristan Beiter: That makes a lot of sense. Jude, Emma, how has this affected your reading, do you think? 

Jude Beiter: Yeah, I think for me, as like the primary place where I engage at this point in my life with literature is still school, the kind of different environment that is the book club as a place—where it’s still reading together, it’s still a communal engagement, and there’s still real serious discussion to be had, but there’s no expectation of “solving” the text or figuring it out—it’s just a matter of like, we come together to enjoy and engage communally in like a de-hierarchized or non-hierarchized space, which is very different from my experience in the classroom as an environment, where there are like definitive power dynamics at play and there’s an expectation to perform intelligence as a part of your reading—as opposed to the opportunity to just have the sentiment of like, “This was really emotionally effective for me” be a complete sentence in the space of the book club. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah, I’ll agree with that. I feel like it, for me, feels similar to a lot of focused, seminar-style literature classes I’ve had where we’re, you know, kind of diving deep on one topic or author but again without the aspect of performing being good at reading book! And the fluidity between, “here are all the serious ways I think about this as a dramaturge, here are the patterns I’m seeing” and “I think there’s a motif here—I truly do not understand it!” or being able to join the discussion, like, “I actually have only read half the book!” But I don’t need to pretend that I have in fact read the whole book as one might feel the need to do in a university setting where this is like rated. 

It is much more about, for me, the pleasure of finding patterns in the work and how that can kind of come together communally with everybody’s observations. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah. I wanna second what you’re all saying. And I think, as I mentioned earlier, this really came up when we were talking about The Left Hand of Darkness, which I know both Jude and I, at least, have read in classroom settings specifically. And in those cases, the classroom ended up feeling like a much more combative space than a collaborative one. There was this sense that, if people had differing readings, we needed to come to a class consensus of what the … maybe not the right reading, but the best reading was, in a way that I don’t feel in the book club environment. 

And also where I feel like it’s easier to engage with different aspects of the text. Like, I know when I was in that classroom setting, I was really excited to talk about The Left Hand of Darkness’ structure, and its use of documents as a formal object; but because of the formality of the space you needed a higher critical mass of participants interested in any given aspect of the book in order to justify talking about it. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: And also, you kind of need to … there’s almost a justification for each book in a classroom setting. Like, “This is why we’re talking about this one.” And usually for Left Hand of Darkness, I feel like it gets overwritten as like, “Oh, this is … we’re talking about gender, guys! This is the sort of thing we have to get at from this book. This is the nut we have to crack of, like, how exactly is it working?” And also, interestingly for me, I feel like there’s an absence of worrying about or poking at the political efficacy of the book.

Of course, I’m very interested in looking at what the books are doing politically, but there’s less of a worry about is this strategy effective? And it’s more about kind of letting them be, I think, in a way—because they’re already, we have already chosen these books, they haven’t been chosen for us—to kind of follow the book club structure a bit. I think there’s something about it being one author that is also doing this, but I’m honestly not sure what that is. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah. I definitely want to second what Emma just said about the classroom space kind of labeling The Left Hand of Darkness as the gender book, and then the expectation that we would decide as a class whether or not this was an effective representation of gender non-conforming people. And in that space for me, as a gender non-conforming person, there was an expectation of like, well, “What do you say? Um, like, is this an effective representation of non-binary people?” And that kind of expectation to decide is absent from the much less combative and demanding environment of the book club. 

And so we could just have the discussion of, “She is doing this thing with gender” without having to worry about whether or not this is the most effective way to do it. We could just talk about what was actually happening. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: It’s interesting talking because, if I remember, as we talked about Left Hand of Darkness, we of course did mention genders—like, “Ursula is doing things with gender here”—but it was a fairly minor part of our overall discussion, as we followed threads as folks that are all fairly queer and enmeshed in gender as a construct and deconstructing that. Yes, this was written in the seventies. We see that there is something going there. She’s doing something with gender, but there are other things that are more interesting for us to talk about. So it did come up, but we didn’t feel obligated to focus on it in a way that a classroom might frame around it.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: That’s true. Like, the whole kind of pseudo Cold War vibe that’s going on in the contrast culture, I feel like it’s so easy to overlook. 

Jude Beiter: We talked a lot more about that and honestly, I think we ended up speaking about gender more in relation to books where there’s less stuff very clearly happening. Like, when we read Earthsea, we talked a fair amount about gender in that context, and I just think there was more freedom in the space to kind of follow alternative threads. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, I think that’s a great point—that by being outside of the classroom justification, where something needs to be the Whatever book, we were able to sort of track connections across different works. 

I think your point about tracking the gender and sexuality relationships of Earthsea, which on the surface are such a small part of what’s happening in those novels, but in another way are super essential—like, Tenar was her first female protagonist. And I think that that question wouldn’t have come up necessarily in the context of reading The Tombs of Atuan in, like, a survey of children’s literature. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: I think it also—the having it all be focused on one author—removes the pressure of each book to sort of justify where Ursula K. Le Guin is an author that you should pay attention to and read, and that has these certain themes in her work.

Like, you don’t have to pull out every theme from every work. It’s much more, “Oh, we can kind of see a cumulative process.” Especially when you consider how many years that these worlds are unfolding over within the fiction and also in her own life, you get sort of this longer, whole tapestry of these things that the author keeps thinking about and returning to that I found enriching as a reading experience. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah. There’s a long time between works like A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness and the latest stuff, things like The Telling or The Farthest Shore. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Or even just like the big sort of almost-trilogy split in Earthsea and seeing the way that her … like, following this trajectory of these themes over the course of her career.

Tristan Beiter: Yeah. And I wonder as a related question to this: You mentioned, Emma, about Le Guin as a valuable author who is worth reading, and of course you get that when you encounter her in a classroom setting as well, or when you notice that the Library of America has been putting out editions of all of her work. But I was also thinking about that in terms of the book club as an object—since speculative fiction book clubs happen, but I don’t know about the rest of you, but for me, when I think of the book club, I think of like middle-aged people reading realist fiction as sort of the default model.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: I think about my local library where I can physically see the book club kits in the mezzanine, and also see the people coming in to do their book clubs—and it is generally middle-aged to older women reading famous, bestselling, like you said realist literary fiction. Somehow the prototypical book club book that I have in my head is Joy Luck Club, I don’t know why that is. When I hear book club, that’s what I think of. 

Jude Beiter: As soon as you said Joy Luck Club, I was like, yep, that is the prototypical book club book! And I think for me, part of the real joy of this experience—and also part of where it has so much like critical value for me as a scholar—has been in taking up this mode that is associated with kind of realist fiction and being, like, “What if we make it a space for the speculative, choose to use the modality in a new way? What can we learn about speculative fiction that way?” 

And I think one of the things that I feel like I have learned about speculative fiction by borrowing this modality to engage with it—at least what I have learned about Ursula Le Guin—is how like deeply communal her novels are in their plots and in their structure. Even novels which have a clear main character—which not all of them do—have extended casts and emphasize community in ways that I don’t know that I would’ve noticed if I was not engaging with it in this space that was all about finding a casual community in reading.

[Musical Sting]

Tymek Chrzanowski: The communal reading and interpretation of these stories, and following a meandering path through them, feels very thematically appropriate for Le Guin. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah, I agree with that. And I feel like it also echoes with the idea of less pressure and performativity, the feeling of complete sentences—“Oh, I agree with that! I also noticed that!”—whereas in a classroom setting, that’s kind of not worth saying, that’s like taking up too much of your hour and a half—if you’re lucky!—discussion time. And, because of the reoccurring nature and the fact that we can have the discussions that kind of expand as we like, and we can return to material, as we focus on the book that we’ve just read, but we’ll often analyze previous works in the context of a new work. This creates this, I think, beautiful space for going-and-returning structure, which I think shows up a lot in her work. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, no, I agree. And I think, in the spirit of that, that sort of brings us to the other big thing that I wanted to make sure we talked about today, which is the beginning of the project—where we started not with The Left Hand of Darkness or with her first novels, but we started with Always Coming Home. Part of that—I was very open at the time!—was because I was hoping to find an excuse to read it, because it had been on my to-be-read pile for a long time, and I knew it had all kinds of interesting formal stuff that I was really excited about. But I think that it’s shaped this project maybe more than I was expecting when I suggested that we start there. And what we’ve been saying just now about community and circling back feels really in line with the thematics of that novel. And so I was wondering if other people had thoughts on how starting there has shaped their experience of reading her work. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Oh my gosh, I’m so glad … I literally was going to bring up, that we started with Always Coming Home. It, yes, it’s so thematic and I feel like, again, in a way that makes a lot of sense as we talked about each set of novels, of books, that we read.

I feel like the specter of Always Coming Home always came up because it’s such an encapsulation of her work in such a good frame, I think, for engaging with it. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah. I mean, I think that Always Coming Home was such a beautiful starting point for this project. And the way that she developed this society within that novel … almost like, in a weird way, I felt at various times when we were doing the book club discussions about later novels, that we were engaging, not unlike the Kesh: This sense of, “Well, we’ll simply treat everything as though it is real.” Which I think is a foundational part of both Kesh society and how her speculative fiction operates. 

It’s not even the suspension of disbelief—just, like, throw out the concept of disbelief entirely. Just think it is true. And if you can do that, then you can engage with her works more fully. This kind of mode of storytelling as something really fundamental to the way people connect with each other, I think, is something that I really felt throughout the experience of this book club—of reading together as an opportunity to learn from people, as scholars and as people, all at once just felt very connected to how Always Coming Home operates? Like, both thematically and structurally. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah, and the freedom to pull in different things really easily I think also, yeah, mirrors that structure of Always Coming Home where it’s this sort of diffuse collection of things, this ethnologue with poetry and plays and longer narratives and little pictures of guinea pigs—where, you know, because we are a group of friends fundamentally communicating informally and over text, we can have like multi-threaded conversations where we’re kind of having multiple things going on at the same time. We’re referencing earlier works, but also completely outside things we wouldn’t necessarily pull on, pop culture connections, in a classroom or reference … talking about the internet posting  culture that exists around novels or characters. Like, I remember posting some things about, as we encountered them, memes of The Left Hand of Darkness and whatnot, and then having a larger conversation. That is part of what we’ve been doing in response to [the work] that feels very in line, structurally, with Always Coming Home. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah. And I didn’t join for Always Coming Home, but an exciting thing about the book club format is I can still feel its influence through all of your analysis of it, and of how it keeps coming up. So I feel enriched by this text, even though I haven’t had my own experience with it yet. But excitingly, it doesn’t feel like the classroom version of like, “You haven’t done the reading—quick, assemble something that looks like you understand it!” I can allow my partial understanding to be true. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah. And I think, let me see if I can find my—there it is—my copy, as what you’re saying about partial understanding I feel like is also sort of endemic to both the book club form and to starting with that novel. 

I’m looking for a particular passage. If I can find it really quickly, early on, we get the very first bit where Pandora arrives. Pandora worries about what she is doing, and it ends, “Even if the bowl is broken (and the bowl is broken), from the clay and the making and the firing and the pattern, even if the pattern is incomplete (and the pattern is incomplete), let the mind draw its energy. Let the heart complete the pattern.” And I feel like, because we’re all talking together, because we’re all building on partial understanding and acknowledging the partiality of our understanding—since, in real practice in the classroom, understanding is partial, right? In real practice, when you write or read academic work, it’s not this totalizing, absolute knowledge of something, but it pretends it is—I feel like the book club form doesn’t require that we pretend that, and starting with Always Coming Home in part is about that, but also it’s just a really hard novel.

Tymek Chrzanowski: “Novel” in quotes!

Tristan Beiter: I definitely felt like it’s the one that, even after reading it really carefully and making notes and talking with everyone about it, I came away being like, “Yeah. Got some tiny fraction of what there is to get out of that book.” And I feel like that was also really empowering for me, having that right away be like, “OK, I don’t need to solve the book.” Because we started with an unsolvable book. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: It definitely feels like the sort of text you could return to over and over and over again and not plumb all of its depths. 

Jude Beiter: And the format allowed us to … like, I think the way we kept coming back to Always Coming Home in order to theorize the rest of her work through the lens of that book was really indicative of the way that we hadn’t solved it, and there was more to discuss and we all knew it and could admit it. And that allowed us to keep returning.

Tymek Chrzanowski: “Real travel is returning,” I mean, is the quote from The Dispossessed, yes?

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah. I feel like I also really … I mean, I’ve had an an English Literature background. Jude and Tristan, you have as well, obviously. And then, Tymek, you’ve been in some, some English Literature environments, like a lot of us, but I dunno, I feel like your linguistics training comes out a bit. But having that even little bit diversity of perspective being held as an equal way of knowing, or trying to, I found very valuable. 

And it’s kind of come into our daily life in a way. For context, Tymek and I are partners that have been together for ten years, but now he will read me Ursula K. Le Guin poems, or talk about things from Always Coming Home, as kind of part of the fabric of our daily life and connection, in a way that I think wouldn’t have come about without the book club in the same way. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah. I definitely feel similarly about the way that like Tristan and I as siblings talk about these books in a very quotidian, non-organized way. I feel like Ursula Le Guin and Always Coming Home come up constantly when we talk to each other about things in the world. And I think that this, that the informality of the environment of the book club, is part of what allows that seepage into really established interpersonal relationships—that she can just kind of like come in and join those relationships and those conversations and seep into daily life in that way. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah. Because the book club ultimately … Like, a big difference between the book club and an academic environment is, even if you are very passionate about the academics that you’re pursuing—you’re, you know, you’re in a class because you want to be, and not because it’s a requirement—even in that sort of best-case scenario, the structure of the academics is a little bit of an abstraction. You are engaging with it for reasons beyond merely your interest and passion. Whereas in the book club, this is a fully voluntary thing we’re doing with friends and we can engage at whatever level we want to.

So, fundamentally, we’re here because we’re excited and passionate about it, which breeds this deeper connection where we’re doing it because we’re invested. So we’re pulling on all of the things that we find most interesting. I think that’s part of the value of it, because it lets us bring … it lets these conversations continue to influence and affect our lives and perspectives beyond what might be in the classroom.

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, I agree. And I think related to that is that, even when we have given ourselves deadlines, right—like, “Oh, we need to have these books read by such and such date so that we can actually like meet and talk about them!”—it’s never work. For those of us in the discipline of English, criticism is work, right? It’s exciting work. It’s valuable work. It’s work I wouldn’t give up the chance to do for the world. But it’s still work. There are still these external pressures to produce a product that adheres to the rules of the university. 

And I feel like the book club has allowed us to sort of bridge fan excitement—because we’re all fans of speculative fiction—with a critical attitude that is certainly findable in fan spaces other than things like book clubs, but I find that when you go online and you’re on Bluesky and everyone’s microblogging, the way fan engagement works there are pressures that prevent criticism from the level of intensity it reaches when it’s work. And I feel like the book club, for me at least, has allowed me to sort of escape some of those tensions without making it back into work.

[Musical Sting]

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah, I really like the feeling of kind of living with and alongside these books that is created by the book club—and then the fact that it is a book club of friends, of people that know each other and interact outside of this—that makes them shared cultural objects in a way that can be, honestly, pretty hard to get with books outside of very popular children’s literature. 

Like, a lot of the time—Tristan, you may understand this—as a child who read many books, it could be sort of an isolating activity. There were all of these worlds and people and ideas that I was thinking about, then I had to find somebody else who had read the darn book! We’re definitely using some book club structure, but there’s also a way in which it feels to me like a friend/fan community similar to, “Oh, we all watch this TV show. We all kind of are trying to keep up with it in a certain way.” The ways that and movies are more readily shared in this kind of current media environment, and how it can be kind of hard to share a book because it can feel like a big obligation. Even if you read a book, you’re like, “Hey, I think this would be really meaningful to you.” You give it to someone and then they’re like, “Oh, I need to read this book. I need to commit to this project.” And this has a looseness to it that helps create a sharing, I don’t know. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah. I think both Tristan’s point about work and your point, Emma, about sharing and about the lack of obligation I really experienced through this book club—in part because there was always a fluidity of expectations. 

I happened to really dislike Le Guin’s short fiction in general, and so when we got to her books of short fiction, I was like, I very much felt like pushing my way through this would be work, and that’s not the point of this. I wouldn’t be sharing and engaging the same way that I have been with these novels. And so I simply won’t read them. I’ll step away from Tales from Earthsea, for example, and allow that space to exist uncorrupted by the pressure, by the sense of pressure and obligation, without me for a little bit. And then I’ll come back in when we get back into work that I want to read.

And I think that fluidity and that sense of “there is something about the enthusiastic engagement that is worth preserving,” even within the group, even at the cost of not actually participating myself, that I think really speaks to how resonant the community is.

Tristan Beiter: Mm-hmm. I wonder if that’s related to what I was saying about fan spaces. Like, larger fan spaces can be really energizing, but they also come with built-in FOMO, right? If you’re not going to the events, or if you miss the episode or what have you. And I feel like one of the things about the book club is that the intimacy of forming a book club and setting out to read things with a defined, relatively small group of people is that that stops being a problem. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah. And there’s not the … In a larger sort of fan place, there’s an assumption that you will want to or have consumed everything and know everything. Like, you know, the way that the internet is, where we all have access to comprehensive wikis, so you can all know the lore, sculpts a very particular, I think, attitude towards those things. 

Whereas, you know, here, even if you don’t read Tales from Earthsea, Le Guin’s work and the work of the book club here is that you still can participate and understand—because you have this through-line of understanding the themes and vibes and the history of the both diegetically in the world and also of her career, rather than like, “Oh, I have all the details of the lore.” 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah. And she’s a very lore-resistant writer in the way that she builds her histories. 

Jude Beiter: I also think that the really rigorous critical engagement of the book club is part of what allows for that like fluidity. Also in that need to, that lack of need to, know all of the lore in the way of the larger fan space—because there’s not a distinction being drawn between the  serious and casual reader in the context of the book club. There is no casual reader and there also is no serious reader. There was just the book club reader.

Who steps into the space and for whom? “Here’s this really complex thought about the thematics of this book” and “that scene made me cry” are like equally valuable whole sentences, and that’s not always the case in larger fan spaces in my experience, where you can’t engage as deeply in the criticism. And so there’s an expectation to instead prove fanhood through literacy, through like lore literacy. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: I think that’s an interesting difference both against fan spaces, but also going back to academia. This ability to, as people have said, to be like honest of, “I don’t, you know, this one doesn’t interest me.” Or “I, you know, I tried and didn’t get through it.” And there’s not the shame and also kind of implicit—not implicit, often explicit!—failure to do the “proper thing” where you have like grades and things on the line. So that is another contrast with the academic there, is that it’s, you know, you can … this moving in and out is more accessible.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: It’s non-evaluative. In a fan space, when you choose not to engage with part of the work and say, “Hmm, this isn’t really for me,” you might be saying kind of implicitly like, “This isn’t worth considering. This isn’t the important part of the canon.” Sometimes, even if you’re not saying that, it can get kind of taken that way, like in academia—kind of these ideas around what is worth engaging with, what has value.

And here, I like that we can step away from something or partially understand something, and not be saying anything about its value as a work of art or as an analyzable piece of literature. It kind of already has that innately. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, I think that’s a great point, and it makes me think about the sort of recurring microblogging discourse about whether or not to be a science fiction fan you need to read whatever. Usually that means like the men of the Golden Age: Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, et cetera. But sometimes you’ll see, more radically, claims that you do or don’t need to read anything older than five years old or what have you. 

Often, very often, on both sides of that argument you see things couched as like, “Well, Heinlein was a reactionary and so you can skip him, he doesn’t matter because he was bad” or “this novel can’t be skipped because it was so important to the history of the genre.” And you see these same logics in academia. 

Obviously Le Guin is a major author that has lots of scholarship on her and is often one of those names that people say you “have to read.” But I feel like, by forming it as a book club through this casual but intimate and intense engagement, we can sort of, as you said, opt out of those questions of value by saying, “We wouldn’t be doing this if it didn’t have value, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs to experience everything exactly the same way.”

Tymek Chrzanowski: I think there’s also something to be said, because we’re engaging with like big sweeps of her work—you know, last summer we did Always Coming Home and then just did all of Earthsea, and then this year we did most of her Hainish novels—we kind of avoid of that, like, “Oh, what you must read.” Because like when people talk about Le Guin, I think, what comes up is people will generally talk, in my experience, about The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. They might talk about Wizard of Earthsea, and probably, you know, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” will come up. But no one talks about Planet of Exile. No one talks about City of Illusions.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Which they should be because they’re wild, yeah!

Tymek Chrzanowski: But like, because we’re engaging with this in this … like, seriously, but also in this fannish way, and going in this broad sweep, I think we get to engage with some of these quote-unquote lesser works that are exciting and do interesting things, even if none of us were in love with City of Illusions.

But it does interesting things and you can see how themes in there and threads that get pulled on and plucked and mature across her work. Which is really interesting. Because you know, I think there’s a lot of the DNA of Always Coming Home in City of Illusions despite it not being, you know, I think nearly as comprehensively interesting, exciting, and innovative. The Prince of Kansas and his fortune-telling future loom is extremely Always Coming Home, and the Forest People, the Plains People that they encounter: They are really, I think, a prototype in some ways of the Condor People from Always Coming Home. And so you can see these threads and this maturation.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Mm-hmm. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Which is really neat!

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: And I like doing that without the pressure to Understand Le Guin and put her together as a puzzle or, “Oh, we’re doing this to try to understand science fiction.” The lack of a larger goal like that is really useful to me. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, I agree. We’ve mostly actually answered the third question that I had about how doing the book club has sort of shaped our engagement with the rest of Le Guin’s oeuvre with the things that we didn’t sort of call out as touchstones. And so I guess I just wanted to see if anyone had any closing thoughts they wanted to wrap up with as we finish this up and also start thinking about next summer—if we want to continue doing this, since at this point we will have read most of her novels. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Try it out. You can, too! 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah, I would say it has been very interesting and valuable.

I think, you know, like I said, you could do this with other people, I’m sure, but I think Le Guin is a really great place and has a lot of things to offer. Like, I’ve independently because of this, read through her poetry. Currently I live in Portland, where Le Guin lived and worked for most of her life. There’s currently a little exhibition at the Oregon Contemporary about her life and her work, which was really interesting and cool to visit. Yeah, it’s been very valuable. I’ve come to really appreciate Le Guin as an author through this process. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah, I think that just having the … to kind of echo Emma, like, you can too! This is so valuable as a process method. No matter what your actual background in literary analysis and criticism is, just the work of sitting down and reading together has been such a valuable and engaging and caring activity. That has really been very enriching.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Also living in Portland, and with Le Guin’s relationship to Oregon as a place, I think that has also been very valuable to me. Because that’s not a thread I would’ve pulled or picked up on. But Tymek really got a lot of that, especially through the poetry, and how he’s been able to informally share that with me. So I think there’s something to … kind of getting specific with it in terms of place or cultural ties that you might share with other folks? 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Oh yeah. I would definitely say, if you have never read someone who’s really contemporary to where you are in space and time, this has been a really valuable experience for me as someone who largely grew up in Oregon and can recognize the particularities in Le Guin’s work that I think are connected to, you know, where she lived and grew up. It is worth looking for authors and also poets—other takeaway, more people should read poetry!—authors and poets and people that have done work where you are connected to, where you lived and grew up. I did not realize how exciting and powerful of an experience that can be before this.

Tristan Beiter: I definitely want to co-sign all of that and thank you all for talking through these thoughts about this experience with me. I look forward to continuing to talk about books with all of you. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yay!

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yay!

[Musical Sting]

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah. This is definitely a shout out for Tristan in particular for organizing this process and idea. It’s been great. [Laughter]

[Musical Outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can listen to more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com. 

Do dig into the rest of the Criticism Special. I’m off to form a book club. See you next time.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 19: On Cozy Horrors

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. I'm Dan Hartland, and in this episode I'll be joined by scholar of the gothic and co-host of the excellent However Improbable podcast, Marisa Mercurio, and the writer and stalwart of the Strange Horizons Reviews Department, Shannon Fay.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we more or less discuss SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it's going. In this episode, we'll be talking about horror, and perhaps specifically its cozy variety. From the gothic to the slasher movie, how might texts within this increasingly broad tradition be judged as a success? And what should reviewers do when a given example falls short?

We talk about Bram Stoker and Agatha Christie, terrifying board games, and the chilling deeds of marketing departments. And we ask where horror finds itself right now … and whether that may be a dead end. (Yeah. Sorry about that.) 

Moving on! First, and as always, we started with Marisa and Shannon's latest reviews for Strange Horizons.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Okay, so thanks both of you for joining me here! Because, as always, I'm look on the lookout—I'm always on the hunt, every month—for two reviews that seem to talk to each other. And we're fortunate that there's always several different categories and candidates for this kind of thing. But your two really stood out to me as ones that are almost sort of weirdly next to each other.

Because you both looked at two books, which are kind of, I don't know—I mean, I'm gonna call 'em cozy horror, but we can kind of get into the weeds of that and whether I'm right about that and what that might be and what these books are. But also they're both books that feature art and craft and how that relates to the horror tropes, but also some of the more fantastical stuff that goes on in both books.

And also they both talk about gender and those kinds of things, too, to varying degrees of success. And that's the other thing that made me think, “OK, we've gotta have this conversation.” Because both of these books, you sort of liked them, but you kind of also were a little bit disappointed by them. So I really want to dig into that too. 

One of the things that I think about a lot is how we can responsibly dislike books (and sometimes, you know, irresponsibly if we want to!). But, like, how do we talk about books that don't work for us. So Shannon, let's start with you and The Macabre, because this is almost the quintessential “it was fun, but also kind of disappointing” kind of book. Do you want to talk just a little bit about what The Macabre is, what happens, why maybe it's not kind of double thumbs up. 

Shannon Fay: Part of the problem of talking about this book is I feel like it was let down by its marketing—things from the cover, which has a very awesome little piece of art of a screaming woman. Her face is upside down. There is a little train of skulls at her feet, you know, the tagline’s about how a picture is worth a thousand nightmares. All great, evocative stuff. But this book is more of a kind of jet-setting magical adventure with some horrific scenes. But just because something has horrific scenes, doesn't make it horror.

And I do think the gruesome moments are well done and they do help drive home how high the stakes are. But it doesn't invoke kind of fear or a sense of dread, right? So it's fun in that sense. But it's one of those: If you go in expecting one thing, you will be kind of disappointed. 

Dan Hartland: We see this a lot in genre, right? The way in which marketing works against the text. A lot of what you talk about in The Macabre in your review is that it's a kind of heist? 

Shannon Fay: Those scenes, the fact that it's kind of episodic, is enjoyable, right? It's like, “We found a new magical painting. You need to go and neutralize it.” And so you have like kind of the crew, the plan, how are we gonna get close to this painting, how will we neutralize it? And so it’s an art heist where the art can fight back. And, you know, that is just so fun! There's lots of fantasy books where people get, like, sucked into paintings and have to deal with like, “Oh no, now we're in the world of the painting.” Always kind of a fun trope. So all that is good stuff, right? 

Dan Hartland: So where do you think it goes wrong? Because that's such a great … like, if you sold me that book, right? “Art Heist, but the art fights back.” That's great! What a tagline! But that's not entirely how the book is sold or how the book … or where the book winds up.

Shannon Fay: Yeah. Well, there is also a through-line of people dealing with grief. So, you know, the title in that sense is accurate. It does have to do … Right. These paintings are attracted to people who have suffered a loss and are often offering a kind of Faustian bargain of maybe restoring that dead one to the people they are, like, sucking energy from.

So maybe they felt by leaning into kind of that element, it needed to be more in the horror genre. 

Dan Hartland: That leads us, I guess, Marisa, to your book, your most recent review for Strange Horizons, which is of Slashed Beauties, which lives in a similar kind of space where the cover and the copy and all of that sort of sets up a set of expectations about what this book is gonna be. 

Marisa Mercurio: Yes. 

Dan Hartland: Which is kind of a kind of neo-gothic thing, right?

Marisa Mercurio: Yes, it’s absolutely a neo-gothic novel. It is set in 1769. Primarily, there are two different timelines. We switch perspectives back and forth from our narrator in the modern period, who is an antiques dealer named Alice, and she is hunting down these wax Venuses, which are kind of this obscure item, real thing—from the eighteenth century primarily—which were, if you can sort of imagine the very famous painting of Venus emerging out of the shell but lying down, a wax cadaver that anatomists could, and students could, take apart to learn about the human body without having to use cadavers. Because cadavers were really hard to come by legally, and there were a lot of ethical, moral questions, religious questions tied up with using cadavers. 

And so Alice, in the present day, is hunting down very specific wax cadavers, these wax Venuses, because there is this rumor that, in the eighteenth century, they would come alive and murder men who went wronged them. And we learn very quickly that this is all true. 

And so in the 1769 narrative, which is the one that I think is both more successful and more frustrating—because of the potential that it has and doesn't quite get there—we see how these wax Venuses come to be. And then we very belatedly see them go on their murder spree.

Dan Hartland: And where does, if at all, where does the kind of horror that we are either encouraged to expect—or, you know, deliberately signaled that we should look forward to—how, where does that come in? How does that manifest? 

Marisa Mercurio: I do think it's important to think about this novel as a gothic novel primarily, rather than as a horror novel. And while those two genres have a lot of overlap, and horror emerged out of the gothic, the gothic is doing some slightly different things. But that being said, a lot of those elements that we're seeing are—I mean, in the present day we have a coven of witches, so we have the supernatural throughout the novel—but a lot of what is horrific in the past setting, in the 1769 narrative, is honestly the day-to-day lives of these women, who are down on their luck in the eighteenth century. We follow a protagonist and she is essentially a jilted lover who's come to London from the country and who is swept up by this older—I say older woman, she's like, I don't know, not what we consider old, right, but she's older than our protagonist. And she says, “I'm starting a new brothel. Essentially, it's gonna be really high end.” And so she sweeps our protagonist up in that and lavishes her with gifts and perfumes and things, all in preparation to have her be part of this brothel.

So a lot of the horror is really coming from the human interactions, just the state of these women's lives, in that they are treated cruelly by this madam and by the men who are in her circle. And then we are introduced later to I think an inexplicably evil witch who is creating these wax Venuses. And then of course we have the murders at the end of the novel as well. 

Dan Hartland: Yeah, and this is something that I think we should sort of dwell on a little bit—you know, the various implications of this word “horror.” And, as you say, your book is a gothic horror with a significant emphasis on the gothic, and as you say that … I mean, I want to say kind of social horror, in a way that exists, certainly in Slashed Beauties.

On the other hand, what we have in The Macabre is—as you say, Shannon—that title, but also like the really striking cover, which is sort of full of red and skulls, and Slashed Beauties as a title suggests the slasher movie as much as anything else. So what is going on here? Like, with how these books are playing with our various expectations of horror?

Because there are so many—and I think actually the resurgence of horror in the last couple of years has been on multiple fronts—there are all kinds of things going on here, which don't have to cohere. But these books are playing in these kinds of sandboxes, and they're setting up all kinds of associations or expectations that, you know, they follow through to one extent or another. So, Shannon: talk to me a bit about how you think The Macabre approaches its horrific elements. Like, is it just a marketing accretion?

Shannon Fay: I mean, it's hard to say. There are certain elements that maybe if the book had invested more, could have really developed this as a horror novel. So maybe an earlier draft, right, was more horrific. 

When the main character, Lewis—so his ancestor, Edgar, is the one who created these paintings, and it's that kind of familial connection that allows him to neutralize these paintings—and when he gets sucked into the world of these paintings, oftentimes he is actually sent to the past and speaking to Edgar. It's a little ambiguous about how real these kind of scenes are—whether he's actually in the past, whether he is more of a phantom in the past—but they're very good scenes and we get to see Edgar, his mental state, break down over the course of his life as each of these paintings are at a different point in his lifetime.

And that has a very strong, kind of gothic arch to it. But the book doesn't really spend a lot of time with it, you know? And I was wondering if this is because race is a big part of the narrative, right? Lewis being a Black American man, and Edgar being a white British man but his direct ancestor. And there are novels, like the classic novel Kindred, where the Black American main character is sent into the past and kind of has to reckon with their white ancestors. And so I was wondering if maybe—you know, understandably—Jackson was like, “No, I don't wanna write that book.” Right? Those aren't, that's not what I'm exploring here, which is totally valid. But there's other ways; maybe you could have explored this subplot more. 

Dan Hartland: It's so interesting to me that of all of the sort of horror options available to the text, it does have this kind of, as you say, this kind of familial, this ancestral, secret, right? Which is—again, Marisa is the expert here!—but speaks to me of many gothic novels, where, you know, there's this … Yeah, and yet it does not follow through. 

And yet it is the thing that is used to sell the book. And I just … yeah. I mean, Marisa: Do you think that your book is aware of where it is sitting in the present kind of profusion of horror? Or do you think it is just the thing that it is and we shouldn't be reading it within this kind of broader context of, you know, “Oh, it's very popular at the moment, so maybe that will sell.”

Marisa Mercurio: Right. It's a very good question. It's also a tricky one. I mean, I think that the novel is absolutely aware of it and engaging directly with its gothic underpinnings. It is an historical piece in a time period in which the gothic novel was at its very beginning—just a couple years before the novel is set, The Castle of Otranto, which is credited as the first gothic novel, was published; and of course then you sort of see this explosion with particularly Ann Radcliffe at the end of the eighteenth century.

So I think it's very aware of the fact that it is playing in the, you know, proverbial gothic sandbox. The cover, as you mentioned, plays towards that sensibility as well. And I think what you had mentioned earlier, too, Dan, about the title is interesting: slashed beauties is … when I was doing some research on wax Venuses—which were a thing that I had been familiar with prior to reading the novel, but had never done a deep dive on—I did come across that term slashed beauty. So it seems that it has been applied to wax Venuses elsewhere. However, I think that of course it brings to mind a slasher, and I think part of that is this feminist—but I think is really more of a pseudo-feminist—novel, which is I think the reason the novel is being written. It is marketed as, “This is a revenge tale against the men who have wronged these women.” 

However, I think when you read the novel that really, that really falls apart, for various reasons. But I think, to me, what is problematic about the novel—and in conjunction with its marketing—is that it is trying to present itself as this very didactic feminist message, when in fact both the narrative doesn't fully support that.

And then the central item, the wax Venus, the novel is centered on is a lot more thematically rich and complex than the novel wants it to be unfortunately. So everything kind of gets flattened in a way that is really unsatisfying. 

Shannon Fay: I haven't read the book, but I really enjoyed your review.

Marisa Mercurio: Thank you! 

Shannon Fay: I enjoyed your um talking about how these anatomical Venuses is actually quite a step forward for science and a positive thing. And I also liked you touching on … kind of, this comes up on a lot of media: the men bad, women good.

Marisa Mercurio: Oh, it's exhausting!

Shannon Fay: And I was thinking, I was like, “Why does this bother me so much?” And I think what came to me is that it perpetuates the idea that women are on the earth to suffer. It also further, you know, enforces a strict gender binary. 

Marisa Mercurio: Absolutely. 

Shannon Fay: But it slots it into, you know, like sufferers and the people who cause suffering. Which just not a good way to frame the world!

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah. And to be fair to the book I do think there are some complex women, particularly this madam of the brothel who is probably the most complex character in the novel. But the novel is very preoccupied with that pseudo-feminist message of … well. I think actually this is the problem with the novel: It never becomes clear to me! I think it is all kind of muddled in a way that I'm not sure if the novel is trying to proffer this pseudo-feminist message, or if it is trying to do something more complex and subversive. Because it simply doesn't succeed at doing whatever it is it's trying to do. 

Shannon Fay: In The Macabre, the characters discuss a lot about colonialism. And, you know, I think it's done well within the characters, they do a good job of kind of literally embodying different sides of the issue. But I don't feel like the book really follows through on it. Unlike, say, a book like Babel, which from the title kind of tells you it's gonna be not just about linguistics, but—uh, spoilers for the Bible—that tower is going to fall.

Marisa Mercurio: I think there are a lot of other current examples of novels that are threading these interests in historical or present day structures and systems that are really interesting, successful; but there is a deftness to it that is required to be successful and that I wish … I think a lot of these novels just aren't proceeding with.

[Musical sting]

Shannon Fay: It is so much easier to talk about books that you just love right? Just open up a spigot and be like, “Oh, and this was good and this was good.”

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah, I find novels that are ones that I'm not enjoying, or I don't think are successful, much harder to write about and to talk about. 

Dan Hartland: But I'm so interested in this question of why these books aren't quite hitting the mark, because they're not the only ones.

So let's not pick on these, right? There have been several books Strange Horizons have reviewed in this kind of ballpark that the reviewers have found: “OK, this book has a theme, but there's something about the way in which it is being handled here.” And it's often in the context of the kind of horror trappings it's just not working. 

So I'm thinking of Racheal Chie’s review of Christina Hagmann’s Field of Frights, she said that about that book. Subham Rai’s review of The Demon by Victory Witherkeigh, he said that about that book. Ian Simpson on We Like It Cherry, by Jacy Morris, he said it about that book. Is there something going on at the moment?

I talked at the beginning of the episode about kind of quote-unquote cozy horror—which is definitely a thing, and I don't think these books are necessarily the sort of quintessential, cozy horror examples—but is there something happening in horror because of something about how they're handling the material?

Marisa Mercurio: Even though I wouldn't categorize Slashed Beauty really as cozy horror, I think there is perhaps some overlap there, because I think that the gothic is often relayed into cozy horror fiction—because of the aesthetics surrounding it and the aesthetics that we've created surrounding it. So, especially when it comes to like neo-gothic fiction, because I think that is weirdly cozy for people.

When I think of the gothic, these things are certainly present in the gothic, and I am absolutely guilty of wanting to spend time in a crumbling movie castle—Crimson Peak, the Guillermo Del Toro movie, comes to mind, which I don't know if it's a quote-unquote good movie, but is a movie that I enjoy. But to me, the gothic, when we're speaking to coziness, and maybe why this doesn't quite work, is because the gothic is so, I think, truly preoccupied with the nastier aspects of life.

So: the gothic being a genre that is preoccupied with a really harsh resurgence of the past, a reminder that progress is deeply fallible. And then you have things like sexual violence, incest, all kinds of the more horrible parts of life. And of course those things can coexist—you know, I think of, like, Dracula maybe. But I don't know if the goals of the cozy novel really align with the goals of a gothic, like a truly gothic, novel.

Shannon Fay: I worry it just comes down to marketing—that if you have a book that has … that's doing a lot of interesting, weird stuff, maybe it's just easier to position it as kind of unsettling and disturbing and horror and at least that way you can maybe get genre fans to buy in on it. I'm thinking specifically of The Macabre, where I compared it to The Rook in my review—and I don't know if that would still be a good comp, because it's been, you know, several years since even the sequel to that book came out. If you could position it as “if you like that book, if you like that kind of spy-thriller fantasy, you would also enjoy this book,” if instead it's like, “Well, there's creepy paintings” … Let's go with that. 

Marisa Mercurio: I absolutely agree that marketing is a huge problem here.

I also recently reviewed a book for Strange Horizons that was a gothic novel—again, that was a modern-day gothic novel that just didn't work for me. And I think a lot of that was because it was marketed as a gothic novel when it didn't really meet those expectations. And I think that for Slashed Beauties, there was a problem of, “This is a gothic novel”—which, true, I would agree with—and then, “This is a feminist novel” … and that is where I really tripped up. 

I think there are a lot of opportunity for feminist gothic novels. I think gender is inherently a topic that the gothic is interested in. I don't think you can separate gender from the gothic genre. But there are certainly more successful versions of that. 

Shannon Fay: So it's late in the podcast. But I do have a question, because I feel like my definition of gothic is mostly vibes based. And it sounds like maybe you have a stronger definition. 

Marisa Mercurio: Um, yeah. I mean, I think the gothic is rooted in a historical moment of the eighteenth century in which you’re sort of post-enlightenment, post-revolution, so you're dealing with the possibility … like, you know, everyone is sort of wanting to progress and think “Oh, we're so enlightened. We're so progressive,” and the gothic sort of comes in and it's like, “Hold up. Here's the past.” You know, there's the old adage, “The past has never really passed,” and that's kind of what the gothic is doing, to me—to sort of say, “Hey, maybe we aren't so civilized,” or that the occult or paganism or the supernatural can still infiltrate science.

I think I mentioned Dracula before and I'll mention it again because I think it's such a perfect case study of all these seemingly contradictory, dichotomous ideas of the past and the present civilization versus, you know, savagery—you might say the east versus west, science versus supernatural. I think the gothic is really preoccupied with those ideas, sort of untangling those complexities, but also making them butt heads and making people deal with that collision. 

Shannon Fay: I was wondering if cozy horror, and I know it's been hotly debated, but to me it comes out of maybe the thinking that horror needs to have existential dread, a nihilistic viewpoint—a hopeless genre in the sense of only the bleakest works can be called true horror—and people buying into that. And therefore, if they read something horror and it doesn't have those hallmarks, they're like, “This must be something else. It must be cozy horror.”

So I just think it comes from maybe having too strict a view of a genre and therefore needing to break it down more. 

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah, it was a matter of time. I think we had cozy, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever. You know, we have closed door romance, we have things that are not going to offend the sensibilities, so that it was a matter of time before it just, you know, made its way to horror—which is kind of … 

On one hand you do have this sort of, in terms of like mystery, Agatha Christie-like cozy novels, which still have death and murder and horrible things happening in them—which probably if they were published today would be labeled cozy. But on the other hand, it does seem contradictory to the very nature of horror to label things as cozy. 

Dan Hartland: I also feel like I don't want to kind of demonize our colleagues in marketing too much. Because, you know, they've gotta shift these books, and if they don't sell books, then fewer books will get printed—and that's a shame! So I agree that Agatha Christie was not marketed as cozy, but would be marketed as cozy now. That's probably fine? Like, in some cases it doesn't change the text.

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah. I wanna read a cozy novel every once in a while, too—like, absolutely. And I think from our perspective maybe as avid readers, we're coming at this with a much more critical lens about the marketing and the genre trappings, as opposed to your average reader who is maybe going to a bookstore like once a year and picking up stuff, or maybe uses their local library and is just like trying to get these pithy terms to be like, “OK, well I think this sounds like something I'd like so I'll check it out.”

Shannon Fay: Well, let me talk about a book that I think does succeed! So I recently read, uh, Marisha Pessl’s Darkly, and if you've read her book Night Film, this almost feels like a YA retread of that. But I love Night Film and I do like also this kind of YA version of that book! 

So in Darkly it's very much like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—you know, how in the world of that novel, everybody is just obsessed with this candy maker and his crazy inventions and his process and what goes on in that factory. Well imagine that. But instead it is a board game maker.

So this woman—Louisiana Veda, I think is the character's name is—she was this eccentric board game creator, and these are very off-the-wall board games. You have to like cut apart the board. You really have to think out of the box. You have to like shine flashlights to create little shadows, and like they're, like, “Her games will drive you mad!” The winners disappear and are never seen again. People pay millions for an original Louisiana Veda! And so our main character, she applies for this brand new internship being run by the estate of this woman, right? And, you know, only her and six other lucky teens will get to go to the abandoned factory where these board games were kind of brainstormed and created! Again, very Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, right? There's all these people trying to get her secrets and the teens are tasked with tracking down a stolen game that could be dangerous for the people playing it. 

Like, I don't think this book has any really grand meaning. The characters talk a little bit about how—when they find out about some questionable things Louisiana did in her life—they do talk about how, say, male celebrities and creators get away with a lot worse, right? So there's a little bit about having to deal with your heroes, taking them off a pedestal. But for the most part it is like reading a version of almost a LARP or a RPG, where these characters are in this world where: What's a game, what's real, who can you trust? But I think it does a lot with the nature of fandom and obsession, which is also kind of the same beats as in Night Film, where three super fans—they're super fans of a director, the director's daughter commits suicide, and they want to kind of find out what happened and almost end up literally in the world of the film. 

So I enjoyed both those novels a lot, and both of them less about creative passion and more about fandom, but both having to do with obsession and the creative process. So those are books that I think, uh, kind of successfully tackle that. 

Marisa Mercurio: I'd also just like to mention The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland, which is a vampire novel that is very preoccupied with art, as is Woman, Eating. So there are books out there that I think are interested in craft and art that are horror- or gothic-leaning that are a little bit more successful, they're out there.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: What about these little books—like, as you said, the boardgame book isnot doing anything really sort of grand or you know, whatever, but it succeeds on its own terms—so in what way is that book better than The Macabre?

Shannon Fay: I think there's just almost a tactile detail to it, right? There is almost, you know, almost on the border of like, “Stop talking about this, please!” You know, you almost have to push the envelope as far as characters starting to describe the rules to this archaic board game, right? That doesn't really have to do anything with the plot, but has everything to do with the world. 

Dan Hartland: Yeah, it commits to the bit is what you're … yeah. Marisa—because I'm conscious that you've said that the two most recent reviews you've written for us were both of quote-unquote gothic novels and you dislike both of them and I feel responsible for this!—so are there any recent books that you did like that we should have asked you to review instead? 

Marisa Mercurio: Oh, well, first of all, you should not feel responsible! Because I think, you know, maybe we'll have part of this conversation later about what makes a book successful or not, but I always endeavor to feel that I am an appropriate person to be able to speak to the novel.

And so, as someone with the background of the gothic, I feel like I can have a place to stand where I can actually talk about it, as opposed to something that is like hard sci-fi, which is just not in my wheelhouse. But in terms of a novel like Old Soul by Susan Barker, which is a novel that came up this year and which is, I would maybe say, like a literary horror novel—it is about a demon—but photography plays a very integral role in that novel. 

So there is this female character who lives for decades beyond what a human should live. And she is making these really strong relationships with people. She comes by people, they strike up a really strong relationship. She takes a photo of 'em, they go wrong, the person goes wrong, and then often end up dead soon after. And the photographs, or the act of photography is absolutely integral to the novel. It is part and parcel of this character, and it is the mechanism through which the horror is happening in the novel. 

Whereas in Slashed Beauties, the wax Venuses are so much relegated to the end of the novel. They don't really even show up until past halfway through the novel, and then the murders themselves don't happen until the penultimate chapter. So why is it presented so much as a murder spree? Even bringing to mind something that happens a century later, Jack the Ripper, is not really what the novel is about in any meaningful way, and the present-day narrative doesn't really do enough I think with the antiques aspect—which is also something that I was really interested in—to sort of bring it all together. 

Because Slashed Beauties really has a premise that I'm very interested in. You know, it's set in the eighteenth century. It's a neo-gothic novel. It's about wax Venuses, I love medical history. And it also has an antiques dealer as the first protagonist, which—awesome! You know, but the threads just don't converge. 

Dan Hartland: There's that thing, isn't there, where sometimes a book can seem so likely to be perfect for us that when it isn't—it's got all these things that, in theory, we should really love, and somehow they don't cohere—we are more disappointed in that book than we would be in a book that was similarly unsuccessful, but didn't ever seem to be something we'd enjoy. 

So how do we navigate this? Marisa, you said, “Let's talk about what a successful book looks like.” Can we do that and can we also talk about how we handle books that don't meet that benchmark? 

Different reviewers will place benchmarks in different places. So some reviewers will have extremely high standards—not even high standards, they will have a set of criteria, right? And if a book doesn't meet those specific criteria, they will give it a pan. Other reviewers are much more sort of open and, “OK, let's deal blah, blah, blah.” How do you approach it when you come against a book that doesn't meet whatever you think a successful book is? How do you just be honest about that without, you know, kind of just being grumpy? 

Marisa Mercurio: I'm personally happy to meet books where they're at.

Like, I want to enjoy everything that I read. You know, I'll read schlock and love it and I'll read, you know, high art—whatever that might be, so the most literary of the literary. And to me it's all about meeting authors and the novels where they are. And I think that I have two major criteria from novels, which are maybe not exactly craft-related—you know, on a purely syntax level—but that is certainly part of it. Because I think a book can fall apart just on a syntax level if it doesn’t—even if it has a great premise—but my two major criteria are: one, I wanna be entertained, and two, I wanna have something to think about after I read the novel. 

And I think what often happens, I find particularly in a lot of current horror publications where the novels are not being deft enough with what they are trying to write about, is that the novels are prioritizing a didactic message over entertainment. In which case I probably in many cases agree with the message that it's trying to promote. But I just feel like I am being, um. Taught a message, I'm being preached a moral of a narrative, which I just simply don't want because I want to figure that out for myself.

And then, relatedly, I want to think about the novel afterwards. So if the novel is simply saying, “Men bad, end of story,” I have nothing to think about after the novel's over and it leaves my mind. 

Shannon Fay: I think what you said earlier, Marisa—about there's certain things where you're like, “No, I am the reviewer for this book”—and Dan, you were saying how is it tough when you have a book that on paper you're like, “Oh, this is made for me,” and then it disappoints you? Well, in a sense, like, yeah, I think a review from that point of view is valuable. Because there'd be other people who would say, “Hey, this sounds like it aligns with my interests.” And then they might still be like, “Well, I'm still intrigued by the premise, but now I can kind of adjust my expectations knowing that someone else who has a similar kind of affection for these things was kind of disappointed.” 

It is tough—like, for me, something that is tough—going in without preconceived notions. Like, usually with the review I'll have maybe read the barest summary. Maybe I'm familiar with the author's previous works and usually I'm excited. And usually I'm already like, ”Ooh, I am excited by this premise.” And it can be dangerous to be like, “Ooh, where are they going to go with this?”—and then either they go somewhere totally different and you're like, “Wow, I was so pleasantly surprised” or you're like, “But what a great premise and how come they didn't deliver on this?” Right? 

Marisa Mercurio: Right. I think other contributing factors to me are: who is the author and what work have they been putting out lately? So I think of someone who, like with this novel, I believe is their debut novel, I'm likely to treat it more as such—to say, “Does this project have potential?”

I remember several years ago, I reviewed Kay Chronister’s collection of horror short stories, and then she had The Bog Wife out this year. And I remember saying in those short stories, which I mostly liked, I said, you know, there's a couple that aren't as strong, but I think this is a really, really strong collection of a new voice. And then I loved The Bog Wife, which came out this year.

Shannon Fay: That potential was delivered on. 

Marisa Mercurio: Yes! And then conversely, an author who I think is very prolific and has a lot of good work, like Stephen Graham Jones—just to point to a really successful horror novelist who is doing a lot of work with just like super entertaining stuff, but also novels that are about ideas and deep concepts—I loved The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, so this maybe isn't a good example, but I would be more willing to say like, “Ah, this one, you know, compared to his other works didn't hit as well.” 

And then similarly, I think I'm really interested—probably just coming from a publishing background myself—in what presses are publishing. So if a book is being published by like Penguin Random House versus an indie publisher, I am a lot more likely to be like, “Oh, this indie publisher, maybe the novel isn't a ten out of ten, but it shows some potential and what they're acquiring in is really interesting to me.” So I wanna see more of that. I wanna see it succeed. I'm really excited about that kind of work. 

Dan Hartland: Yes, there are ways to contextualize our sort of disappointment. There are ways to admit to kind of negative feelings about a text whilst not enabling or not letting those feelings overwhelm a sort of a broader consideration of the book.

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah. I mean, when it comes down to it, a book is what's written on the page, and it's what the reader engages with. So ultimately, you know, if you think a book succeeds or not, some of those factors are gonna be stripped away. They can be things that you take into consideration, but at the end of the day, a book is, you know, plot, character, syntax. That kind of thing. 

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I think it was Will McMahon who on this show said—was it on this show or was it in one of his reviews?—who said, “Yeah, these are just words. It's just words on a page!” Right? That's all there is. And I do think that you're right, Marisa, when you say that some books just fall apart on the syntax level alone. Reviewers can struggle to know what to do with those kinds of books, as well. And sometimes it's easier to talk about a book's ideas than it is to talk about the fabric of them. 

Shannon Fay: With The Macabre, I've been thinking about one of the reasons why it left me kind of cold. I was thinking how if it was a case of you could put points into stats for this book, this would be a very even build. And I'm like, “Oh, if only, maybe if it had just like excelled in one thing, you know, I could have either championed it or known why my disappointment with it, what it's grounds for.”

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah, for sure. I really get that. I think similarly with Slashed Beauties, you know, the content of my review really is more about the thematic content and the messaging rather than the words on the page, because— although I did feel that the words on the page were also not successful and were, you know, the work of a not fully matured author—it's harder to sort of be like, “And I didn't like this sentence, and here's the sentence and here's the sentence.” It just feels so much more mean to say, “These sentences aren't working and they're hitting a lot of like, my pet peeves, like ‘This happened somehow!’” And I'm like, “Well, how?!” as opposed to sort of taking a larger idea? 

Shannon Fay: No, I just wanted to talk about the things that did tick me off in The Macabre’s characters!

Marisa Mercurio: [laughter]

They're supposed to be like spies. Like, you know, they work for different national entities. They have their own agendas. But they'll be things like, they'll say things practically like, “All right, I'll team up with you, but if I even think that you're gonna steal the painting for yourself, our partnership is over and I'll kill you.” Right?

And it's like, no, play your cards a little closer to your chest! This is, you know … it almost feels like we're at a point with genre fiction in particular where self-awareness is seen as a book being intelligent. You know, like if we acknowledge the reader's expectations—like having people outright say, “I will betray you if these things happen” because the reader's thinking they will betray them. But instead it just becomes so juvenile, right?

Dan Hartland: I'm really struck by, Shannon, something you said, which is that it's kind of a very even distribution of stats on this novel. Like, there's no spiky bits and you're both talking about kind of flatness. So flatness in terms of prose and style, flatness in terms of character: This links to the didactic quality that Marisa was talking about where a lot of novels right now just want to tell you. 

All of that speaks to me of safeness, and maybe that is a feature as well as a bug in so-called cozy or, you know, escapist—that's a very loaded term—literature, where the book is deliberately being flat. It's deliberately distributing its stats all in the middle, just to sort of stay as smooth as possible, reduce the friction. Does that sound like a reasonable … ?

Shannon Fay: Yeah, actually, and it does maybe solve the question you posed at the very beginning of this podcast. 

Dan Hartland: I can't say I planned it!

Shannon Fay: Some of the most vivid scenes, the most memorable scenes, are kind of … they interact with the painting. With Lewis, because he is inexperienced in the ways of magic, kind of things go wrong and people die horribly. And those are some of the most vivid, well-written scenes in the book. So maybe either an editor or a publisher or, you know, the marketing team read in and said, “This is the book’s strengths, you know, these are the scenes that make people feel something. We're gonna lean into that.” And maybe that's why it got hit with that genre.

Marisa Mercurio: That’s really interesting to think about, too, because what you're saying about flatness to me is contradictory to what horror is, right? Horror is a series of, like, stasis, stasis, stasis, spike, right? Big moments followed by like a sort of climax followed by a coming down and maybe multiple of those throughout a novel.

But that affective response is what we're looking for when we read or watch horror. And if it's not being delivered, then that becomes a generic problem for the novel.

[Musical outro]

Marisa Mercurio: I want to like stuff!

Shannon Fay: Yeah. It turns … it becomes a personal disappointment. Right? You know?

Dan Hartland: You're more disappointed in yourself than in the book at some point. 

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah, exactly! [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. Listen to more of their music at grandvalise.bandcamp.com. 

After our last episode, some queries were raised in various corners about how it is that so many speculative fiction criticism podcasts seem to be releasing in the same calendar slot each month. From A Meal of Thorns to Hugo! Girl, By the Bywater: It's a real pleasure to be in such august company. And even better to meet in our secret hideout deep below the surface of the earth every month where we plan our—

[Long censor’s tone] 

Not sure what happened there. Anyway. See you next time.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 18: On Fantasy and History

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the reviewer—and newest member of the excellent Strange Horizons proofreading team—Cameron Miguel, and the scholar and critic, Nick Hubble.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about fantasy in particular, and its relationship to history and history-writing. Is some sense of the recordable past baked into the genre? And, if so, with what effects?

We take in Tolkien and Virginia Woolf, Augustan Rome and the Yukon Gold Rush, and we ask ourselves how power operates through history—as well as what history even is. Most of all, though, we wonder: What can fantasy teach us about history writing … and how can it change it?

But we began our conversation with Cam’s most recent review for us. Fittingly enough, it was of K. J. Parker’s Making History.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: Okay, both. My job on this podcast, as I see it at the moment, is to put reviews and reviewers in conversation with each other, to try and give the reviews some more legs, to give the issues they discuss more airing. Just get the conversation a little bit wider.

Sometimes my job is super easy because some great reviewers put in some fantastic pieces that are talking to each other without even knowing it. And your two most recent reviews for Strange Horizons fall into that bracket: They just did their job for me. And Cam, I thought we’d start with yours, because what really struck me about your review—one of the many things—was that you started it by saying, “Look, guys, this, this book is just made for me.”

And what really struck me, was how your interests in history and language all aligned in this world that’s been built by K. J. Parker, in a book called Making History. So I just wonder whether you could talk us through what you think that book is doing, how its worldbuilding is working towards a sort of vision of how we interpret the past?

Cameron Miguel: Well, I’d say that the main way that K. J. Parker’s novella approaches the past is by viewing it as history being this malleable thing that can be shaped, molded, remade, subject to peer review, scholarship, reinterpretation—just re-analysis of all the evidence that we have. And I was rereading the novella in preparation for today, and there actually is a scene near the end of the story where the narrator discusses exactly that: How we know for certain that this group of people migrated, one million en masse to a different location, to settle this specific region. The narrator later goes on to say, “We know now that none of that is actually true and that a few of them were brought over as slaves and they multiplied, and they either overthrew or flat out enslaved the people who enslaved them, and became the settlers of that region.”

I really like how he played with this idea of history and our understanding of history—how everything that we read in books ultimately gets updated, revised in accordance with new knowledge that we learn. And it was really interesting for me, coming out of the academy not too long ago as a classicist, the ways that we constantly had debates about the classics and what they meant. And in my specific field, which was examining same-sex relationships and antiquity, there’s this predominant assumption of just how every ancient relationship would’ve worked. If you’re looking at same-sex male relationships, we rely entirely on Plato, we rely on Athens; but the problem is every city-state had its own culture. And we see how those cultures are different, but we still try and impose this one model on everything else. And I think it’s sort of hindered our understanding of the variance of sexuality, sexual behavior, and other things in antiquity—because we’re trying to impose an understanding of the world on them when we don’t even understand ourselves.

We know today that sexuality, gender, all of it is just incredibly fluid, inconsistent; but somehow we think that it’s stable and sturdy in the past, that they never bucked their cultural norms or had illicit relationships. Everything just perfectly fit into these models. I like the way that Parker challenged that.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And we will definitely come back to the ways in which fantasy literature sort of calls on the past and sometimes reflects it well and sometimes doesn’t, and the kind of generic knee-jerk responses that fantasy sometimes has with how it deals with quote-unquote history.

But one of the things that interests me as well about how you characterize Parker’s approach to history is that the novella has this character, this dictator, right? I think he calls himself a “first citizen,” but actually he’s a prince, right? And he’s just trying to swap clothes to retain power—whatever it takes. And it’s this figure that is behind a lot of the most obvious misuses of history in the novella, right? He basically tells the academy, he tells all these historians, “Go away and write a history that suits me, that makes my power authorized.”

And that’s a really interesting grace note on what you’ve just said, right? Because yes, sometimes it’s misunderstanding that makes us misuses history or misinterpret history or miss out on the nuances and the valences of the past; but sometimes it is knowingly done. The novella, you talk about it being a meta-narrative of history. Can you talk a little bit more about how the first citizen’s kind of approach to power shapes that kind of historical record in the novella?

Cameron Miguel: I’m so glad you asked that because on my reread I was actually thinking, “Wow, this guy kind of reminds me of Augustus.” And as I got further and further, I said, “Oh, he reminds me a lot of Augustus. Uh-oh!”

Because again, in the academy there’s speculation—debate, even—about the influence Augustus had over not just politicians or the citizens, but also just the artists in the world. You mentioned, Prince Gugu, which is his original name, and then Gyges, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, maybe it’s Giese or something else. Not only does he tell them to write a history, in the narrator’s specific instance, but he tells them to build an entire city that they can just uncover and use to create an expansionist project of making Aelia—that’s the land in the story—far bigger, so they can eventually attack this other group called the Sasha.

And it was reminding me a lot of Augustus, because Augustus supposedly strong-armed Virgil into writing the Aenid. You got the Aenid, you got the Lea. I’m seeing parallels. There’s even an in-universe story called the Lea which tells the story of how these nobles from a fallen city traveled to Aelia and became the Aelians. I’m like, that’s, “That’s the Aenid. That’s just the Aenid! I really saw a lot of parallels between Augustus and Gyges and the way that they try and use power to form narratives that suit them, their pursuit of power.

Dan Hartland: There’s so much going on in this. I mean, did you say like it’s sixty-odd pages, this novella?

Cameron Miguel: Yeah, it’s about sixty-eight pages.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And you are getting so much out of it, there’s so much going on. You know, the people in the novella, the characters of the novella, are using history, but also Parker is using history, as you say, calling on that kind of Augustan sort of thing. And Nick, that’s why it just seemed to me like I had to get you and Cam talking, because Cam in their review makes clear that this is a novella about history—and when you are writing about Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting, you start the review with history!

You say, “One thing we’ve learned”—and I’m not sure we have learned it, but you’re a hopeful person!— you say the one thing we should have learned is history is not a linear process, right? The Harrow, it seems to me, is doing similar things—there are academics that are told “you’ve gotta write this certain thing,” and there are old stories that are refashioned in order to authorize power and authority. So I just wondered what similarities, what differences, are you seeing in The Everlasting when you’re listening to Cam talk about Making History?

Nick Hubble: Yeah, I think there’s clear—I have to say, I’ve actually read Making History, given that it was only sixty-odd pages long.

Dan Hartland: So you two are just making this too easy for me!

Nick Hubble: Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of absolutely direct parallels. One is that in both there’s a kind of … well, it’s more of a wannabe ruler in The Everlasting, Vivian Rolfe, and she’s a minister—the Minister for Defense or something at the beginning of the book. But in various versions—because they go backwards and forwards in history, and in that sense, it’s a different kind of book because they move backwards and forwards in history—and at various times she used to be the chancellor, she used to be the Prime Minister. She’s trying to run history so that she’s in power. And of course, part of the thing is you can’t control it quite that well, so, you know, it doesn’t quite work out.

But she says specifically at one point, she has a quote where she says, “I invented a lineage for myself, gave myself a name, a title, a birthright. Oh, don’t give me that. Look, how do you think any king gets his crown?” And that’s kind of exactly what Gyges is trying to do in Making History: invent this kind of past. So it’s the same kind of process.

We’ve also got the historian, and also they’re very also similar characters. The two historian characters, I don’t think the historian is actually named in Making History, but the one in The Everlasting is called Owen Mallory. And there’s also a sense that it’s kind of a play on Arthurian stories, because you’ve got Mallory, and when the historian goes back in it is all to do with writing the history of a famous knight who is a woman: Una (or Oona!). So it’s kind of like a gender flip to Arthurian romance.

But the point of kind of similarity in both cases is that the historians are not from the actual nation that the ruler is trying to manipulate. The guy from Making History is not actually an Aelian. He says at some point, you know, “And thank God I’m not,” without specifying exactly where he might be from.

And it’s similar, it turns out, in The Everlasting—that the historian is not actually from Dominion. (The country’s called Dominion, so the kind of politics of it are rather, you know, made evident, because they took about dominion and everlasting dominion and so and so on and so forth!) But he’s not from that country, it transpires, and also he looks different. At first it’s not such a thing, but gradually, as the novel goes on, you realize that this is a significant part in that part of the history of nation—that he actually looks different. He’s a different sort of size. He has very much darker eyes. He has kind of crinkly hair. I don’t … it is not explicit exactly how different he looks, but he clearly looks ethnically different to the people of Dominion. And he’s actually from the people they’re kind of conquering in, you know, ever expanding their empire.

So I think there are these two direct parallels, but then for the rest, you know, there’s a more general sense that we’ve both got historians who are at universities. There’s a little bit of kind of playing around with university politics in this, so that every time the guy writes the story of Una the Everlasting—which he doesn’t want to do on the one hand, but he does because it gives him a chance to go back in history and meet her every time—it’s not that he’s commanded to do it. He’s told to do it, to get tenure!

So it’s a kind of a nice sort of … it nicely satirizes how academia works. Which is—I can say as an academic, well, former … no longer a paid academic, put it that way—you end up doing things, obviously you do things, that you don’t necessarily want to do because you have to do them to go through the system, or you get told to do them, or it’s to your advantage in some way—and it kind of, it satirizes very nicely as well, the making history. Making History, I would say, is a funnier book than than The Everlasting in that sense.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. There’s something about—we’ve talked about novellas on previous editions of the show, and I wouldn’t want get sort of sidetracked again by the endless question, but! Satire seems to me something that a novella is particularly well disposed towards.

I think it’s really interesting to think about the academic side of it because that is in miniature a power structure, right? And it’s a type of power structure under which the historians are laboring and must to some extent or another pay due deference—certainly in order to advance within the structure, but also partly just to be able to do the thing that they want to do in the small space that’s left to them by said structure.

You quote, Nick, in your review, from The Everlasting, where one of the professors says, “If the history you were reading wasn’t filthy, then someone had censored the good bits.” Are both of these works also trying to get at this idea that Cam began our discussion with: this idea that history was a lot messier actually than … let me put it another way. The past was actually messier than this thing we call history. Is that something you find in the Harrow?

Nick Hubble: Yes. I think that that’s definitely the case. And that particular professor, although academically superior to Mallory, is actually in some ways one of the moral consciences of the novel. I think she also says at one point, “You can be a historian or a patriot,” to Mallory. “You can’t be both”—implying that actually, what he’s doing is, obviously, writing stuff for the greater glory of Dominion, rather than good history. And actually there’s several points where we see him exactly doing that—you know, sanitizing history.

There’s a kind of time loop thing in it, in that actually—although he’s supposedly interpreting and translating this ancient medieval text telling the story of Una the Everlasting—he’s actually writing it himself when he goes back into history. So he is kind of rewriting his own story continuously. But there’s a point where the Queen is supposed to have sent for her, when she was at prayer at some point, and she says something like, “Well, uh, yes, I will put off my God in order to, to fight for my destiny.” And then she, you know, tells him, “No, that’s not how it happened. I was completely drunk. And I told them to go fuck themselves!” And he thinks about it and he goes, “Hmm, well we don’t need to include all that detail in the writing.” I’m, you know, I’m paraphrasing!

So you said something … Una responded as she always had done. How he writes it. So it just nicely … it is exactly messier, more fluid, than the version that … I think another difference between the two stories, perhaps, is he, doesn’t … he kind of becomes more self-aware as the story goes on.

I think the narration of Making History is perhaps more self-aware from, from the beginning. So you get a slightly different kind of story in that respect. But the point of Owen Mallory becoming more self-aware is he gradually becomes aware that it’s actually … he himself is complicit, and in writing this history has to kind of contend with his own sanitizing tendencies, if you like, and that comes across very well across the length of the novel.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: One of things that struck me as I read both your reviews—and as I’m listening to you now—is that there are so many echoes in these novels of prior fantasies that do similar things. So one of Harrow’s previous works was The Once and Future Witches, right? Which is, you know, in its title plainly a homage to T. H. White, who famously sort of did the Arthurian thing in this kind of fantastically rich, mixed historical setting: You know, you have Normans but also kind of pre-Christians, and also they play games that seem similar to what we might imagine a nineteenth-century student at Eton would have played. You know, there’s this great kind of mixture of historical periods in this one supposedly coherent world.

And it reminds me of this scholar, Irina Ruppo. She wrote this essay, “What’s Wrong With Medievalism?”, and she argues that epic fantasy plays a kind of game with history. There’s definitely game-playing in both of these. Like, Nick, you say that Making History is funnier than The Everlasting. But there’s no doubt that, from how you characterize it, The Everlasting is having fun, if nothing else, right? Like, it might not be funny, but it’s good fun.

Nick Hubble: It is funny. Sorry, it is funny. It’s just not … I don’t think it’s so self-consciously comic throughout, put it that way. Yeah.

Dan Hartland: So I’m just thinking of all these ways in which these books talk to each other, but they also talk outwards. The commonplace about fantasy is that it looks backwards to the Middle Ages—that it is, you know, kind of informed by medieval epic and all of that. And I think, you know, maybe the canonical statement of that—and pretty much every recent history of fantasy talks about it—but was W. A. Senior who wrote, I mean this is years ago, but in the Journal of the Fantastic Arts that fantasy looks back to medieval literature because it seeks, in a similar way to medieval literature, to confirm certain moral certainties, right? It is comfortable as a genre when ontologies are concrete.

There’s a lot of secret knowledge in fantasy. There are a lot of occult groups—you know, I think of China Miéville, or I think of the Aes Sedai in The Wheel of Time—and that’s fine because nevertheless they have the knowledge. It might be secret, but it is gettable. The use of history in fantasy can work towards that. It can work towards, “Oh, well this world has a past.” Like Tolkien: “I can literally tell you thousands of years of history of this world. That must mean it’s real.” But of course it kind of also isn’t, and this game with history is really interesting to me.

But Cam, you talked about Classical history, and it seems to me that recently certainly there’s been quite a bit of fantasy that draws on other histories, and I wouldn’t want to necessarily echo this flat assumption that fantasy is just European medieval. I don’t think that’s true anymore. What thoughts do you have about that, about this idea that these books … yes, they’re in dialogue with each other, but also they’re in a long tradition of fantasy being interested in history?

Cameron Miguel: I would say that history writing is kind of baked into the nature of fantasy, as you’ve already said. In fact, one of my thoughts was just about Tolkien and Martin, because these two authors create entire histories that go along with their stories, and they’re built into their narratives. That way, everything that shows up in the story has some sort of weight to it. It’s just this sort of way of confirming the truth of the narrative itself: If the narrator is reliable, everything that the narrator says is true because the narrator is reliable; so therefore everything the narrator has to say at the past, unless the narrator is being deceived, is therefore true.

And being able to have these concrete facts about the world helps you build up an understanding of what type of culture, what type of language types, of education systems that these people may be building, experiencing—and the ways that they just influence each other constantly. At least to me!

Dan Hartland: I think Juliet McKenna’s written—there’s an essay on her website—in which she talks about how she uses history to do exactly that, to like provide kind of texture and ballast and believability to the world. But what’s interesting, of course, is that these books—these two books, Making History and The Everlasting—make it absolutely clear that that’s not what history is, and that in fact it’s much more complicated than that and much more partial and much less reliable.

So is there an issue—and this is to either of you—is there an issue here where fantasy has come to rely on history and chronicle and the idea of building a world from a verifiable past when in fact, you know, those are not solid foundations in the way that the genre has sometimes assumed?

Cameron Miguel: Yeah, history is pretty messy overall. I think that fantasy narratives tend to rely a lot on the fact that they are narratives. And again, that they create the facts of the world straight from the author’s brain, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when you look at history and fantasy and then history and antiquity—specifically Herodotus—you get a lot more plausible deniability in Herodotus!

Every tale that he tells you is prefaces with “supposedly” … “they tell me this is what happened.” “I wasn’t there!” “It could have gone down this way, but it might not have.” Whereas in fantasy, you’ll get, even with my own writing, details about someone, a specific person’s past—that’s their history, and how it led them to where they are currently—or a group of people, a nation’s, past, and how it led them to where they currently are.

Simply because it’s an easy way to communicate with the reader. A period where we don’t have worry about being plausibly deniable.

Dan Hartland: I think it’s Kari Maund, who is well known to fiction writers—fiction readers—as Kari Sperring, in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy who says something to the effect that, you know, fantasy and history are completely, she believes, completely interlinked, totally interrelated.

Some people, I think, might imagine that, “Well, fantasy is all made up and history is all real, right?” But there’s something actually that is … that’s not true of either. And this hybridity is part of what they are. They reflect each other in that way, that approach to history. You know, the sort of Lord of the Rings Appendices approach to history: The timeline, the absolutely irrefutable fact of it. It’s very seductive. It has a power because we kind of want to believe it.

I just wonder whether there’s something here, Nick, about identity—where we want to believe that Middle Earth has this verifiable past because it means that Aragon is definitely who Aragon is meant to be, and the hobbits are slot where they are meant to be. History gives us this illusion of “slotability”: I mean, is there a way that that really helps a fantasy world and also comforts a reader? Maybe? I don’t know what you make of that.

Nick Hubble: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s exactly true. I mean, one thing that comes to me is both Tolkien and Martin, who we mentioned, both actually do have a level of self-reflexivity. The Tolkien stuff is supposedly begun by Bilbo and finished a bit by Frodo, and Sam sort of tops it off in these three volumes of the Book of West March or whatever it’s called. Martin, in Fire and Blood—which is the source material for the House of the Dragon TV series—gives a historical narrative compiled by some archmaester who does sort of point out, “This actually might not be entirely true because, you know, the sources are in conflict and you know, and this stuff.” So they play those games, and obviously, yes, we do!

I mean, both of those books are immensely popular because they have that in-depth kind of history, but actually both of them are so big that they’re not internally consistent. And you know, we can read that because the level of scholarship into Tolkien, we can see that. And also because he changed it, so if you’ve got a second edition of The Hobbit—which I’ve got, because that was the one I read as a child, you know—it’s still got all this stuff about policemen on bicycles and stuff that at some point got taken out to make it more internally consistent. So you can reinsert that playful bit. And again, both of these writers are, when the mood takes them, playful as well, they kind of can’t help themselves.

So there’s that level in there. But I think the issue with these kind of fantasies—and I think it’s even true to an extent of somebody like Terry Pratchett, who’s more cynical and more trying to show his readers the kind of flaws in this kind of thing—there’s still a sense that they’re still in hock to history in some sense, to this idea of history, the idea of history itself that we can in the West—or in a country like England, that can trace a history back to, I don’t know, Egbert or whatever, who fought with Charlemagne and stuff, and then came, you know, Boedica and Alfred the Great and so on—there’s this kind of history which in some ways is, “Yeah, you can trace a history back, but also obviously it’s a myth.”

It’s a story and immensely powerful story. And I think all these fantasy versions of it, although they play off that, they’re also partly in awe of that kind of structure. So you can read Tolkien and Martin and Ursula K. Le Guin for that matter—I mean, you can read it from a kind of politically right, conservative kind of position. It’s not like the readership of all of these texts is kind of necessarily progressive or liberal or whatever. Whatever you want to describe the other side as! I mean, Joe Abercrombie, for example, has also done that kind of replay from an even more cynical kind of perspective.

But it’s still … I mean it’s good for the writers, obviously, because they get big, big readerships—because it kind of appeals to everyone. But I think The Everlasting is definitely taking a side in that. It’s not kind of in awe of that kind of history. It’s trying to pull that history kind of apart and say, “You know, it’s part of the process of imperialism.” And so, in that sense, I think it’s different to this other version of, you know, the more dominant, if you like, epic fantasy kind of reliance on history.

Dan Hartland: And it’s interesting that you talk about epic fantasy specifically there. You know, we are painting with quite a broad brush here. I mean, I wonder whether there are examples in, you know, whatever you want to call other types of fantasy—the uncanny or the weird—where this kind of quote-unquote reliance on history is less pronounced, or maybe not.

I’m not convinced, for example—I mentioned Miéville earlier—I’m not convinced that the sort of the leading lights of the new weird—you know, Miéville, VanderMeer, and Steph Swainston—really kind of broke away from it as much as the New Weird might have liked to believe it did. But there are currently quite a few fantasists, I think, who are very actively trying to kind of dissolve that.

You know, I’m thinking of maybe Kai Ashante Wilson, you know? Sorcerer of the Wildeeps: You read Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and I don’t feel the certainty. This is an episode of Critical Friends, so we have to mention Vajra Chandrasekera, it’s not allowed for us not to. So The Saint of Bright Doors does this very explicitly—you know, deals with past and history and identity and how those things are built up over time in a fantasy setting—but is aware, you know, of what are the perils and the pitfalls of this.

Is fantasy able to sort of get around its own reliance on history? Because we started this conversation with The Everlasting and Making History both … I mean, basically the villains in those novels are trying to convince us that history is verifiably the truth. The villains are doing that, right? So that seems to me really important, because if fantasy as a genre isn’t escaping that assumption, we’ve got ourselves a problem. Do we feel like it is, it has, it can?

Nick Hubble: Well, I suppose that’s the question—you know, you’re right!—that’s the question we’re asking. But it’s kind of a big question!

Dan Hartland: Have a swing at it!

Nick Hubble: Having said all those fantasy texts are complicit, I mean, I think we have agency as readers. That’s what I try and tell people, and used to try and tell students at one point: you know, we have agency as readers, so we don’t have to necessarily … I mean, there’s also resistances in all those texts.

And that’s kind of what modern literary criticism is: You read for complicities and you read for resistances, and you try and sort of negotiate what you can out of that. But then, you know, like, I kind of grew up reading Tolkien, you know?! I can’t actually excise that from myself! There’s no way I can do that. And I must admit I like all those fantasy writers and Steph Swainston’s version of doing it if we go into the New Weird.

But yeah, I do think it is … on the other hand, if you ask me to be cold-blooded about it, yeah, it is kind of complicit. I mean, the other thing is the genre is evolving, so something like The Everlasting—which I think will be a (I’m sticking my neck out at the moment!), I think it will be a landmark thing—in a sense, it’s kind of fantasy where the actual goal of the fantasy is to escape from history in some ways, to escape from nation. And I think that’s probably the key? Well, one of the key things, because what it highlights for me, what the novel really highlights for me, is the relationship between fantasy, history, and nation.

It’s about, I mean, with, in this case, as I said, the nation’s called Dominion, so it’s like fairly clear. It’s a bad, I, you know, it’s a bad thing. And then when you think about all those. They’re always about nations. I mean, some are more cynical than others. Actually. The fantasy I was thinking about, which I don’t think we’ve mentioned so far is, is The Witcher, because I was trying to watch series season four, the Witcher, but, and that’s kind of quite cynical about nation, but the nations are still there.

But I think that is the key thing: Do we get away from nation? What would it mean to get away from nation? What would that kind of society be like? And that would possibly involve, it would involve not just going back to history and realizing things were a bit more fluid and messier than we thought; it would involve actually saying that should be the state we want, where everything’s fluid and kind of messy.

And it’s this sort of fixed hierarchies and binaries that you get in nation and history that have to be kind of opposed. I think that’s what Harrow’s doing in The Everlasting. She is actually trying to pull apart those kind of binaries and hierarchies at the same time as satirizing history and fantasy, and also kind of pulling it apart, but also homaging a bit to people like T. H. White and other twenties, thirties writers. She’s just recently written—Alix Harrow has recently written—an introduction to a reprint of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, and those twenties, thirties fantasy writers were also kind of cynical.

I mean, some, something like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is very cynical about history, although it kind of relates four hundred years of it. And it is about kind of escaping from the history, escaping from gender, as it were escaping from hierarchies. Similarly, Hope Mirlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist is another one that does that. There’s a number of fantasies in that period, and I suppose they are also key fantasies in the history of fantasy—and I think what I like about The Everlasting is it seems to be able to draw from a lot of these traditions and do something different with it that’s very, very contemporary, but pay respect to all of those things.

Dan Hartland: Cam, when Nick was talking—particularly when they were talking about nation and history and escaping from it—I was thinking about your review of Ley Lines. Do you remember this book?

Cameron Miguel: So I do remember Ley Lines. It’s such a weird little book!

Dan Hartland: Isn’t it? And your review of it really gets into the weirdness of it. And it’s a fantasy—it’s not an epic fantasy, but it’s definitely a fantasy, in the way that it is a …

Cameron Miguel: Psychedelic Odyssey is how the blurb described it.

Dan Hartland: I was gonna say in the way that a bad trip is a fantasy, but yeah! Psychedelic odyssey works, too. Yeah. But it looks like a western at first, it looks, you know, gold rush and saloons and all that stuff. But it’s not that at all, and it completely dissolves all of the kind of assumed …

Cameron Miguel: It’s Canada, so there are a few less guns!

Dan Hartland: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s kind of a Call of the Wild thing, right? It’s, it’s a Jack London White Fang thing. So my question … I guess the reason I bring that up is that this is a book that really does dissolve all of the silent symbologies of nation and history, and I mean—just so that people have … if they haven’t read this review, I mean—basically it starts out as a sort of cowboy thing, but before long they’re being chased by giant disembodied ears and noses and things. Right?

Cameron Miguel: Not even chased, more like just followed, casually menaced. But instead of ascending this mountain—coming back with their glory to get their bounty, whatever it was—they come back with this ear that’s just slowly floating after them. It’s not even doing anything. It’s just standing there, not even standing, just floating and it doesn’t do anything. But it gives this weird eminence that seems to have an effect on everyone and drives just pilgrimage to this dying town in the Yukon.

It is a really interesting book, especially because, while it deals with history, it seems like it’s more about examining the way our exploitation of the environment creates this death cycle where things progressively get worse and worse and worse. There was a book that came out a little while ago, everyone in the left political sphere was talking about, I think the name was Enshitification: How Everything Just Got Worse. And thinking about enshittification and then Ley Lines: Yeah, everything in this book just keeps progressively ratcheting up in a way of getting worse and then coming back to where it was, getting worse and coming back to where it was, but being in different locales and transcending time.

Dan Hartland: Which I think is kind of valuable because, if we think like Nick does—and I tend to agree that (I’m holding you to this, Nick!) fantasy is complicit in some way in this kind of deadening narrative that the past leads to the future in a sort of meaningful chain of events—there’s a danger that we become nostalgic for a time when things weren’t so enshittified.

Every schoolchild in Britain at one point was thrust a copy of a book called What Is History by E. H. Carr. This is a book that’s really easy to kind of roll your eyes at now—it’s a very kind of certain mid-century British thing. But it ends with a chapter in which Carr worries about nostalgia. He worries that Anglo-American historiography is not going to be open to all the new ideas it needs to be open to in order to escape this sort of dread gravity of, “Oh, things were better in the olden days.”

And I think sometimes fantasy can fall into that because it’s often construed as, if not set in our past, then certainly something that looks like it. Is that something we experience when we are reading fantasy or are there recent or older fantasies that we read that feel a bit more forward footed? Can it project forward or is it always going to be kind of a little bit backwards-looking?

Cameron Miguel: As someone who engages not just with reading but also with other forms of media, and who is in the comic book space and the film space necessarily by living in LA, in the friend group that I’ve built—the creator friend group that writes comic books, has people in the industry—I’ve noticed there’s this dramatic shift towards nostalgia in everything, a hatred for anything potentially new.

And I don’t necessarily blame them. Because everyone wants to go back to, “Back in my day when cartoons felt good”—because you were young and cartoons were great because you were a child! You didn’t have to think too critically about the story of a cartoon. But then you look at a kid and they’re like, “This cartoon rocks!” I know because I’m an educator—I see how these kids react to their cartoons—and not only are we becoming stuck in nostalgia, it’s going to create this sort of vortex where any type of new narrative goes. And it’s already happening. It’s just dismissed as woke or garbage or anything because it doesn’t live up to impossible expectations we have because of something we saw when we were younger.

Something that reminds me of this already is the discourse happening about the recent Predator movie, which is science fiction. But having watched the 1987 Predator film just yesterday, uh, because I watched Badlands and loved it, so of course I go all in on things. I was thinking, wow, “Badlands just takes the Yautja far more seriously than Predator 1987 does.” And I know people will come for me when I say that! But what I mean by “takes them seriously” is: It fleshes them out as a people. It gives them culture, it gives them history here, it gives them norms. Really interesting! And then the first Predator movie, you sort of just have this apex predator—as in the name—who’s trying to kill a bunch of commandos. And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a good film; but if you want something that takes its subject seriously, I think Badlands is a bit better of a film.

[Musical sting]

Nick Hubble: For all that I’m giving, you know, my sort of emancipatory readings of Making History and The Everlasting, they are also just narratives as well—I mean, “just”—but, you know: narratives, stories, novels all work, you know, on one level have to work as entertainment—and they do. They’re both very entertaining. I can assure everybody who’s listening! So, yeah, in some ways you don’t, you can’t, quite ever kind of escape from the circle, but maybe that itself is understanding it as a circle.

Because we can still … even nostalgia is not necessarily bad if you don’t think that history is linear. To get back to my starting point, if it’s not completely linear, then nostalgia is not necessarily bad because this doesn’t mean you’re necessarily just going back into the past. It can be nostalgic for the future in a way, as well. You know, there’s different ways that that can play out.

I think that the way to do that is to be kind of mentally agile. And I think that’s what both of these books do. They sort of encourage you to be mentally agile. So, you know, it’s not that you have to abandon everything from the past. It’s not that, you know, we don’t have to … I was saying that earlier with Tolkien. It’s not that we have to completely throw out Tolkien or you know, anybody else.

Dan Hartland: Do we think that we, that fantasy as a genre is—or at least parts of fantasy as a genre, I wouldn’t want to talk about, you know, all fantasy, that’d be silly—is it moving forwards? You know, where are we? It feels to me like a lot of the things that we’ve been discussing here—and we’ve been very circumspect and careful, you know, we’ve talked about medieval Europe, we’ve talked about the Roman Empire, we’ve not talked about today, right now—but I think a lot of what we’ve been talking about has, you know, urgent contemporary resonances. Is fantasy sufficiently conscious of all of this?

You know, we’ve been sort of bringing this forward, these complicities or these potential sort of areas where we might sort of break free. Do we have confidence that this is something that fantasy can do? Where is all this going? It seems to me that fantasy is really very current right now: In the end of year lists that are coming up soon, my suspicion is—partly because of romantasy, but also I think just generally—fantasy will be well represented in a way that science fiction might not be. Between the two of them, it feels fantasy is having a moment.

If that’s true, is that okay? Are we … is fantasy gonna look after us in this moment of its zenith?

Cameron Miguel: I mean, in the same way we don’t expect perfection from literary fiction, especially when it was the dominant genre, we expected just good art, I think fantasy is in a similar position. Fantasy has narratives that appeal to all types of people and some of those narratives deal with things that are current or don’t deal with things that are current at all. I think for readers that’s completely fine, but if the aim of fantasy itself is to be critical of how things currently are, it may not be prepared to meet that challenge.

I mentioned that I had reread Making History in anticipation for our meeting, and as I’m looking at Gyges, not only am I thinking about Augustus, but I’m thinking about the orange guy in the White House, and the fact that he just mobilized our biggest warship off the coast of Venezuela, supposedly to target drug cartels. You need missiles to target drug cartels?!

This idea of strong men, dictators or strong men—would-be dictators—who rely on lies and mixed stories that allow them to get away with committing crimes up the wazoo: That’s all Gyges decided to do. He even went as far as abducting the academics at the beginning of the story, just having his guards wrestle them out of their homes into that little crowded room, so he could tell them, “You guys are gonna make a city for me so I can go invade somewhere.”

Nick Hubble: Because we are living in fantastic times—I mean, we are not living, you know, in the sort of periods where … we are not living in this kind of rational, instrumental change period that would suit some of … science fiction and fantasy in some ways, I think, is a slightly false distinction because they quite often play off similar ideas as we know, and the boundaries are not hard and fast. But you can imagine there’s a kind of cold sort of … there’s a kind of Star Trek moment of optimism and enlightenment that is possibly not just not consonant with what’s actually happening in the world at the moment to us.

That’s why we—I think why we—are reading fantasy. But on that hand that makes it the field of contestation, and we don’t quite know how that’s going to play out. I mean, in some ways it’s quite exciting that fantasy is the dominant genre. I mean, who would’ve thought that, you know? That would’ve been, as recently as the nineties, considered absolutely ridiculous. The fact that that’s actually happened itself is just, you know, interesting. I don’t think we pay enough attention to it.

And perhaps, you know, that might be a way to go. You mentioned romantasy there, and I do, in the review, sort of discuss a bit where the Harrow is. I don’t think it’s really a romantasy-type novel, but it might attract some of that readership. You know, it’s kind of romance. Romance is a way of learning the world. It’s a way of getting agency. It’s a way of thinking about different systems of power or thinking about power dynamics in sort of interpersonal ways. As a critic, I feel we can work with that. As a reader, I feel we can work with that. So, I mean, therefore, that’s my optimism if you like.

Dan Hartland: I agree. We should be paying more attention as critics to what is going on there. But of course one of the critics, one of the notable critics, that has been is Cameron Miguel!

Cameron Miguel: So are you about to talk about The Entanglement of Rival Wizards?

Dan Hartland: We are.

Cameron Miguel: Is that what we’re doing?

Dan Hartland: We are!

Cameron Miguel: OK, let’s do it.

Dan Hartland: OK, let’s do it! So go for it. You reviewed this for us relatively recently. It was the last book before Making History that you reviewed for us. Yeah. That’s a romantasy book … and you loved it, right?

Cameron Miguel: Yeah, I’m big on romance. When I was growing up, as a child there wasn’t much representation of queer people in literature. At least there wasn’t much representation of queer people in literature that I was allowed to read as a little kid. I would certainly not recommend this book for little kids, either, but, as a grown adult now who has free will and choice, I chose to read this book, and of course I enjoyed it.

It has queer characters in it. It handles serious topics pretty well, including abuse and the way family members can deny abuse if it’s done by someone else; the way institutions abuse people, the way that academics play into institutions. And I was just thinking about The Entanglement of Rival Wizards when I finished discussing fantasy that’s not meant to or not able to meet the moment of being critical of power. I wouldn’t expect an Entanglement of Rival Wizards to challenge an invasion off the coast of Venezuela. That’s something that I do from Making History, and that doesn’t make an Entanglement of Rival Wizards bad. It just makes it a different book that appeals to a different audience.

Entanglement of Rival Wizards can challenge our assumptions about sexuality, gender, the nature of gender, culture, all of that. You can look at other books and how they target race and the superstructures that we’ve invented across the Western hemisphere to subjugate certain groups of people. There are certainly ways that books can be sophisticated, critical. All of it really just depends on what the author is going for.

Nick Hubble: You just have to have a slightly more agile way of thinking about it. And I guess that’s kind of what the culture—you know, the broader whatever-you-wanna-call the fan/critical culture embodied in something like Strange Horizons—is trying to do in some … I’m not giving it a conscious purpose, which is perhaps overdoing it, but it works as a kind of hive mind collective. That’s kind of trying to do something, something like that. So that would be my … I mean, maybe that’s just me! I would always want to try and find some optimistic take on things.

Dan Hartland: Critical Friends isn’t known for its optimism, so let’s try, let’s try!

[Musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for persevering through another episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can listen to more of their music at grandvalise.bandcamp.com.

After our last episode, on hope in science fiction, friend of the show Abigail Nussbaum wrote to push back on the idea—sort of raised during our discussion of Forfeiture by J. P. Nebra—that forcibly displacing a population, quote, “for their own good” is a positive, hopeful storytelling choice. Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden isn’t perfect, Abigail says, but at least it recognizes that this would be—is—colonialism by another name. As Abigail notes, the prime directive exists for a reason.

Meanwhile, Paul Kincaid reflected on Paul March-Russell’s remembrance of he and our late colleague Maureen Kincaid Speller being baffled that anyone could enjoy the work of Becky Chambers. In his defense, Paul says, the world that Chambers paints is in fact far from hopeful—because it faces no obstacles and overcomes no challenges. PK writes that, because everything in those novels is predicated on everyone being so unutterably nice, everyone can afford to be nice to everybody else because they’re not putting anything on the line to get to that point. Paul emphasizes that building a community out of difference is not easy. And that hope might be found in the measure of discomfort those giving something up might be willing to experience.

And on that note, Roseanna Pendlebury on Bluesky found herself tending towards the belief that literature can’t, and generally doesn’t, change the world, or even really hearts and minds. She wondered if anyone has written about this more generally. Answers on a postcard! Zadie Smith in the NYRB comes to my mind, as does a collection of essays entitled Can Fiction Change the World?, edited by Alison James, Akihiro Kubo, and Françoise Lavocat.

As for changing the world … well. See you next time.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 17: On Imagining Hopefully

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the outgoing editor of Foundation, Paul March-Russell, and the founding editor of the Harare Review of Books, Jacqueline Nyathi.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss SFF reviewing: What it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about speculative fiction’s approach to hope and optimism. Where has it gone? How do writers express it? And what are its pitfalls?

We address the perils of realism, define the dystopian aesthetic, and discuss both revolution and reform. In particular, we discuss E. J. Swift’s new novel, When There Are Wolves Again, and Jacqui’s recent piece for us on Tim Weed’s The Afterlife Project, as well as her essay for our criticism special, “Collective Dreaming.”

But we began our conversation by establishing some context. What kind of mood is specfic in right now? And why?

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: We are here to talk about, I don’t know, hope or optimism, or the absence of pessimism, or whatever else within science fiction and fantasy. And you’ve both written for Strange Horizons recently on this topic, and I want to get to those reviews. But before we do, I wondered whether we could talk a little bit about the wider context: Where we’re at within the genre, but not just the genre—like, you know, speculative literature or the culture in general writ more widely—in terms of this dystopia/utopia spectrum. How pessimistic are we at the moment and how optimistic are we at the moment? Where are we on that line right now?

Paul March-Russell: I’ll jump in only because of my experience having been a Clarke Award judge—so, back in 2017, 2018, we had a huge slew of dystopian fictions. And certainly … I mean, some of which made their way onto the shortlists. So Emma Newman’s After Atlas in 2017, and Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters in 2018. And El Akkad’s American War probably should be chucked in as well. We couldn’t sort of keep them off. But I think collectively—I think especially the 2018 judges, but I think all of us—got pretty tired of using yet another dystopian fiction.

But if we take the Clarke Award as a kind of … some kind of measure, some kind of standard, yeah, there does seem to be like a huge glut of dystopian fictions, a lot of which I think have also been influenced by TV shows like Black Mirror. And I think that kind of popularization of dystopian has really kind of pervaded the whole culture. And of course we can think about franchises—The Hunger Games and so forth—and it’s just got so tired to me, that I can begin to predict those kinds of narratives, where those narratives are going to go. I’ve never been a huge fan of dystopian fiction, you know, cards on the table: I don’t like 1984, I don’t like Brave New World; We, yes I do, but I’ve never liked the classics of dystopian fiction, particularly. But I do feel that we’ve got this kinda glut of dystopian fiction and a general kind of dystopian sensibility, a dystopian way of looking at things.

Whether that’s a particular kind of Global North preoccupation, as opposed to a Global South, I think is something we need to think about in this conversation. But it does seem to be that we’re in a really very annoying and very irritating (!) sort of dystopian phase, it feels to me.

Jacqueline Nyathi: I have to agree. I come to it as a reader, and unlike you, Paul, I’m actually really into dystopian section.

Paul March-Russell: Oh, good! [laughs]

Jacqueline Nyathi: I like the idea of it. I mean, I wouldn’t want to … I have lived through dystopia, I’ll explain that, but I like the idea of kind of looking at what could go wrong and kind of coming at problem-solving from that direction: If everything’s falling apart, what are we going to do about it? I like that. I find it sort of mentally challenging to think about what could happen.

And I do tend to find the other side of things, the sort of hopeful side of science fiction, tends to go a little too hopeful; it’s out there, it’s unrealistic. It does tend to be that way. But having said that, we do live in a world that’s very bleak. I mean, if you turn on the news, there’s so much bad news going on. So in that sense, I feel like if we’re going to be thinking about the future, then let’s think about solutions. Let’s be more hopeful. I know it sounds like I’m contradicting myself, but I enjoy dystopia; I just don’t think, if we’re thinking about the future, we should be focusing only on the sad stories, the bleak stories.

But then the thing is, like you say, in the last six years, but especially since the pandemic, it’s all dystopia now. I think of the I-don’t-know-how-many books I’ve read in that time—maybe a handful, like I can count on one hand, have been actually thinking about the future hopefully.

Paul March-Russell: Yeah, I mean, I’ll put my hand up as well: I’m complacent in this. At Gold SF we’ve published dystopian fiction—M. J. Maloney’s The Ghostwriters, The Disinformation War by S. J. Groenewegen—so I’m involved, I’m not an innocent bystander! And I mean, there are certainly great dystopia. I don’t want to, you know, rubbish the dystopian genre. You know, obviously we think of Octavia Butler and the Parable novels. When I was judging, I absolutely loved Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun. I loved Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY, which won the Goldsmiths Prize. So I think there are great dystopias and which do interesting things. But I think very often, you know where it’s going to go. That’s the problem.

And I think what bothers me is that narrative trajectory of, shall we say, the generic or the formulaic dystopian fiction. That is what bothers me. And the fact that, as Jacqui was saying, we do seem to have wall-to-wall dystopian fictions since the pandemic, and that really bothers me for the state of science fiction.

Dan Hartland: When Jacqui talks about thinking about the future, it strikes me that a lot of dystopia don’t. Because there are dystopias, right? And then there’s the dystopian aesthetic, right? And a lot of these kind of sad novels about how it’s all gonna get worse and worse and worse—you know, that old John Le Carré line, isn’t it, which is, “There is no future, it’s just the present getting worse and worse all the time” or something.

The dystopian aesthetic, all it wants to achieve—because that’s its stylistic sort of bent—is to lay up on top of each other examples of how bad things could get. And that kind of problem-solving that Jacqui is looking for isn’t there. It’s not a dystopia that’s a kind of experiment to see, “Well, what would happen, like if this stuff happened?” It’s kind of … I mean, some of them become subtypes of horror fiction more than of SFF because the effect that is being aimed at is just, “Oh, I feel really bad about all of this.” Right?

Jacqui, you wrote, in an essay for the Criticism Special in January called “Collective Dreaming,” that thinking about the future is meant to be a sign of our intelligence. And I just wonder, especially—and I do think the whole point of your essay was to say, “Well, there are alternatives to how we imagine the future and they exist in the Global South, a set of traditions that Anglo-American SF has for a long time marginalized,” and we can talk about that—I do think that there is something about how we are thinking about the future in the Global North right now which is very limited and narrow.

And this is one of the things that’s behind this profusion of dystopias, you know, this idea that we’ve got a problem in terms of how we are imagining futures right now.

Jacqueline Nyathi: Yeah. So I’ve actually read more SF outside of the Anglo-Western side of fiction, and I agree with myself that it tends to be much more thoughtful about the future and hopeful about what we can do for the future. But I maybe possibly went a little bit … I was a little bit too hard on Western SF. Because you do come across some hopeful stories in Western SF.

I think what you say about the aesthetic is the big thing. So even when I’m watching on Apple TV For All Mankind or Foundation—you know, that kind of thing—there are ways of looking at that sort of fiction and thinking about it as, “OK, maybe humans will find ways to deal with things,” and so on. So that is not aesthetically as dark as Black Mirror, let’s say. So it’s there! It’s just that you have to look for it.

I think I find a lot of the short fiction that comes out of the West is very dystopian, whereas, when people are writing kind of novel-length works, there’s a lot more thought about what they’re trying to put out. People are thinking about how humans will progress and it’s probably … In other words, I think I was a little bit too harsh, because I think, if you read a bit more of the longer fiction, you’ll find a little bit more thought has gone into thinking about the future and thinking about ways that we can solve problems.

But I do still think if you read outside of the Western, you’ll find a lot more about how humanity can survive. I don’t know if that’s when I should bring up The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed. That book is perhaps not really dystopian, but kind of extrapolating from where we are today: The climate crisis singularity happens, what comes next? And it goes into geo-engineering and so on. I won’t give you a summary just now, but that actually brings up something I really don’t like in Western SF, which is that you have the one person who survives. The one hero, that kind of thing.

And, in this case, this man doesn’t have any special qualities, but usually that hero has all of the qualities that make humans great and so on. And that hero may not save a day—because everything has gone and we’ve destroyed the planet and so on—but that one person that we’re all looking to, to maybe carry humanity forward or take maybe our knowledge into the future (which is what happens with this guy), is not a concept that we have in the Global South. We are not about the one hero. What is it? Neo in The Matrix or whatever. We’re not about that. We’re about how a community can go forward.

And I find that that’s not simply a … I’m talking about it from the African traditions, but I find it’s in Aboriginal or native Australian traditions and Native American traditions, that it’s more about how the community survives together and how we go forward together. So that’s the thing that I really dislike in Western SF: When everything gets so negative, and then it’s about the one person, the individualism, one person who survives, or the one person who tries to save the world. That’s the thing that I still find nags me.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And in your review of The Afterlife Project, you do sort of pause over the fact that there’s this white guy in the future and, you know, everything is on him—and surprise, surprise, it doesn’t work! And I’m thinking about the work of Rasheedah Phillips or the work of Joy Sanchez-Taylor, all of whom have sort of looked at Global South traditions of fantastic literature and said, “look!” And shown us where the community exists.

And I wonder whether part of SF in the Global North’s problem is a crisis of the rugged individualism that has informed it, that these problems that we now face cannot be solved by the lantern-jawed omnicompetent man, just can’t be solved by one guy, however brilliant he is. Right? And so the texts that we are producing within this culture, within this tradition that has always had that assumption, are kind of really pessimistic—because they’re like, “The thing doesn’t work!!” Right? And we don’t know what to do with that.

Which does bring us, Paul, I suppose, to your most recent review for Strange Horizons of When There Are Wolves Again, which has this community thing built into it. And you were really struck by this book.

Paul March-Russell: Yeah, I was. I was actually chatting to Andrew M. Butler, the other day, and I was saying, absolutely, I could see ways in which my review could be shot down. I could see ways in which this book could be shot down. I still defend it! And I think I defend it because, as I think was saying earlier, and as Jacqui was saying earlier, there was a tendency—again, let’s think about Western science fiction, Global North science fiction—to be overoptimistic. You know, that kind of Asimovian, Heinlein, we-can-conquer-problems rugged individualism, yadda yadda. And I don’t think this book is. I think it’s a book which is cautiously optimistic. It knows parameters.

So there’s great bits where the character of Hester Moore reflects upon the current situation at that point of the narrative, or reflects upon their own life-story, and says, “Well, actually, all this could have been completely different, you know, if I take a different turning an entire set of other events could have followed.” So there’s always a constant awareness in the book that this is just one hopeful outcome, but it could have easily gone in a totally different direction with other kinds of repercussions. And there’s also that lovely sense of in the book that this is what we can do within these prescribed parameters. It’s not all about gloom and doom. But you know what? The polar ice caps are still melting. There’s still the sixth extinction there, there’s still this kind of colony of tech bros living somewhere in the South Pacific.

So the book never says, “OK, everything’s now sorted and everything’s now gonna be fine.” There’s a sense there’s a series of conflicts are staged throughout the course of the narrative, and those conflicts will continue after the narrative is over. This is an enduring process. But I think what’s important about the book is that it commits itself to the idea of process, that things can change, things can develop, things can go in different directions. It’s not about the given product, which I think is what dystopian fiction in its kind of generic, formulaic form tends to deliver. “This is how it is.” Winston Smith, he can have his little petty struggle, but you know what? He’s still gonna end up loving Big Brother.

That’s just not how history works! We know that, you know? We know that. So it seems to me that I would defend this book because it commits itself to the idea of process.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: I do wonder though, if—as we’re talking about this sort of focus on process—if there’s also something else going on. Because, Jacqui, in your review of The Afterlife Project, you were like, “Yeah, well, I can understand why Tim Weed, the author, wants to write a book about how we appear to be absolutely bent on the planet’s destruction.” But what is absent in the novel is any idea of, I think you used the word redemption. Which struck me as a really interesting word to think about, because it’s a lot more … it’s more emotive, but it carries more weight, than mere process. So the Swift book is absolutely about that, but it’s also about redemption. I dunno whether you wanted to talk a bit about how that absence of redemption in The Afterlife Project struck you, because that seems key to me to how you were reacting to that book. You were like, “There’s nothing here!”

Jacqueline Nyathi: It goes a little bit back to the single solitary man who’s going to carry humanity’s genes into the future. He is literally the only person who survives on the whole planet. So, I’m like, is there no way to make the story a little more hopeful, by bringing along a group of people, a community of people into the future? It’s like writing off all of humanity. And that’s the way I felt throughout the book, that Tim Weed was writing off humans completely. You know, there’s nothing we can do to save the planet or to save ourselves. It feels so much like he’s actually saying there is no need to save humans.

At the end of the story, there is a hint that other species—because now we’re so far into the future that there’s been evolution in the species that have survived—there are species that are on the verge of sapience. So a crow is sitting on the tree watching this man, and it’s intelligent, he has the impression that it’s intelligent. So the implication is that this man will die, crows will rise up and occupy our ecological niche, I suppose.

Why are we writing off humans to that degree? I don’t fully understand. Is there no redemption for us? Is there no way that we can speak up for … I know we’ve destroyed the planet. I understand this, you know, and I completely understand why he feels this way about humans. But I also find that this is more of a … I don’t wanna say Western, but more people who think in a scientific way are very quick to write off humans very quickly. It’s just humans, you know? They can disappear. It really doesn’t matter.

Dan Hartland: You’re absolutely right. I’m thinking right now of Ross Douthat of the New York Times, who recently interviewed Peter Thiel in his Ross Talks To Weirdos series of podcasts. And, he just asked Thiel. He said, “Well. We should save humanity, right? Like, we should make sure we carry on living, right?” Thiel tried to find every possible way he could to not answer this question, because his answer is basically, “Nah.” Fundamentally, as you say, Jacqui, there’s just this sense that … “Nah.”

And there’s a sense that it’s a zero sum game, right? You can either have the humans or you can have the crows. They can’t coexist—I mean, heaven forfend, right?

Jacqueline Nyathi: I don’t know if you’ve read Speculative Whiteness. I think that’s a very important book. So the people with money are making movies and Peter Thiel’s in the White House influencing American policy. And, you know, these people have a worldview, a complete worldview that they claim is based in science fiction. And it’s a certain kind of science fiction that they appeal to. It’s racist, it’s sexist, it’s ableist, you know, all those things. So this, this book is very revealing. It’s a monograph really. It’s a very short book. But I think everyone should read it, to help think through why our stories right now are as bleak as they are.

Paul March-Russell: I’d add into that David Higgins’s work on the alt-right and victimhood. I think that’s a really important book as well, a companion piece to Jordan.

Dan Hartland: The reason I think it’s so critical as well is because—I find myself saying this a lot in these episodes, but—I keep trying to center the material contexts of all these texts because, if we’re asking in this episode, “Should we be being more optimistic?” I think Carrol would say, “Yeah!” Because, unless we are, then the bad actors are going to take the other kind of SF and they’re going to use it to extremely bad ends … like, really bad, guys!

And that’s why a book like the Swift, Paul, seems so important to me, and why you argue in the piece … You start the piece with The Citadel, Gollancz’s kind of most-read book ever, which you say in part was responsible for the establishment of the NHS, right? Books can have an effect, and if we don’t write hopeful ones, then we won’t be hopeful.

Paul March-Russell: I mean, we go back to Said, in The World, The Text and The Critic, and Said emphasized that books are events in the world. They’re not just things describing the world. They intervene, and I think that’s the really important facet. Everything that Swift demonstrates in the novel is based upon real-world proposals now. There’s nothing made up here. You know, these are all proposals that are being written, being discussed. And she just says, “Look, let’s imagine a series of configurations.”

As I say, there are two what ifs, neither of which are totally implausible. And because of that we have a series of configurations and these don’t happen overnight, you know, it takes at least thirty years for these things be to begin to come together in the course of the narrative. And she goes, “Look, if you have these convergences, it is possible to take these proposals now and actually begin to enact them.”

And even though the narrative then travels another twenty years, by the time we get to 2070 they’re only still beginning. You know, it’s that they’re not completed. The process isn’t over. And I think that’s the thing. I think what she does is to show I think two things.

One is to show how things could be enacted bit by bit. There’s no grand master scheme necessarily. It’s just how things begin to slot into place based upon the immediacy of events, the contingency of events. And at the same time, I think it’s really important, as Jacqui said, we talk about the communities that come together in this kind of positive, transformative way. But she also looks at the communities that are also trying to preserve their current way of life, who don’t want to make that change. And she treats them sympathetically, it’s never a simple kind of, “We are right, they’re wrong.” And that is another feature I love about this book. It’s not a polarizing novel. It reaches out.

Jacqueline Nyathi: It’s interesting, because I just finished another novel, Forfeiture by J. P. Nebra. So I don’t know anything about the author—you know, where he’s from or anything—but in this novel, same thing: You know, we’ve destroyed the planet and so on. And then what happens is that in Indigenous cultures around the world—all kinds of places—send out a signal to aliens who have been here before and saw this planet and were completely amazed by how alive it was and how beautiful—so many species here and so on—and left a way for us to contact them if we need help. So these Indigenous peoples send this message to the aliens, and the aliens come.

They give us time, they give us a year or whatever it is to try and get things back in order or at least put things in place to clean up the planet, clean up the Pacific garbage patch and so on: Do this and do that, put in laws. Of course we don’t do anything. We fight. We find ways not to do it. We fight amongst ourselves and so on. And so, at the end of that time, the aliens decide to remove everybody from the planet. They have the means, they encircle every city, major city, on the planet and go and take everybody away.

But what they do—so here’s the redemption part—is that someone speaks to them and says, “But you know, are you writing off all of humanity? Is it possible to … because it’s not everybody who agreed with everything that was going on.” And then they’re like, “OK”; the aliens say, “Maybe we can kind of train up the next generation to value the planet and look after the planet.” So everyone’s going to go away and be put on an empty planet where they’re not destroying all the species. And then we’ll kind of teach the young people how to value and look after the planet and they can come back.

So there’s the redemption. I thought that was interesting. It’s also like, “Oh, all of humanity,” you know, but there’s something there.

Paul March-Russell: And again, I think it’s that difference between, again, the Global North and Global South, like you were saying earlier. And I think, you know, when I think of something like a subgenre like solar punk, I think of that’s very much as a Latin American movement in most respects. You know, when I think about it. And it does seem to me that immediately you do get a much more hopeful take because it’s coming from a totally different cultural outlook, which is also much more communal in its orientation.

Jacqueline Nyathi: And that’s with Asian fiction as well. Southeast Asian particularly I think is what I’ve read, and you get a lot of the same thing as well. You get—because they’re also thinking about not just humans, but other species—so how will they survive a alongside us, you know? So it’s much broader in its, um, outlook.

There are peoples who know how to live alongside other species. How about they teach the rest of us how to do that, or we find ways into the future that way.

Dan Hartland: And that’s what I like about the novel you just mentioned, Jacqui. There’s this idea that it’s not inherent to the human species that we behave in this way. It’s just a cul-de-sac that some of us have decided to get stuck down. Octavia Cade a couple of episodes ago was talking about how humans don’t have to change to not destroy the planet; we just have to accept that we’re like everything else on the planet, right? We just have to live in harmony—to use a terrible cliché—with everything else.

And that is what the Swift novel is very good at, which is it talks about human and non-human animals very often. Some of the most moving passages in the book—and some of the passages in the book I found very moving—were about animals and were about the natural world. She writes really well and I think that’s one of the ways in which it models what we could be doing differently. It kind of respects that, teaches us—a little bit like the aliens!—how to respect the world.

But what the Swift isn’t—and even Paul accepts this in his review—is radical. You say, Paul, it is radical because it sets its face against what we’ve been talking about, which is this kind of dystopian aesthetic that so much SF is inhabiting right now. But it’s not something like august clarke’s Metal from Heaven, which is like explicitly kind of leftist radicalism, right? It is much more a sort of … I won’t say it’s a centrist liberalism, but it’s definitely a liberalism, right? The way in which things change is they are reformed. The way in which laws are passed is, well, parliament does it. The society isn’t getting destroyed or there is no revolution. The system fundamentally kind of works. We have to correct it a little bit, but ultimately it finds the solutions itself. This too is fairly unfashionable in a lot of SFF and I just wondered whether we wanted to talk a little bit about that really. Is … is that good?

Paul March-Russell: I remember back in the late eighties, Terry Eagleton writing a review of David Lodge’s novel, Nice Work, and absolutely hating it and saying, “This is dreadful. Why are you not talking about capital and labor and so on?” And David Lodge is saying—who again is a liberal, centrist kind of writer, not un not unlike, I think, E. J. Swift—“That’s not the novel I can write, I’m not that person.” You know, I can write what I can write, you know, so there are definitely limits—limits that E. J. Swift imposes upon herself and, and there are limits I think that’s a kind of worldview the problem.

I would say it’s not so much … you know, we  get this old line about, “Oh, it’s so much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, yadda, yadda, yadda.” But actually the real problem to me is actually how do we imagine ways to actually radically reform or revolutionize the world without actually ending up killing a whole bunch of people in the process, you know? And that seems to be the problem. Or destroying other people’s environments or destroying other species and so on and so on.

If you look at kind of standard sort of science fiction tropes—and this is true from H. G. Wells through to Kim Stanley Robinson—we often have this idea of, “Oh, don’t worry, there’ll be a scientific elite. They’ll appoint themselves, they’ll impose some kind of worldview. It will be fine.” You know what I mean? And that is, you know … folks, we’ve got a bunch of tech bros who’ve absolutely fed into that way of thinking and hey, look at the mess they’re making, you know?

I would come back to the idea that if we’re looking at a current political situation, for very good reasons—again, I’m thinking about the Global North, because unfortunately Global North is where I am—we’ve had a series of political disasters where people have lost faith in legal, constitutional politics. It actually becomes radical to say, “No, hold on a minute. The system can work if you act. If we can actually reenergize those institutions and those commitments.”

Not perfectly. I mean, there’s no idea this is a paradise by the end of this novel, in no shape or form is this grandiosely utopian or something. But it seems to me that to simply abandon legal, constitutional, democratic institutions and say, “Oh, don’t worry, folks, the scientist will sort it out … that ain’t gonna work, folks.”

From a kind of Marxist revolutionary position, this book will really annoy you. But actually it is reaffirming a faith in legal, constitutional, democratic institutions—that they can actually work, with a lot of nudging it has to be said, but it can work. And that I think is important.

Dan Hartland: One of the things that the interests me about the Swift kind of what we were talking about. Its perspective is very particular. We hear that China’s built a base on the moon, we hear that the US has “finally”—the word is “finally”!—split into three separate states. But we don’t get a lot about anywhere else that isn’t Britain. We hear a bit more about Europe, because one of the novel’s sadnesses is that Britain is still separate from Europe even in 2070. But it is very much a British solution to a kind of global problem, which is probably where I would … the shooting down thing that Paul keeps saying we could do if we wanted to, that’s probably where I would aim if I were seeking to shoot it down. Because it’s not a complete solution.

But on the other hand, as I’ve said, one of the things I really like about it is how kind of slim and economical it is as a book. And it wouldn’t be that if it had to do with the same thing for every country on the planet. It’s decided to do a particular thing. And what it does is, as Paul says, it says, “OK, this is the system we’ve got. This is the history we have. How do you get somewhere more positive without completely breaking everything.”

And that’s fine. But one of the things you wrote about, Jacqui, in your essay in the—which I reread for this episode, and you know, although you’re in the room, I’m going to embarrass you anyway by saying everyone should go and read the essay, it’s so good, I, loved going back to it.

Jacqueline Nyathi: Thank you!

Dan Hartland: Again, it’s called “Collective Dreaming.” It’s all about how we might imagine futures differently. But there, there was a line which really struck me—because I was reading it for the purpose of this episode—which was where you wrote, “For post-colonial societies, the apocalypse has happened.”

“How did we respond?” is your kind of rhetorical question. And it strikes me that Swift is saying, “How will we respond?” and saying, “Well, within a system.” But what do you make of that from a Global South perspective, Jacqui? Like, how did the post-colonial societies that experienced those apocalypses … How did they respond? You mentioned already, I think, that you’ve lived through an apocalypse, right? You’ve lived through a dystopia. So is that systemic response it, or are there other things as well?

Jacqueline Nyathi: So I am very much a “burn the entire thing down” kind of person. Because, first of all, what you’re saying about the Swift book, so you’re solving the British problem, but we’re on the same planet. And there are, I don’t know what the population of the UK is, but you know, there are billions of other people on the same planet. And I think that’s the mistake we have been making since we started talking about climate change. Which is that we can’t seem to—and the same thing with the pandemic, you know, it was, “This country has vaccines and we’re fine, you know, or we’re going to solve our problem.” The virus is literally traveling around the world on planes or whatever. It’s going from person to person! We are on the same planet, we have the same destiny in the end. So our little systems are not going to fix this problem.

The US doing whatever they’re going to do, or Peter Thiel, or the tech bros solving their little problem, you know, it’s not going to fix what’s wrong with us. And so I think probably, if I’m going to be a revolutionary about this, I think the time for that kind of solution is long past. And this is why we are where we are today.

So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that you can’t use the same systems to solve the problem that was created by the systems. So  if we’re—I know I always talk about capitalism, you know—so your tech bros are trying to do green capitalism and you know, let’s have Bill Gates saying, “Let’s have all these technical solutions, let’s take carbon out of the atmosphere.” And, you know, all these things are just going to create more problems.

So in the same way, I think political systems are not … I understand the impulse to kind of want to find a solution that doesn’t kill everybody or cause starvation and so on. I fully understand that. But I also think that, for those who don’t believe in a future for all of humanity, they’re not playing by the rules. So if you are going to try and play by the rules, you’re not going to get anywhere. They have the power, they have the money, and they’re thinking about themselves.

You know, a lot of the solutions that are proposed are—now I’m talking from the Global South perspective—are going to solve certain problems in the Global North. People are already dying from flooding in Pakistan and Bangladesh and Mozambique and Malawi. We’re already getting these ferocious storms every rainy season. All this chatter that’s going on in the Global North about fifty years from now, that’s not the reality that we’re living through.

So I’m very much of the opinion that trying to work through the systems that we already had is not going to work for the planet. I understand it may work for a country or a certain community, but it won’t work for the planet, and we’re supposed to be thinking, I think at this point, about all of humanity. We should have a much bigger perspective when we’re thinking about how to get to the future.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: And is that where, again, the “Collective Dreaming” essay comes in? Because where can we learn what these alternative imaginings of the future are or might be? Well, it’s in literatures which are not embedded within the assumptions that got us here in the first place.

Jacqueline Nyathi: Colonialism came to my country and destroyed a way of life. There’s so much to say about that, but it took almost a hundred years for us to finally get back on track. I’ll explain why I don’t really like the term post-colonial. It boxes us into a certain definition. We are more than post-colonial. There’s a long history before that. And then after that, of course, we had our dictator, and we have a long story to do with that.

So we had that apocalypse in terms of all the ways of living that we had, our ways of being. And then we then had this political destruction. I could tell you so many stories about living in Zim when there’s no power, no fuel, no water supply, no, you know, no food in the shops. You know, that’s another kind of apocalypse that we’ve lived through.

But here’s the thing: when we tell our story as Zimbabweans, we’re not there anymore. You know? We moved past that thing because humanity has a way of solving problems. So in Zim we have this saying that you always make a plan. Make a plan, make a plan. You always find a solution somehow, if you need to find a solution.

The thing is how to come up with that solution. So, as Dan is saying, in my essay I was saying one of the main things is not to think so narrowly. The tendency with Western SF is to think in Western ways, which is fine because that’s where they’re coming from, but that dominant way of thinking really narrows. And if we’re talking about power dynamics, the power is with Western people, the Global North. If everyone is thinking in that narrow way about the future of humanity, then you know, we’re not actually going to come up with the solutions we need for the entire planet. So how about we all kind of think outside of that or be exposed to other stories, other ways of living.

Let’s talk to native Australians, one of the oldest cultures in the world. How have they got to where they are today? You know what knowledge do they have about living with the land that could save us from oil spills and all the other things we do and so on. So those ways of knowing and traditional knowledge is what we can get a lot of ideas from: What are other people saying could happen? What other solutions could there be? Let’s let everyone participate in being a human on this planet. You know, let’s listen to each other.

Paul March-Russell: I find that deeply inspiring, actually. You know, I’m gonna have to think through a lot of that and I find that very, very inspiring.

I think, I think it’s worth to note that obviously E. J. Swift’s last novel, The Coral Bones, did have that kind of global perspective. So The Coral Bones is obviously a novel which is set in three different time periods, from the nineteenth century to about three hundred years into the future. It’s all set around the Australian coral reef, the Great Barrier Reef, and with, again, a very strong input from Indigenous cultures in there. So I think Swift is a very good example of a white Western author who will think globally about this. Here, she’s just trying to focus on one particular bit. I don’t think she’s in any shape or form inimical to that kind of global perspective, that global way of thinking.

There’s so much to what Jacqui just said, but one thing I’ll take away from it is that it does pose very direct questions about science fiction, and speculative fiction, and science fiction studies. It reaffirms to me that the current direction of travel in science fiction is not the Global North or Anglophone tradition. It is very much about science fictions, speculative fictions, from around the world.

You know, if I just think about foundation of the journal that I edit, the current issue—which will hopefully be in people’s laps!—starts off with an article on Chinese science fiction. The issue itself is a special issue about women in the Black fantastic. We have had special issues in the last five years about Indigenous science fictions. So it just seems to me that science fiction itself has to learn from these other cultures, and if science fiction is—we go back to the point I mentioned earlier—a literature of change or literature of process, then for it to be, you know, a change, full process, full literature, it has to learn from those other cultures. It has to. An Anglophone tradition that doesn’t learn from around the world, it ain’t much of a tradition ultimately, and it’s certainly not gonna have much of a future.

Dan Hartland: I think one of the challenges for science fiction will be that a lot of what … you know, Foundation was very kind to publish my review of Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall, which happily just won the Ursula K. Le Guin Award, and the point I make about that novel is, “It’s coming for you, science fiction.” This book, it’s going to dissolve all of the bonds that you think are holding your genre together.

And science fiction—or the Anglophone version of it, because we won’t get into that, the Anglophone thing that calls itself science fiction—has to be okay with that. Because if it wants to learn, because some of the things that those literatures are gonna teach us as, as Paul says, they’re gonna ask questions that require complete reconstitution of things.

But it does strike me again that the Swift kind of … Paul, you talk about it’s realism, right? And realism is a double-edged sword, isn’t it? Because on one level, we don’t want to go … Jackie was saying earlier, some SF is so hopeful that it’s not convincing. You know, Star Trek: The Next Generation doesn’t seem like a viable future for we are not gonna get there easily, certainly not by, what is it? Twenty-fourth century? No chance! But on the other hand, realism can be captured by all the assumptions that we’ve just been talking about, right? What is realism really? Is it just what is easily doable?

That question of realism seems to me key. But if books are an intervention in the world, Swift’s book is intervening at a point in British letters where even as limited a future as the book is building is necessary, because we’ve completely lost sight of every … you know, we began this episode with the dystopian aesthetic, which is baked into SF. And to be led out of that may require a kind of quite a narrow book, on one level.

I do want to talk a little bit—because I think we should, if we’re talking about hope and optimism—about hopepunk. Jacqui, you’ve, I think—I don’t know whether it was in the essay or in your review of the Weed—you say, “I love to read hopepunk, it’s great!” Paul, you say, and I quote, that hopepunk is associated with—quote—"moral platitudes and glib sentiments.” So I just wondered whether we could put these two together, because I instinctively feel that hopepunk is very vague a collection of texts, right? Like, I’ve heard Lord of the Rings describe as hopepunk. So I mean, at that point the kind of word becomes a bit meaningless.

On the other hand, it began with a call similar to the one we’re making in this episode, right? Which is that we’ve gotta think a bit more positively in many ways. Do we have any thoughts about that? Paul, do you want to defend yourself?

Paul March-Russell: Yeah. I mean, for me, the term hopepunk is actually … I never really knew what it really meant, you know? That people said, I say it, talk about it being platitudinous and whatever because when I’ve read pieces, that were talking about hopepunk they just seem to talk in very general terms. And I’m going, “Yeah, OK. What are you actually referring to here?” You know? And I think it’s tricky.

I’ll give an example. I remember—again, going back to my days of being a Clarke judge, you know—I absolutely loved Becky Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit. And I had conversations with Maureen Speller and Paul Kincaid who were like, “Why, what? How can you even like this book?” You know, they were like, “What? What’s he doing!?” But, you know, I found it emotionally engrossing. It actually moved me to tears at one point. And it felt that Becky Chambers is very much a kind of, doyenne of hopepunk in a way, a kind of emblem of it.

But then you look at Becky Chambers’s more recent novels and it may not quite be working out quite as hopefully as we hoped, when she’s gone into issues around population control and stuff like that. This … dodgy, shall we say? To say the least. So it feels to me that I don’t fully know what hopepunk’s really meaning. I can see it’s gesturing after exactly the kind of quality we’ve been talking about in this conversation, but I don’t think it really sufficiently captures it. And to be a little bit cynical, it’s not enough just to stick the suffix of “punk” onto something and then it suddenly becomes okay, you know?

But, Jacqui, you probably know more about hopepunk than I do. So how do you respond to Dan’s question?

Jacqueline Nyathi: Yeah, so I think you’re right, both of you, about it. It’s not very well defined, is it? Anything with hope in it becomes hopepunk, which doesn’t make sense because punk is about social disruption, right? So how is it … where’s the punk?

But the reason I have enjoyed reading hopepunk is because of the absolute obsession with dystopia. I’ve been looking for something that will give me hope for the future, that sort of reminds me that humanity’s worth saving, that kind of thing. So that is the literal reason why I’ll read hopepunk when it comes across my desk. It has not been important enough for me to say, “Oh, yes, this is the book that everyone should read. This is Good Hopepunk.”

The closest thing to it has been a book called Multispecies Cities, which I refer to in in the essay, because all of those stories are quite hopeful, and they’re about communities and about all the different species surviving into the future and so on. I consider that hopepunk, even though there isn’t any talk of revolution or, you know, how the world has got to that place. It’s just maybe the punk is the idea of dreaming outside of what we see in front of our eyes right now. Maybe that’s the punk part. I don’t want to be reading about the end of humanity all the time. I would like to think about what could, what else could happen.

[Musical Outro]

Paul March-Russell: This is from the very end of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which is a conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo.

He said, “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

So there you go.

Dan Hartland: I’m never against some bonus Italo Calvino, to be honest. [laughter]

[Musical Outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-up” by Lost Cosmonauts. Listen to more of their music at grandvalise.bandcamp.com.

After our last episode on form and length, William Henry Morris offered some further thoughts on novellas. In particular, he encouraged SFF publishers to re-embrace the short novel. All for those, and WHM’s newsletter is worth a follow. Although with novella, novelette, and nouvelle we’re already rich in terms of art.

Dave Hutchinson, he of the Europe in Autumn books, remembered workshopping his novel The Villages years ago and being unsure whether he could get it to novel length. Friend of the show Paul Kincaid apparently told him, “Think of it as a novella and just keep going.” Sage advice!

And finally, Strange Horizons reviewer Hana Carolina also got in touch to note that, “since Kindle Unlimited pays per page read, editing for clarity or concision effectively means cutting one’s own income. It restages once again,” she says, “the old conflict between quality and profit.” Always center the material in your criticism, gang.

See you next time.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 16: Length and Breadth

[Musical intro]

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the novelist and critic Redfern Jon Barrett, and the reader and reviewer Nileena Sunil.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we insist on discussing SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about length and breadth: those novels that feel too short or not long enough.

What’s behind that feeling we have that a text is lacking something, or that it’s overstretched? How can we read shorter and longer works on their own terms? And what the heck is a novella supposed to be, anyway?

We take in Margaret Atwood and P. Djèlí Clark, the perils of dragon riding and the loneliness of the deep space mission. And we’ll ask ourselves how we can meet works of fiction on their own ground. But also, how those works can help us get there.

We started our conversation with Redfern’s latest review for Strange Horizons.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Redfern, you recently reviewed If the Stars Are Lit for Strange Horizons and it was a really great review on a number of levels—

Redfern Jon Barrett: Thank you!

Dan Hartland: You’re welcome!—that I found to sort of really get under the skin of a book that kind of hadn’t impressed you, and you kind of felt bad about that, and you were checking yourself. You were like: “OK, why?” And, “Should I say so and if so, how?”

And I felt that tension really helped the review sort of expand itself and understand the book. But one of the primary criticisms I think you had in the book, and tell me if I’m wrong and go into more detail about it, is that I think you said it needed a … it would’ve benefited in your view from a good edit.

Like, there were a lot of elements in this book and they were kind of clashing. They were hitting against each other, they were working against each other, and kind of by the end of the book there had been so many things that nothing had sort of come through as the novel’s primary identity. It remained a confused book.

I just wonder whether you could talk through that with us a little bit. Like, what was it about reading that book that just felt so … uncontrolled, I guess?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah, I think that’s a really good way of putting it. So I really feel quite a strong sense of disappointment when a book—I mean, it doesn’t have to even be a book, but any form of fiction—has this really, really compelling premise that it doesn’t quite unpack enough.

And this is the issue that I had with the novel. And this novel had some really, really great elements to it—which I think, you know, in a way adds to the disappointment when you really, really want it to get into the meat of what it’s proposing to do. And instead, it kind of glosses over that and doesn’t really know how to fully unpack it.

And in this case, with If The Stars Are Lit, I was really, really drawn into the idea of someone being trapped in deep space, alone, on a spaceship with a subconscious construction that looks like their ex-wife, you know? To me, that’s a really, really compelling premise—and part of what is compelling about that is imagining all of the psychology around that situation.

You know, everything from that sense of isolation to the fact that this … it’s called a gemel, this sort of artificial construction is, and it’s based on the protagonist’s subconscious, but looks like someone she was very close to—and yet is really neither, and I think that that is such a fascinating idea, and I think especially because the protagonist as well is queer. You know, it’s, that’s another element to it. And you know, I said in the review, I’m a huge fan of queer indie fiction. I think that it’s something that I really want to help elevate. So it was something that I was really excited to get into.

But unfortunately, the novel didn’t, as I said in the review, really get into that—only for about half of the book, really, it has this setting, maybe less, and we don’t really see the relationship develop between the protagonist and the gemel. We are told that they love each other, but we don’t really see how that unfolds between them.

And then it moves on, and then it’s no longer the two of them alone on the page—which really surprised me, because I was sort of waiting for more to happen from this scenario. And then it introduces the element that the protagonist is rescued by her real ex-wife.

And you know, that was kind of compensating: OK, well this isolated creepy premise is over. But now we have another potentially interesting premise. I mean, imagine if you rescued your ex to find that they’d fallen in love with essentially a hologram that looks like you! You know, that’s another fun thing that could be explored. But then that wasn’t really fully explored, either, and it sort of went into so many different directions that felt like they were explored only really on a surface level.

And yeah, ultimately that was just really disappointing. And it’s not the only novel to do that, you know—that’s quite a common thing, that something is sold on a particular idea, but then it doesn’t fully know what to do with that idea.

Dan Hartland: As you speak, I’m thinking, “Yeah. I’ve read novels of two halves like this as well.” Is it two novels here that have kind of been smooshed up against each other, do you think? It sounds as if the novel you were really interested in was that first half. Would you … in your head, would the more successful version of this book be a more in-depth treatment of that first half, with the second half either, you know, relegated to a sequel or just kind of pushed aside?

Or is there a way that this … smooshing … of the two ideas could have worked? What’s your preferred solution? Because one of the things we do when we read a book and think, “Ah, this hasn’t quite worked”—even if, you know, we know that it’s not for necessarily the critic to say, “This is what the book should have been”—in the back of our heads, just as readers, we’re thinking, “I wish it had been X.” Did you have that?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah. I mean, I think when reviewing it’s really important to understand the difference between what you wanted to read and what the novel is, you know? And I think that part of reviewing professionally is understanding that a book might not be for you, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not for someone.

So that is something really, really important to hold in check, and I am hopefully not so arrogant as to assume that there’s not a way that the book could have been two very different halves that would’ve worked well. I’m sure that there are. But having said that, I think that some of the strongest works of fiction I’ve read that have a speculative angle and a really, really strong, strong hook do sort of stick with a singular premise and really dive into that.

And I’ve got three books in front of me that I think did that well or did it less well, which we can talk about later. But I really, really think that it would’ve been better off if the author had really chosen to dive into the psychological state of the protagonist—because, you know, it doesn’t have to be sympathetic. There’s so much you could do with that, because it’s quite narcissistic to fall in love with an artificial construction that’s based off your own subconscious. And that is something that could also be really interesting to explore, and the protagonist as an anti-hero could have been sort of further developed from that. But, you know, I’m careful all the while not to spoil the novel because I think that if people are into queer indie fiction, it is something that they should consider picking up. But I personally think that it would’ve been better just as a single novel. I don’t think it necessarily needed the other elements really at all.

That first half … like, at one point they discovered that the nearby planet, and I said this in the review, all of the messages—inbound and outbound messages—from that planet are fake. And that was really creepy as well, because they only heightened the isolation and like, “OK, so is everyone on the planet actually dead?? You know, what is behind this? And … I don’t know. Nothing really got resolved in a way that could live up to that potential.

Dan Hartland: As I say, in the review you, for me anyway, make the case that this is a classic instance of a novel having an awful lot of good ideas but not settling on any one.

As you were speaking, I was remembering there are two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation featuring the perennially, unhappy in love chief engineer, Geordi La Forge, and in one episode he creates a hologram of the woman who designed the USS Enterprise, right?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah. So I remember this!

Dan Hartland: Yeah! And he has to talk to the hologram to figure out the thing that he has to fix to make the ship go again. But in the process, he falls in love with this hologram. And then, maybe a couple of seasons later, the actual designer of the SS enterprise appears on the ship and she’s, like, “What the … have you been doing? What’s this hologram?!” And she doesn’t fit the kind of fantasy of the hologram that Geordi has, and the whole thing unravels from there.

I think they do have to talk to each other to find the thing to fix the ship to make it go again. I think basically it’s the same plot, just with a different character, but I think this distance between those two episodes is what gave them impact, that sort of two-season gap where, you know, you don’t hear about this character, but then suddenly, “Oh, she’s back and he has a hologram. Remember the hologram?!” is what gives that second episode its impact.

So yeah, it’s a trope that has precedent. But not only does the trope have precedent, your suggested treatment of it has precedent as well. Nileena, let’s bring you in here, because one of the things—and it will seem perhaps to listeners as if I planned this sort of discussion between two reviews, but I didn’t, it’s just that you handed these reviews in and then I’m like a parasite, just feeding off your work—but it was so interesting to me to read your review next to Redfern’s because it’s about a book in which there is isolation in deep space. It’s a book in which there are kind of messages from far away, which aren’t quite what they seem to be. It’s a novel, or a novella, where the main character does have an interaction with a kind of nonhuman intelligence and forms quite a strong bond with that intelligence.

And yet your reaction to this novella was almost—it’s not kind of the opposite to Redfern’s—but you wanted, where Redfern thought, “Hmm, this needs to be sort of shaved away, the edges of this, we need to balance it out, we need to rationalize the novel in some way,” you are like, “No, no, I need more of this. It would be great if this book were longer, if we had more time with these characters and in these settings, so that we can really understand them.”

The reason I say that’s not quite opposite to Redfern is because of course that’s what Redfern thinks. So you are both basically saying, “More please,” but within different kind of contexts. So your book was Orphan Planet. I just wondered whether you could talk a little bit about, as Redfern has, your experience of reading that, of getting into it and then finding that it wasn’t quite what you were imagining or looking for or felt worked.

Nileena Sunil: Yeah. So, with Orphan Planet, I felt like … So, for the most part, I did like the book. Like it was mostly a positive experience. But I felt like I also had a lot of unanswered questions by the time I got to the end of it.

So the premise is, it’s about this girl who’s stuck on a planet all alone. She’s like the only person except for this artificial intelligence. And she gets these messages, and I thought that was a really interesting premise. But also, first of all, I felt that there could have been like more psychological depth when it comes to the main character. Like, I felt at parts … I felt like she was too well-adjusted for someone who’s been—who has all her life been—the only person on the entire planet.

And also like, you know, what happened: why she’s there and what’s actually going on outside? There was some explanation for that, especially when another character comes in and she starts investigating what happened all those years ago—you do get to see some of it—but I also felt parts of it were … I mean, there could have been more of an explanation, because I still had a lot of unanswered questions.

So I felt either it could have really focused on this one character and the psychological aspects of it, or it could have expanded the worldbuilding a little bit more. But then I don’t know if that would’ve worked as a novella. It would have to be a little longer. So I felt like these two aspects could have expanded on either of these two things: either kept it super-focused on one character or explained more. But, even though for the most part I did like the book, I felt there was something missing.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, and that very much comes across in your review: that the setting is interesting, the character dynamics even have potential, but the novella just doesn’t give itself space. But I mean, would you say that you were left … unconvinced … by the setting or the characters?

Because you mentioned that the protagonist is just way too well-adjusted for this person that has basically grown up in total isolation, you know, sort of locked away from all human contact on this sort of barely-terraformed planet and yet seems fine with that. “That’s okay!” And so is that a problem when you are reading this novella and constantly in the back of your head you’re like, “Ah, is that really how this would work?” Is that what undermined your reading, just this sense that it hasn’t thought through its own setting?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah. There were parts where I did feel like that the character was … she was there on this planet basically since she was a baby and she grew up all alone. And I kept thinking, “OK, how, how did she turn out, like, even a little bit well-adjusted?!” I then kept thinking, “Am I overthinking it? Maybe, am I just supposed to suspend my disbelief for this?” But like, yeah—it was on the back of my mind all the time.

Dan Hartland: And it’s interesting, because in genre work, and in particular SFF, we are often told that suspension of disbelief is crucial to the reading protocols of approaching these kinds of text. But I always feel as if—I don’t know how you two think about this—but suspension of disbelief is a deal between writer and reader. It’s not something that the reader gives the writer: “OK, I’m just gonna suspend all my critical faculties and just let you write at me.” There is a responsibility on the writer, I think to enable you to leave some disbelief at the door again.

Was that your experience? That the novella just didn’t quite … help you believe in it?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah, I guess I did try to … like, to an extent I did try to suspend my disbelief, or, you know, just try to accept it or rationalize it in some way, but I felt like it didn’t do enough to let me do that.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Redfern, I’m conscious that you are wearing two hats in this conversation—because you are a critic, but you’re also a novelist. You’re a fiction writer. So this conversation is getting a little closer home for you, right? So, with sort of maybe half the critic hat and then half the fiction writer hat on, what are your views of that kind of suspension of disbelief? Because we’re all—both of you here are—kind of saying that you’ve read a text that hasn’t quite helped you stay with it, right?

Redfern Jon Barrett: I was just thinking that it’s such a complicated thing, you know, suspension of disbelief. It’s sort of in this gray area between being conscious and not.

You know, sometimes I’m more willing to suspend my disbelief for something I really want to believe in, or there’s some other aspect of it I enjoy, but it’s not completely in your control. Right? It’s sometimes you really, really want to believe in a work or a premise, but it just … you’re pulled out of it regardless.

But at the same time, I think we have different tolerances depending on how we’re approaching the novel. And, as a novelist, that’s something that is really, really at the forefront of my mind, especially when it comes to character and worldbuilding. So for Proud Pink Sky, for example—my novel set in the world’s first gay state—it was really, really important to me that I created a believable world, because I love worldbuilding and I’m so easily pulled out if there’s something incongruous or something unbelievable about a world.

So I’d spent so many years working on this gay state, and I have notes for everything from, like, the parliamentary structure to the political parties. You know, I had a whole Polari—the gay slang—dictionary at the end of the novel because I really wanted above all else to create a believable world for the reader that they could really, really get drawn into.

And I think that is something that as an author you have to constantly keep in mind: how, or try and predict how, is the reader gonna respond to this? How is this going to sound to the reader? And of course that’s always gonna be different and it’s not something that you can ever completely nail down, but it’s such a huge part of the process. And I think that makes me more disappointed, as a critic, when I read and something about the characters or the worldbuilding or the way the novel’s structured in this case just really loses me, really pulls me out of it. It’s such a disappointment.

And, you know, I had a similar thing with my review before that of Ken MacLeod’s trilogy. I loved the first two books. And then in the third, the worldbuilding just completely pulled me out of it and it felt ungrounded compared to what he’d done before, which I really felt was masterful. And I don’t know, I feel like there’s a particular soreness to that kind of disappointment.

Dan Hartland: I remember the MacLeod novel—your review of it, I haven’t read the novel—and yeah, that disappointment really shone through in that review: that you’d read the other two and that’s an even more egregious problem for a reader than the one we’re discussing here, right? Where you’ve read two previous novels in the trilogy and you’d be like, “These are amazing!” And then the third book comes along and you’re like, “Arrgh!”

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah! And especially when it’s the last one. If it’s the middle one, it’s kind of like, I dunno, I feel like less devastating somehow.

Dan Hartland: Well, I really enjoy second books in trilogies. I’ve got this thing for the hinge of a series, and you are right that sometimes what I like about them is that they are not perfect. They can’t be, because they’re that point of pivot. But yeah, you’re right: When the third book lets you down, it’s the final season of Game of Thrones, isn’t it? It sours the whole experience.

But one of the things that I’m also interested here is that worldbuilding is one thing, but the other thing that we’re talking about both of these books is—from the perspective of “need more of it” and also kind of, not “less of it,” but “more focus on it”—is that one of the things that isn’t working here is the psychology of the protagonist for both of you.

So there’s this worldbuilding, this sort of reams of notes on the parliamentary system of the world that never go on the page but inform everything that happens on the page, and therefore gives it some sort of verisimilitude to you; but also, the way that the characters are convincing and therefore you go with them through all this stuff. And if they aren’t convincing, then you kind of almost can’t.

And I wonder, Nileena … like, Redfern has said that they found the protagonist of If the Stars Are Lit kind of underdeveloped, or at least the way in which that character reacted to situations insufficiently developed, to really believe in, to use that word again. You likewise say that this character in Orphan Planet just doesn’t ring true: there isn’t sufficient trauma, if you like, expressed in how they react as you read the novella.

Were you aware of that affecting your reading, that kind of lack of conviction that you had in the character, or was it only something you realized later as you wrote?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah, I think it was there on the back of my mind as I read it, but I didn’t think … I wasn’t actively thinking about it for the most part. It was something that kept lingering in my mind as I read.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. It’s that what Redferm was saying, that conscious/subconscious thing. You’re not quite aware of what isn’t clicking, but you know something, isn’t.

I’m thinking about one of your old reviews for us, actually. So Redfern mentioned their review of the Ken MacLeod. I’m thinking of your review of the Indra Das book The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar. And again, that’s another novella, and you really enjoyed that book, but this is what interests me: At first you thought the same thing, that maybe the novella wasn’t developing the world enough and it wasn’t therefore delivering on the promise of its premise.

But you realize that that’s kind of the point of that book, and you say, “Indra Das might have created a world in which epic adventures and fantastical scenarios exist, but our point of view character exists on the fringes of the world.” And therefore you don’t get full immersion in the way that you might want … but that, because thematically that works for the novella, it’s okay.

Nileena Sunil: Yeah, it does. Yeah.

Dan Hartland: And that brings us to this idea of: when can a book—a novella or a novel—not give us what we want but still work, right?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah. So, from what I can recall, when I went into it, I was expecting it … So I had read another book by Indra that was like a lot more epic. It had like a lot more characters and a world and worldbuilding. So I was expecting something like that. So when I went into this, I was like, “OK, this doesn’t elaborate on a lot of things.”

We are told that there’s this vast world with dragons and all these adventures and all that stuff, but we don’t really get to see any of it. But as you keep reading it, I kind of realized, “OK, that’s kind of the point of it. This is written from the perspective of someone on the fringes of that world.” It didn’t really meet my expectations in that sense, but then I realized I did like what the book was doing. It was something very different from what I expected, but also it was something very interesting on its own terms.

Dan Hartland: And sometimes those are the best reading experiences, right? Where we go in thinking, “OK, we’re gonna get this from this book.” So when you go into Last Dragoners, you are thinking Dragonriders of Pern, right? You are thinking, “Oh, it’s gonna be this big thing and there’s gonna be, I don’t know, flying dragons and fire and all that stuff.” And then there isn’t.

And your first reaction, inevitably, to that is, “Oh, but we wanted the thing that we liked before! We liked the thing!” You sit with the book and you think, “Oh no, this is great.” And the surprise of that, the discovery of that, is actually really pleasant—and we wind up loving that book for pulling the rug from under us.

Have we … can we think of any others? Redfern, do you have an example of a book that, you know, hasn’t necessarily done what you would do or what you would’ve imagined this book would’ve done, but in fact has totally won you over? So we’re think … we’re talking here of two books that didn’t quite achieve that. How can a book not give us what we want—because books shouldn’t necessarily do that, right?—but succeed in that effort?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah. It’s actually kind of a tough question. Because on the one hand that has happened, you know—of course I’ve read books that I really enjoyed that weren’t quite what I expected. But at the same time, coming up for a blurb for a book is its own skill, right? And if a book is completely not what you expected, then I think it’s kind of in a way failed to sell itself quite properly, if that makes sense.

I’m having trouble—I know it’s happened, but I’m having trouble off the top of my head thinking of a specific one. I think, as well, what you said before about having two hats with it, you know: one of the books that I have in front of me is, is Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, which I love. But what I loved about that book is—and this was something that I completely didn’t expect from it—was, you know, it’s set with an older woman and a younger girl and they’re in this apartment and society seems to just be disintegrating around them. And we’re not told for most of the book why that is. It’s just really, like, the buses stop running, things just slowly sinking into disorder, almost as though the connections that tie us together as people and allow us to form society are dissolving. And later in the book, it kind of reveals that it’s an environmental catastrophe, which I was almost disappointed by because, I don’t know, I kind of just liked this idea of people losing their ability to connect with each other!

So I just finished a manuscript based on that exact premise! Because I wrote the novel that I really wanted to see. And that is that our empathy, our interpersonal relations, just stop functioning and society starts to slowly break down as a result. So that was really fun to work on.

Dan Hartland: The Lessing is a great example of a book that you’re investing a lot in, and it holds off its revelation, and then towards the end it almost just slips it in, right? Like, yeah: it isn’t almost materially relevant to your experience of the reading. But in your case, Redfern, you were like, “Oh, that’s the explanation,” and felt a little bit let down by that, right?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah. Like, I mean, again, this is something that … I’m aware there’s a difference between what I want to see and what makes a book good. I think it’s an amazing book. I just really, really, really obsessed about the idea that, you know, our greatest strength—our ability as a species to form these connections and hold them to the point that we can live in cities of millions of people and not have just complete disorder—that the idea of that breaking down is one of the most terrifying things to me. And the fact that it has a different root cause I almost found as a disappointment from that book. And again, that’s why I was like, “OK, I’m gonna write a book where that is the root cause.” Again, it’s just a really complex thing, what book you want, what you expect to read. It’s a hard thing to express.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: We are skirting around this idea of length here: Nileena wants more from the novella in question; Redfern, you want more from the first half of the novel in question. And we’re talking here about what the writer spends their words on and how many words they choose to spend. And then we’re also starting to talk about markets and how to sell a book.

And it seems to me that novellas are having a moment in the market. I don’t know whether you two agree. I feel we’re seeing more of them. You know, do we think that the novella has this problem specifically? Nileena, when you were reading Orphan Planet, did you just wish it was a novel? Would that have solved the problem? More words?

Nileena Sunil: I guess it depends on how the author would approach it if they wanted to change it in some way. I guess if you’re focusing it on the character and the psychological aspects, I guess it could still work as a novella, but then you’ll have to cut out some of the worldbuilding elements or some of the external elements, to an extent, if you want to keep it to a novella length. Or, if you want to just expand the world and let us know more about what’s going on outside the very contained environment of where most of the book is set in, for that, I guess you would need more words. It would have to be a novel in that case.

Dan Hartland: It’s a question of focus, right? Where the novella needs to be this very clearly targeted thing, where the novel has room for highways and byways and subplots and side characters. The novella’s secret weapon is clarity, maybe. So that’s why Last Dragoners worked for you, perhaps: that it knew, “OK, I’m gonna look at this very particular character in this very particular corner of this wider world, but I’m not going to stray into the wider world. I’m gonna stay here in this area of focus.” Whereas in Orphan Planet, you are almost missing the wider world, it needs some of that in order for its main story to work.

Nileena Sunil: Yeah. I mean, I think it could have still worked without much focus. If the worldbuilding is less, it would be fine, but there has to be more depth to the characters and the very contained environment. Or you can expand outwards and have a bigger novel where there’s like a lot more going on. So I felt it needed to be either expanded, like, depth-wise—and maybe make it more contextual or, you know, expand outward and make it a vaster world and explain a lot more of what’s going on.

Dan Hartland: The route that the book takes demands different things of it, right? So Orphan Planet is trying to be this kind of quite focused novella that is pretty fixed on its main character, but your problem is that, in your reading, Nileena, the main character lacks the depth to make that convincing. And the only way around that, if you want your character to be a little flatter or whatever, is to make the world more interesting. But for that you need to be a novel and lose the focus.

I’m really conscious of the problem that we have here being that we’re almost as critics—and, Redfern, you are a critic and a writer, so you are probably just telling yourself these things!—but, for Nileena and I, we are telling writers what to do! Like, we’re saying, “No, no, no, this is the thing!” And I’m convinced by what Redfern said earlier, which is that we need to take books on their own terms and we can’t decide what we think it should have been and criticize it on that basis. So. How do we achieve that, Redfern—since that was your idea, I’ll come to you! Like, how, if we come to a short book that secretly we wish was longer, how do we come to terms with that? And, if we come up to a door stop—like a huge thing—and we’re like, “Ah, I wish this had like fewer chapters,” how do we accept that that’s not what it is and write about it sympathetically?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Well, I think it ties into what both of you were just saying about … you know, obviously accepting books on their own terms, but also what Nileena was saying about, you know, there’s lots of different ways in which the novel could have worked. I think that’s a really interesting point, because, yes, you can have breadth and have that work really well. You can have depth and have that work really well. So it’s not like there’s just one direction that things can go in there.

I think it’s really when the novel feels dissatisfying based on what it’s trying to do. Because there are novels that I love that are just really focused on worldbuilding and, you know, the characters are a bit more just archetypes, but they’re there to really flesh out the world, you know? And then there are things that I love where we don’t really see much of the world. A lot’s implied, but the characters are so vivid and rich that that winds up really being what works about the novel.

And, just going back to novellas quickly, one of the other books I have on my desk in front of me is Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram—really embarrassed if I’ve mispronounced their surname. And, you know, I was really, really fascinated by this premise that this person is stuck in a never-ending metro system. And, you know, it’s found this purgatory-sort-of-space, and I didn’t know what to expect of it. And the novel continually surprised me.

It was really a reflection on depression and suicide. And, you know, I hadn’t read much about it beforehand, so it was something that really I wasn’t expecting—and, on its own terms, I think it did such a wonderful job. You know, it’s not how … it’s not a book I could have written, you know? I don’t think anyone but this author could have written this book. But you can see what it’s setting out to do and you can see how well it’s doing at that.

So I think it’s a real tough one when you have a book that you feel there should have been more from and could have been longer to go into it more, or a book that you feel that the words are kind of wasted and that it really needs a good edit down. Just coming to mind at the moment, one of my favorite books—and it’s almost a cliche to love this book—but you know The Handmaid’s Tale! I read The Testaments last year and I really hated it, because it just didn’t need expanding on. Like, Margaret Atwood did such an amazing job of encapsulating this incredibly claustrophobic world, this incredibly claustrophobic perspective—that’s literally claustrophobic because of the wings that the protagonist wears on her hood—and so much is just left to your imagination to imagine what’s happening in this world and what it is.

And then it’s just, “Oh, actually we’re just going to dump that all in another book.” And it’s just so unnecessary. And again, I feel like that failed on its own terms, but it’s such a subjective thing at the same time that it’s kind of hard to say why something fails.

Nileena Sunil: I kind of felt the same way about The Testaments. Like, almost exactly the same way!

Dan Hartland: Yeah, me too! So, I mean, we can end here on a note of harmony, right? We all hated The Testaments. You know, we were just talking about, “Maybe some novellas could benefit from additional worldbuilding.” Well, here is some additional worldbuilding that, you know, no one wanted. It wasn’t necessary!

Yeah, as you say, Redfern, it’s all so subjective and every text must be taken on its own terms because of that. You know, it might be the case that one book is saved by some additional work on the page—not just in the notes, but on the page, explaining how the world works and going into that breadth that Nileena was looking for, maybe, from Orphan Planet—and then there are other books which just … I mean, I don’t wanna say Handmaid’s Tale … of course Handmaid’s Tale hasn’t been damaged by the existence of The Testaments, but The Testaments exists, guys! Like, it must affect, in some senses, our backwards reading. And that’s a shame, isn’t it?

Redfern Jon Barrett: You can’t erase it from your memory. That’s the thing, you know: like, I haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale since reading The Testaments, but I know that now there’s all this extra stuff there and it’s like, I can’t ignore it. So I think in a way it does impact the original text in a sense. And it’s actually sad to say, because I, I absolutely love Margaret Atwood. I’ve read every single one of her novels, she’s been a huge inspiration for me. But The Testaments was just … yeah, like you say, so unnecessary. And that’s the point: if a novel’s done its job well, it doesn’t need more.

Dan Hartland: And that’s what we’re dancing around, isn’t it? How do you tell as a reviewer whether a novella has done its, or a novel has done its, job and therefore is complete, doesn’t need more? And how, as a reviewer, do you approach the experience of reading a text which you feel does—that, for whatever reason, has an absence for you?

I was thinking again, Nileena, of another review you wrote for us. I’m really sorry to keep picking on your back catalog in this way, but you must be on the novella beat for us—because you also read The City in Glass, and I remember we had a conversation briefly about this over email because I read that book too and felt that it was super-well-turned. Like, the prose is just … you call the prose evocative, and I think that’s spot on. It’s quite long for a novella, but I think it still counts as one. It’s this kind of mythologized city and you compared Italo Calvino—which is pretty high praise!

It really worked, right? That book doesn’t need anything else, but it has huge gaps in it. There are whole passages of time that we don’t really know what happened in them. Right?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah, that’s true. I think in that kind of work, because it was meant to be this kind of a dreamy feel to it—it kind of felt like reading a myth—because of that, I think it kind of worked for me. Because you weren’t supposed to get down to the details of it because it’s like set in such a long span of time and has this almost mythical feel to it. I don’t know—it’s kind of hard to say what exactly works for this type of story, what does it, what might not work for another type of story.

But yeah, it did feel like—when you take everything considered—it did. I didn’t feel like, “Oh, this long period of time, I don’t know what’s going on.” It didn’t really feel that way for me because of the way it was written.

Dan Hartland: You’re absolutely right that the form fits the function, fits the style, fits the theme, and therefore there isn’t the gap. There isn’t a space that we’re feeling needs to be filled, even though the book is actually relatively short.

And that brings us back to this idea that you just kind of know as a reader when a book feels complete to you. There was recently a discussion across multiple podcasts about the novella. I think Roseanna Pendlebury—on A Meal of Thorns, I think it was—was talking about Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and mentioned that the first part of that book is basically the only part that she needed; that the rest of the novel could be discarded. That the whole of the novel is contained in the first part, which effectively is a novella. But then over on The Coode Street Podcast, I think Strahan and Wolfe took some exception to this and spoke about novellas more widely and what they are and how they work.

And I think the big issue with all of this is … I’m not sure there is a separation in some ways. Like, a novella is just a novel that is slightly short. I mean, we try to come up with these rules—“Oh, well it’s 45,000 words; oh, it’s 70,000 words”—for the purposes, it seems to me, of awards categories. But actually, as a text, we’re seeing more of these shorter novels, these novellas, but we just approach them as we would a longer work.

Right? They work or they don’t.

Redfern Jon Barret: Yeah! [Laughs]

Dan Hartland: I’m relieved! I’m relieved to hear that!

Nileena Sunil: So I told you that I read a lot of novellas when I need to review them. But otherwise, I tend to pick up whatever, see what’s my fancy at the moment. I don’t specifically think that I’m gonna read a novella or I’m gonna read a bigger novel.

I have read a few novellas recently, which did work well for me. I read Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher, which was like a fairy tale retelling, and I thought it worked quite well. It was a pretty short, self-contained story and, since it’s a fairy tale retelling, there wasn’t much extra worldbuilding required—because it treads like old ground when it comes to that.

Then I also read a few novellas that are part of a larger series, which may contain bigger novels. Like I read P. Djèlí Clark’s The Haunting of Tram Car 015, that’s like a part of a larger universe. And that worked well as a self-contained work. But also kind of got me curious about a lot of aspects of the world. But I knew it’s part of a larger series—so if I wanted more of the world, I could just go and read those books!

Dan Hartland: It’s interesting you talk about the, the P. Djèlí Clark books, because the word “novella” is Italian, and each story within The Decameron was a novella—so we are going back, with this kind of publishing trend towards novellas in shared worlds (the Singing Hills series as well is a similar kind of thing), we’re going back to the fourteenth century here. Like, you can pick a novella off a shelf and it’s part of a wider collection.

Redfern Jon Barrett: I just wanted to jump in a sec on what you were saying about the lack of distinction between novels and novellas. Because it ties into the third book that I have on my desk, The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin, which is another book that I love. I think it’s usually marketed as a novel, but if you look at the actual length of it, I don’t know how many words it is, but it’s definitely novella territory.

And you know, in general, I think there’s the same thing between the difference between novels and novellas, or the supposed difference, as there is between genres in general. You know, it’s actually much, much less boxed-in in reality than it’s made out to be in terms of marketing. You know, as a writer particularly, it’s really frustrating that these things are treated so separately.

And one of the things that I’m happy to see happening more and more is an acceptance of what’s termed crossover novels, which I actually think is a bit redundant because I think a lot of great novels since the inception of the novel have been crossover novels. A lot of books do not fit comfortably within a single genre.

And honestly, we don’t even know what we’re talking about half the time when we label a book in a particular genre. Like, where is the boundary between horror and thriller? Someone show me, you know? And it’s especially frustrating and difficult sometimes as a writer because you need to put your work in a particular box, and I think it just taps into this wider issue with the tension between creativity and marketing. How do you decide which box it goes in? You know, it’s quite arbitrary a lot of the time, and I think that applies to the length of novels too.

Dan Hartland: I hope that, at Strange Horizons, the reviews we write—although we’re based within a tradition of literature that is broadly speculative—we are aware of that. And we try to approach these books—and this is what we keep coming back to in this conversation—on their own terms, and try to put aside any kind of ideas about what a thing is or what a thing isn’t, and just see what it’s trying to say.

[Musical Outro]

Nileena Sunil: You mentioned that I might be on the novella beat. OK, there’s actually a kind of a reason behind it. I’m actually a little … like, while choosing a book to review, I’m a little scared of picking up a larger book because I feel like: “What if I don’t like it and I still have to push through just for the review?!” So I tend to choose like novellas, or shorter books!

Dan Hartland: How have I been doing this this long and not figured that one out?!? [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 listen to more of their music at grandvalise.bandcamp.com.

After our last episode, friend of the show Jonah Sutton-Morse got in touch to complain about my calling out the perils of podcast addiction. In response, I can only say, in all sincerity: Jonah, I hope you’ve listened all the way to the end of this one.

See you next time.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 15: On Time-Pass

[Musical Intro]

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the literary reviewer Sneha Pathak and the host of the remarkably good film criticism podcast, Going Rogue, Tansy Gardam.

In every episode of Critical Friends, I’m afraid we’ll be discussing SFF, reviewing what it is, why we do it, and how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about the kinds of texts which many don’t find worthy of criticism at all. How do we approach so-called ephemera books or movies or TikTok reels that are popular, populist, or popcorn.

We’ll discuss cosy fantasy and country house mysteries, gumshoe detectives and pirates of the Caribbean. We’ll have both Sherlock Holmes and John Wick. And we’ll try to figure out what it is we are doing when we spend time with a text that, perhaps only at first, exhibits few pretensions. We started that conversation, appropriately enough, with pulp fiction.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Sneha, you recently reviewed for Strange Horizons the new anthology from Blaft of Gujarati pulp fiction. And Blaft are doing great work in general in collecting, anthologizing, almost rescuing literatures that have been sort of marginalized or forgotten, whatever else, due to circumstances largely often beyond the actual control or quality of the texts themselves.

But you, in discussing this particular collection of Gujarati pulp fiction, use this phrase that really struck me and I wanted to unpack it more. And that’s this idea of “time-pass literature,” which you say is a very Indian concept, and I’d just be really interested to talk a little bit at first about why you use that phrase in relation to that particular anthology: what it means to you, and this idea that pulp fiction—and obviously pulp itself is an adjective with all kinds of connotations and implications—you connected with this idea of time-pass. What did you mean by that?

Sneha Pathak: So I don’t think that “time-pass literature” as such is a formal term or a formal category even here, but in Indian English “time-pass” is a fairly commonly used word, and that is something we tend to use both as a word as well as a verb and an adjective.

So, for instance, you’re sitting there, you’re doodling, and I come and say, “Hey Dan, what are you doing?” And you simply say, “Uh, time-pass,” and I’ll not ask you anything. Right? There’s no need to go into greater specifics about time-pass. So time-pass in that sense of a word can simply mean something which you are doing to pass the time.

In a more pejorative sense, parents can scold their kids—you know, they are spending so much, it’s time for you to study and what are you doing? Time-pass! Right? Passing the time, right, to while away your good days, not looking for a job or preparing for your exam. So one idea is that of time-pass as a verb.

And another would be I simply, you know, ask Tansy, “Tansy, how was the latest movie you watched, whatever the name was?” And she’ll say, “Uh, time-pass.” And I’m like, “OK!” She need not say anything more about it. I know, OK, it’s not something that I have to watch. So that word in itself is enough to convey a host of, um, let’s say ideas.

So when I was saying “time-pass literature,” that was the concept that I was trying to bring in, and comparing it with, or putting it in front of, “pulp fiction.” That idea came to me because of that one line which the translator had quoted or which she had said in the introduction, where she said that, you know, people asked her why was she wasting time with translating pulp fiction instead of proper literature or real literature? I’m forgetting the exact term.

So that was what sparked that idea and made me write or use the word time-pass literature, because I could imagine a lot of people read it, pulp fiction, especially during train rides or maybe plane rides—not so much today maybe where we have got reels and those YouTube shorts to do to, but before that, that would’ve been a common way of passing the time or time-pass. So it was from there that I used it in front of that literature to make it “time-pass literature.” That was what I was trying to convey.

This is the general understanding of pulp fiction: something which is not weighty, which is also sort of insignificant, good enough to pass the time when you have it. Something you would probably not necessarily recommend to anyone, or probably you would not even like to be seen reading or probably you would not even accept you read in proper social gatherings: “Oh yes, I read James Hadley Chase,” for example. You’d rather say, “Oh yes, I read Murakami.”

Dan Hartland: So, as you were reading it, were you were thinking, “Oh, I’m doing the time-pass thing here!” Was that—because I know some of the stories work for you more than others, and you have some really interesting things to say about particularly how the stories and how the collection approaches gender—but, as you were reading these, were you experiencing them in that way? Or do you think more that these are stories that have been experienced in that way and therefore were at risk prior to Blaft of just sort of disappearing?

Sneha Pathak: Because I was reading them with a certain aim in my mind because I was reading it to review, I was definitely not reading it for time-pass! Because, you know, I had to bring a certain seriousness in my reading.

Dan Hartland: Right, yeah, I’m sorry about that! I apologize!

Sneha Pathak: That’s quite okay! But I think I could actually that how a lot of people are, how the first audience, the original Gujarati audience, would’ve read it—how it is not something that would probably be a very serious occupation for them. That was something I could actually see and understand.

But when I was reading it, of course I was looking at the nuances, whatever I could write about. If I was reading it just for pleasure, maybe at least some of the stories I would’ve been, like, “Yeah.” And if somebody had asked me what are the stories like for some of them, I would’ve definitely said, yeah, “Some are good, others are just … yeah.”

Dan Hartland: And what were the qualities of the stories, of those stories that kind of counted for you as time-pass—what were the qualities? Because at some point … so one of the stories, for example, you say (I think it’s “The Coils of Fate” you mentioned), is particularly one that reveals the weakness of the genre.

And what I was really interested in was the breadth of genre in these stories, but also how each of the genres kind of emphasizes the adventure form of that. So there’s a science fiction adventure, and there’s an uncanny adventure, and that element of adventure seems key. But yeah, with “The Coils of Fate,” you were like, “Yeah, this one’s really long, which just makes it clear, the weaknesses.” So when you were thinking, “Oh yeah, this one is pretty time-passy,” what was it about them? Or was it something kind of a bit more ineffable?

Sneha Pathak: I think one of the things that probably may make it time-pass is the fact that it fails to grasp your interest as much as a non-time-pass thing would do. Also a sense of predictability in a way or repetitiveness, not necessarily in just that story, but in the general ideas that the story is telling. The way it is telling. So, for example, in “The Coils of Faith,” one of the things was that, because it was serialized and because it was a popular story, it must have been so, it had to—you know, like, in the age of Dickens and all, they had to come up with those plot points to keep on maximizing the number of instalments. In this case, it just happened that it was that the writer struck upon a formula, “OK, this happens, X kills Y, X is having a dream, and every dream is about a murder.”

So that just kept on, it kept on happening. Y gets murdered, Z gets murdered, A gets murdered, B gets murdered. So that sort of became repetitive after a while, and I was like, “OK, yes, I get it. This is what’s happening.” But again and again, it’s the same formula. So I would say the more formulaic the thing becomes, the more time-passing in a way it becomes—especially if it’s not doing something new with that formula. If it’s just a simple copy-paste of something, if it’s something that I’ve seen before, if it’s something I’ve heard before, if it’s something I’ve read before—or in some cases I can think of some movies, which will go unnamed, which seemed to make it worse—then it becomes nothing more than a time-pass.

Dan Hartland: Well, let’s name the movies! So, Tansy—

Tansy Gardam: Speaking of!

Dan Hartland: Yeah, let’s go to the expert of the bad movies! So, Tansy, the reason that you are here—other than the fact that you are in fact the expert on the bad movies—is that you’ve recently published with us a review of Jurassic World: Rebirth, which seems to me to speak to a lot of what Sneha’s just been talking about: predictability, the formulaic-ness of it all.

You frame the review by talking about, if you like, the movie as a commercial product, as being aware of itself as a thing in dialogue with an audience. And I wonder whether that, too, is part of what we’re talking about here. It’s kind of a product to be consumed to some extent, or at least it is more conscious of itself as that thing than as another piece of art.

Tansy Gardam: Yeah, I think Jurassic World is really interesting in that it has this entire meta-text on the Jurassic Park franchise. And the way I would describe Jurassic World is that it is a movie that has one thing to say, and that is: “Fuck you for buying a ticket.” It has a really strong ethos of, “You should have stayed home and watched Jurassic Park. Do you know how sick Jurassic Park is? Jurassic Park is so much better than the movie that you are currently paying to see.”

Jurassic World in particular has this weirdly hostile relationship with its own audience, and so Rebirth—which is the fourth in the Jurassic World franchise, the seventh in the Jurassic Park series—has a softer attitude towards the viewer. It wants to be like, “Hey, thank you for buying a ticket to watch a reminder of how good the movie Jurassic Park is.” But yeah, it’s very formulaic. It absolutely trades on what has come before.

I find it so funny that apparently the director, Gareth Edwards, was essentially told, when he handed in his first cut, that Steven Spielberg’s main note was, “Hey, can you cut all of the Jurassic Park references? Like, there are so many Jurassic Park references in this, dude, can you just chill?” And the number of them that ended up in the final cut really gives you an idea of how many there must have been in that first assembly. But yeah, they are increasingly insubstantial as a series, and that’s sort of what I would go to in that sense of time-pass: You feel like you are watching the same movie over and over.

I think that sort of acceptance of unoriginality in exploiting a popular property really results in a sense of just watching the same thing, churn and churn, throwing new ideas in. The problem with franchises is that they are essentially mining a non-renewable resource, and they can choose to completely change what they’re doing and go after something new, and that might get rid of what remains of their audience, or it might be what helps ’em survive. Something like Fast and Furious is a series that is gorgeous time-pass watch, because you truly don’t know what’s gonna happen next. You watch the first one, they’re lifting DVD players. You watch, I think it’s nine, they go to space! And that has been super successful for them as a series.

But that is also a series that is constantly attempted reinvention. You watch the first four films and they really don’t know what worked. They’re like, “Look, the first one was successful, I guess. Is it Paul Walker? Is it the cars? Is it Vin Diesel? And then finally, before they’re like, oh, it’s Vin Diesel. Huh.”

And yeah, that is entertainment that continues to be entertaining. Whereas once you get to the point of just rinse and repeat, recycle, you are left with something that has diminishing returns.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, there is this tension, isn’t there, between the comfort of formula—we want to watch Jurassic Park again, and, Tansy, I’m thinking of that essay you wrote for the Criticism Special in January, which was all about your relationship with Lord of the Rings and why you cannot recapture that.

Tansy Gardam: And oh boy, there’re gonna be two Hunt For Gollum movies to prove that.

Dan Hartland: Apparently there are, yeah!

Tansy Gardam: Apparently! Yep.

Dan Hartland: So we have this tension in our ourselves, but also more widely in the culture, of: we would love to get that thing that we had back, we want the comfort of the formula; but also at some point we become bored of it if does not do something new.

And I wonder whether … forgive me, Tansy, if I say you have made a career from being a critic of movies that some people feel do not deserve criticism, right? So these popcorn flicks, which actually have so much to say about them—and Going Rogue says it all with such wit and elan—are ignored, though, by large swathes of the critical community. They do not treat them with seriousness.

I wonder whether this sense of unworthiness is linked to this idea of the formula of comfort, of escapism. Were you conscious, are you conscious, of that when you do what you do?

Tansy Gardam: At the risk of sounding like a parody of myself, you have reminded me of the Hays Code and the initial justification for writing the Hays Code, which were these set of restrictions on the content that could be shown in films. And yeah, I’m not even paraphrasing massively to say that they basically say, “The kind of guys who go to movies are not the kind of guys who go to plays, are not the kind of guys who go to operas. They’re more like the guys who go to boxing matches. So because you have a lower class of people watching movies, you need to have stricter moral guidances.”

That was the idea behind the Hays Code—that you could watch a Shakespeare play and because you’re watching Shakespeare, it’s okay if there’s murder and sex and violence and all of those bad things, but in a movie, “Oh God, we can’t show that because these dumb-dumbs are gonna think that they can go out and murder and do violence and, you know, have sex! Whatever they want to do.”

And so I think that there is in many ways a hangover of that attitude. There is this idea that there is good art that can be complicated and can grapple with social issues and can depict those social issues. And there is popcorn entertainment. But if we’re talking pure numbers, popcorn entertainment is being seen by more people. More people are engaging with that. And when you have popcorn entertainment that is going uncriticized and no one’s engaging with the ideas that are within it, that doesn’t mean that it’s not having a huge impact on its audience.

So something like Bridgerton is being watched by a hell of a lot of people. It’s being watched as a guilty pleasure. It’s being watched as a time-pass. But it’s also being absorbed by massive audiences, and that is, for good or bad, the content that they’re consuming. And so, therefore, it does deserve the attention and the discussion of what it is actually saying and what it’s trying to say and whether or not it succeeds in doing that.

And so I guess that’s why I spend all my time talking about movies like John Wick.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: In terms of that pulp fiction anthology, Sneha, is that a tradition that still exists? So, you know, we’ve got the popcorn movie, which feels very much like the inheritor of a certain type of pulp fiction. As you were reading that anthology, are there other means, modes, and genres—and it doesn’t even need to be SF, I don’t think—that do the same thing now? That have that same relationship to the reader and the audience?

Sneha Pathak: A lot of mysteries and thrillers, in some way: mystery and thriller fiction and also romance fiction, because that is taken as something that is … even in the popular fiction genre, there is sort of hierarchy where science fiction and fantasy still ranks slightly higher because you can always go and say and claim that—and rightly so—that, you know, they talk something about the human condition, which is what is considered to be a general parameter for a good fiction. It has to talk about something, it has to tell you something, or, discover something about the human code and the human condition.

So, in fiction also, I think romance fiction and mysteries and thrillers—because I read a lot of mysteries and thrillers, I consume them by the dozens really—I always do feel that, there is this … they are often taken as palate cleansers, is what I often come across in my corner of Instagram. I have a book related page on Bookstagram, right? And people who mostly read quote-unquote serious fiction, when they sometimes switch to thrillers industries, they say, “You know, it’s good as a palate cleanser.” Or a guilty pleasure, even, maybe. But yes, I do feel that mysteries and thrillers and romances are seen as something that are slightly—more than slightly—lesser or on a lesser pedestal than other fictions. That is something that I’ve felt.

And I also feel that, you know, as you were talking with Tansy about that feeling of nostalgia—trying to capture that nostalgia, that feeling of comfort zone—that is also something that I feel. I read a lot of mysteries and thrillers, especially mysteries, especially those written in that golden era—which they called when Agatha Christie was writing, for example, right? So you have a country house, a manor or a house, and you know you have a limited number of suspects and then a murder happens and there’s a puzzle and you solve that puzzle. So that is the kind of comfort that I look for when I’m reading those books. And in a way, when I read a lot of those books, somehow I do feel like yes, mysteries and thrillers are on a somewhat lesser pedestal, compared to more serious fiction that’s is talking about other things, maybe sadness or pain or whatever it might be talking about.

Tansy Gardam: But I find it super interesting that you sort of highlight that science fiction and fantasy does get the pass of, “Oh, it’s commenting on the human condition.” I don’t think you can write anything that is crime fiction without engaging with the human condition, without engaging what drives people to crime. And it’s so common for the idea of the literary mystery: It’s “I found a body in my bathtub, and this is actually mostly about my relationship with my dad.” It’s such a common thing to hide more serious literature in mystery or ultimately to actually hide a mystery in more serious literature to be like, “Hey, there is a reason to keep reading. I promise you’re gonna find out who did the murder.” And so yeah, that idea that that is the lower rank I find really interesting.

Sneha Pathak: Yeah, I suppose even there, like you said, literary mysteries: So there’s this genre, the mixed genre where we say “literary mysteries,” there are some who still rank higher because, you know, they’re a literary mystery. You have added that word, that mystical word, magical word, “literary” before it. So it has elevated it somehow. A pure mystery where you’re not necessarily going into the mind of the murderer or not going into, the who and why of the murder is for, let’s say, pure entertainment purposes. That is something which I’m reading not to know what was happening … not the knots of the relationships, the knotty relationship between the characters, but simply to enjoy or to find that solution to the puzzle: Who did it and why did it and how did it.

So they are still considered—I feel that I have experienced that, you know—they’re still considered slightly lower. But yes, if in some way, so for example, Mr. Ripley, because it goes beyond the mere crime being committed, that is still considered to be, you know, a classic of some sort. And I also find it very interesting how some novels and novelists, which must have been or would have been, I feel—or at least should have been—considered more “popular” in their times now tend to find a place in, for example, Penguin Classics or Vintage Classics. So that is something I find very intriguing, how tastes sort of change.

Dan Hartland: As you were talking, Sneha, I was thinking of Agatha Christie—a really good example of a writer who kind of exists in an unusual pocket, certainly in the kind of Anglophone world where— yep, she has the Vintage Classic, she has Penguin Classics, she has sort of canonical reissues, in scare quotes. But also, you know, really as well the literary establishment make it very clear that, well, “Agatha is OK, right? Like, yeah, she, kind of is allowed in, but maybe not too far into the room. Oh, and don’t let her bring anyone else in with her!”

Sneha Pathak: I was attending a lecture, this is a few years back. And the speaker, he somehow in the course of the conversation—now, I don’t remember exactly what he said, but this line stuck with me. He was a professor and he said, “Yeah, and I’ve got people who have read Christie throughout their life and then they come and tell me that, you know, ‘Oh, we have read literature.’” That was something stuck me and me. I was like, “OK, I’m never telling him that I’ve read a lot of Christie”: Bad secret, should stay buried. So there is this, of course, even though we claim that—I think in every Christie book that I’ve read I remember reading in the blurb—only the Bible and Shakespeare have sold more copies than her!

Dan Hartland: Yes, in science fiction there are a couple, maybe a couple more, authors who occupy this odd position. I think Ursula Le Guin may have kind of been fully let into the room by now, and rightly so. But people like Philip K. Dick, for example, again: Man in the High Castle, Penguin Classic, Radio Free Albemuth, very much not. There’s just this interesting, as you say, relationship and changing relationship with authors who were quote-unquote popular, but have lasted long enough that we have to accept they have some sort of value.

To revert to this kind of popcorn idea, I wonder whether “popular” is a pejorative. Because you were talking about Bridgerton has a huge audience, right? The MCU had—still has, but you know!—a huge audience, and these things are popular. It becomes very easy to presume that that is a bad thing.

Tansy Gardam: Absolutely. And also, just on that list of writers who sort of have acquired taste or acquired literary ambitions in their time, I’d absolutely throw Terry Pratchett in there, too: Really pulp to begin with, now you can get the nice hard covers. It’s the exact same book on the inside.

I think you often see a backlash of popularity, particularly when it comes to films that are sort of aiming at a higher audience. I think the kind of cyclical reaction to Parasite is really fascinating, in that sort of idea of it breaking through, becoming hugely popular, but also the cultural criticism of the sort of people who were suddenly tweeting about Parasite? More likely to be the Parks in that situation.

Popular is definitely wielded as a pejorative, but like you say, Sneha, Agatha Christie sold more copies than anyone other than God or Shakespeare. There is a reach to popularity, and there is a reason that things become popular, and we can’t just apply this to things that we like. This is as true of Agatha Christie as it is to E. L. James. There is an appeal to the content that they are producing—or rather the books they’re writing, let’s not turn everything into content.

I think there’s a lot, too, in the critical reappraisal of popcorn films from our youth. And some of that is nostalgia, a lot of that is genuinely nostalgia. Some of it is because a lot of those films were better shot than the movies we get now. If you compare the first three Harry Potter films to, I mean, even the last few Harry Potters without bringing Fantastic Beasts into it, you’re talking about a fundamentally different series and one that has a different attitude towards the visuals, towards actually kind of capturing a sense of magic versus—and I know that part of this is tonal—hitting the film with a sledgehammer.

I’m a huge fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean series. I will defend 2 and 3. I have defended 2 and 3! But 1 in particular is just gorgeous to look at and I can’t really think of any big sort of $150 million adventure films from the past few years, any really big films, that have that beautiful and rich a visual palette. And so there is some value in going back to those things that you’re nostalgic about and being like, why do I like that so much? Why is this a film that I can watch again and again and again?

So much of the streaming business model relies on you wanting to go back and rewatch Friends or wanting to go back and see every single Disney film, whereas a lot of the original content that those streaming platforms are producing are just one and done, out of your brain—like off it like a greased pan, absolutely no imprint on the memory. And so I’ll be really interested in ten, fifteen years, will people who are ten-, fifteen-year-olds now, will they be critically reappraising the things that they watched from this period? Or will they be going back to Pirates of the Caribbean?

Dan Hartland: I think you’re hitting on something there, which is perhaps worth unpacking further. Sneha mentioned—we’ve all mentioned—this kind of separation between art or literature and all the other stuff, right? But what strikes me is that if one of these kind of time-pass escapist pieces of literature or film or whatever else—interpretive dance—does its job, it is because it has mastered some technical basics, and in some cases more than basics, to enable us to escape on its eddies. If it were a bad piece of work, it would not be effective.

And again, in the pulp fiction anthology, Sneha, you read stuff that you’re like, “Nah.” And then you read other stuff, like there’s a story I think called “Hello,” which you think, “Yeah, this is great.” They only succeed if they are technically proficient at what they are attempting to achieve. I suppose there’s an interesting question here about not the difference between—not art and technical proficiency, because I’m not sure there is a line on that spectrum where we could usefully put a marker—but more on what it is that these things are doing. And one of the words that we often use is escapism, right?

The canonical critical statement on escapism is inevitably from Tolkien, and he said: “Escape is one of the main functions of fairy stories, and since I do not disapprove of them”—fairy stories—“it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘escape’ is now so often used, the tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all.” Right? This idea that escape is often quite a good thing. Like, if you’re trying to escape from something, you probably need to—for whatever reason, material, spiritual. And we accept that outside of literary criticism, but somehow the artwork that enables us to do this within literary criticism is demeaned.

Sneha Pathak: The funny thing is, for me, literature has always been a way of escapism in a way. Take it negatively or take it positively. There it is. And when I was growing up in the nineties, the internet was, you know, you did not have the internet! At least not in the way it is ubiquitously present these days. So we had, I had, very few books. You did not have that many books. You did not even know there were so many writers with so many books. So the first books that I read in English were those abridged editions—not the first books, but I’ll say I was ten, maybe, or eleven.

So those first novels that I read were quote-unquote abridged edition. And back then I had no idea what abridged mean, the word was not in my vocabulary, nobody told me. So I was reading novels! And I was reading abridged editions of say Oliver Twist or, uh, you know, Pride and Prejudice maybe. And I was reading them for escape. They were pure means of escapism for me. And they are classics, they are literary classics, right? But they offered me the same thing! You know, reading them was like, you have a cloak of invisibility all around you. There’s this warmth and you are there in a cocoon. And it sort of creates … you are untouched by the world around you as long as you have opened the pages of that book.

So it’s really funny how even serious literature can be escapist at times, depending on the reader. It’ll also, I suppose, vary from reader to reader, what sort of quote-unquote helps you escape. And even those of us who enjoy reading escapist fiction—let’s call it that—even we don’t like reading all the genres! I, for example, am not a fan of fantasy. I have tried reading fantasy, but I find that I’m unable to read fantasy novels. I can read mysteries and thrillers, yes. A little bit of science fiction, which is not very hardcore, yes. But give me hardcore science fiction or give me fantasy and I’m like, “OK, give me a … I mean, no! That’s not something that I can do.” So escape is also something that is different for different of us. It’s not a one size fits all sort of thing.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: I would like to talk a little bit about all the various kind of mediums that we can use now. Becase you mentioned we can time-pass on TikTok now, and there are other—other than three-hour dinosaur films … Actually, it’s not a three-hour film. I’m being unfair.

Tansy Gardam: It’s bang on two.

Dan Hartland: That’s right! Other than two-hour dinosaur films or big anthologies of pulp fiction from Blaft, there are other things that we could be spending our time with—and I just wonder whether we would like to admit, just among the three of us, what the things are that we find ourselves passing time with.

Tansy Gardam: I’m terrible for audio books. I’ve really gotten into … I’m not sure if everyone has this option, but there is an app in Australia that’s attached to local libraries, and has a huge selection of audio books through that. So I’m able to do that without using Audible or anything like that. But yeah, free audio books, constantly got one on the go. And because I’m a craft person—I love making a little thing, I love doing a little task—and I feel like I’m multitasking if I’m listening to an audio book while I’m sewing or something like that.

What I’m actually doing is not properly absorbing the audiobook. I’ve done most of The Locked Tomb. I could not tell you much of what happens in that series, but, oh boy, have I listened to most of it. And yeah, I’d be interested to know, Sneha, whether you consider that, like … would time-pass on TikTok be eroding the concept? Would it be kind of a lesser version thereof? Or is it just a new mutation?

Sneha Pathak: Oh, I suppose it would be a new mutation, but to my mind, if there is a hierarchy of time-passing then time-passing on TikTok would be far lower than reading!

And the time before, when books were not so easily available, I’m sure everybody time-passed. Even then, maybe they chatted with their friends. Maybe they simply doodled. Maybe they simply stared into space and built air castles! But everybody did something which has probably morphed into something different. But I think, yeah, it’s, it’s just technology helping us time pass.

Dan Hartland: If I’m going to admit to time-passing on anything, it would be—and I’m afraid to say it, given that hopefully people are listening to this—it’s podcasts. My partner Anna is constantly saying, “Why are you … why do you have to have your earbuds in all the time?!” And it’s very similar to Tansy, I’m like, “Oh, well, I’m … I’m getting information in!”

Tansy Gardam: And if you don’t have your earbuds in, then the thoughts get heard.

Dan Hartland: [laughs] That’s right. That’s exactly right.

I’m making bread and I’m doing the podcast thing and I’m … and really what you’re doing is, is time-passing and podcasts seemed to me particularly well-suited to this because so few of them provide …

Tansy Gardam: Some are quality experiences, they give all sorts of critical experiences!

Dan Hartland: I believe, I do think that I derive value from that podcast habit! Yet I’m also conscious that I’m not paying the attention to some of the podcasts that I listen to in the same way that I would if I was sitting down with a book. Is that escapism? It’s certainly time-passes, but if I’m not really paying full attention, if I’m not giving my all to that text, I can’t really escape with it, right?

Tansy Gardam: There are plenty of books I’ve read that I couldn’t tell you what happens in them. There are some audio books where I could almost do them from memory. Now, it really depends on the time and attention that you are giving something and I think that’s where escapism does kind of deviate from time-pass.

Because escapism, I would say, is that you have been drawn away, that you are engaging actively with the text, whatever. Whatever that text happens to be, it is escape as opposed to passage.

Sneha Pathak: Yeah, I think I’ll agree with Tansy on this, because if something has provided me really good escape, I’m bound to, you know, tell at least one person or read that. But if something is just time-pass, I’m not going to, I’m probably not going to, recommend it to anyone—unless they specifically ask me something, what is a good time-pass or something, you know. Just for time-pass!

Dan Hartland: I was reading an article on Word on Fire by Holly Ordway the other day, and her position was really interesting on all of this. She was like, “Well, you know, like”—actually similar to what Sneha was saying about science fiction being seen as about the human condition, even if it’s got spaceships in it—she says, “if fantasy and science fiction really did encourage a flight from reality, maybe that would be a bad thing … but it totally doesn’t!” This escapism thing is in fact a full-on engagement.

It’s the opposite of just kind of whiling time away or doing something without value. And I wonder whether we are conscious, when we’re reading these texts as critics of them, of doing them justice. Like, if they do have this kind of value—the texts that we are talking about aren’t conscious of themselves as serious things in that sense, but they nevertheless have value—and so, as critics of them, how do we advocate for that? How do we approach them in a way that gives them the seriousness while not pretending that they are necessarily all the time serious?

Tansy Gardam: I have to use this opportunity to talk about of one of Australia’s greatest critics of all time passed away this week, David Stratton. He was known to most Australians as Margaret and David: There was a weekly show, which was him and Margaret going through that week’s releases. It was a half hour, it was on fairly prime time, incredibly wide-ranging audience. And every week they would talk about pretty much every release coming out that week.

And it was in many ways a product of its time. I cannot see a show like that getting greenlit today, but it meant that they would be talking about Fast and Furious 2 alongside Ken Park, and the questions of censorship in the country, and they would give them, if not necessarily equal weight, they would approach them on their own terms.

Margaret never gave a Fast and Furious movie under three-and-a-half stars, ’cause she just liked them. She enjoyed them and she acknowledged them for what they were. She also nearly got arrested for hosting an illegal screening of Ken Park. Almost all of this is from a show that was on at the Melbourne Comedy Festival this year, Refused Classification—you can’t see it anywhere else, but it was spectacular, I promise.

But yeah, there is a way to approach works on their own terms, you need to go in not expecting Ken Park to be Too Fast, Too Furious, and vice versa. You need to address them where they are, and I think that you do get a lot of bad faith criticism that doesn’t address things as they are, that approaches Too Fast, Too Furious, as if it is Parasite or vice versa. So I think it is really for us as critics and also as audiences to go to something knowing what it is.

Sneha Pathak: Definitely. I agree with Tansy on this one, that we need to have a different, as critics, we need to go with a different yardstick. We cannot really say that, “OK, I’m going to measure an escapist fiction with the same criteria that I use for, let’s say a literary novel.” That would be doing a disservice to both of them, I believe. And I think another thing is we need to be unapologetic about reading, as well as reviewing and watching, popcorn cinema or popcorn fiction, right? Let’s not be apologetic that, “Yeah, OK, of course I read that—also, I read this as well.”

So, if we are critiquing something, I’m assuming that we are going to be, to some extent, well-versed with what is good and what is bad in that particular genre. What are its limitations? What is the best that we have read, and what is the worst that we have read? And we probably use those to measure the current work against those things, rather than measuring it against some sort of generalized literary criteria.

Whatever I review, most of it’s … a lot of it’s serious, let me say, or literary fiction as well. So when I’m reviewing a literary novel or a novel which is not an escape, which would not be termed “popular” or “escapist,” then of course I’m using a different criteria for reading it as well as looking at it. But when I’m reviewing something that is pure escapism or purely popular, I’m not going to bring in that yardstick here. I think that does a great disservice to both the genres.

Not as a critic, but I think that a recent term which I have seen, with respect to the marketing, that a lot of books these days they market as a murder mystery or a mystery, probably because they sell, probably where the mystery is just a part of the entire book and the entire book is actually dedicated to something else. It might be more of a literary exploration of something else with a murder thrown in, but that gets marketed as a murder mystery. And then, you know, I suppose that kind of marketing also creates sort of bad faith among readers—and also makes you give the book a lesser rating because you go in with a different set of expectations, which you would not have had you not read the blurb, which claimed it was something different than what it was.

Dan Hartland: I’m really glad you brought the marketing idea in, because I think it is actually really super important for how both books and movies are framed. Certainly, there are pretty difficult science fiction novels that have not been marketed in that way and have been marketed with a big spaceship on the front. And the reception of those novels is therefore—maybe they sell a lot of units!—but the people who buy them, you know, kind of feel a little short-changed. And I am confident, Tansy, that you have examples of movie trailers that have done similarly!

But the thing that I pick up from this idea of approaching these texts in a different way is, of course we should, but also there may be grounds on which—and, Sneha, in the pulp fiction review and, Tansy, in your Rebirth review, you both do it—there are still ways that we can criticize these texts safely. So from a perspective which isn’t this kind of sniffy, “well this is nonsense” perspective, but from the perspective of “it was trying to do this and it didn’t.”

I’m thinking that recently there’s been a turn in fantasy towards kind of cosy fantasy. Perhaps the canonical cosy fantasy is Legends and Lattes, which I think we’ve mentioned, or I’ve mentioned, before on this podcast. Wesley Osam has done a fantastic … take-down is the only word for it … of that novel, where he takes it on its own terms. He’s like, “OK, this is what this thing is trying to do,” but finds a range of choices that that book has made which kind of undermine even its own project.

So I guess as critics, we need to be open to that, too: That these books are capable still of failure.

Tansy Gardam: Yeah, and definitely I think when we bring marketing into it, there is a real question, as well, not just in terms of how a book is marketed, but also how it’s initially sold to a publisher. Like you mentioned, these novels that have a mystery in them that are sold as murder mystery, but they really have a lot more going on: There’s a decent chance that they were written without that murder mystery and that the writer, upon finishing it was like, “Oh. Shit. How do I actually get a publisher to look at this? They’re looking for mysteries. I’ll chuck one in there. How hard is it to put a dead body in a pool?” And you do get that I feel with the cosy genres and other kind of buzzword ideas—you just bring a little bit of that in. It’s easy to put it on the cover.

And we are talking about judging books by their covers, but there’s an entire art to it to—cover design rather. And you end up with these things that are sort of … that show the thumbprints of where they tried to be molded into something more marketable. And you get it with films, you get it with television series, you get it with all sorts of media. The attempts to chase a trend. And I think that that is one that does need to be called out critically.

Like, this evening I saw Fight or Flight, which is yet another John Wick imitator. In my opinion, it’s one of the more successful John Wick imitators. (I would absolutely love to know why it was produced by the two John Wick producers, but it was not done by their production company.) But yeah, that’s something where you know what it’s trying to be. You also accept it as what it is, and that’s where you are critically engaging with something and it is chasing a trend. It’s doing it pretty well, but sometimes it can absolutely crash out. And so I think having that awareness as well as a reader is part of the reason that it’s so uncomfortable when you have people who are outside of a particular genre coming into that for criticism.

I feel like earlier this year in Strange Horizons, there was a metacriticism of critiques of Klara and the Sun that approached it as a lot of people who’d read other Ishiguros, or who were literary critics, coming in and saying, “Oh, Ishiguro is just really elevating this entire genre, this whole idea. It’s so new, it’s so original!” And it’s like: He’s playing with an idea that  is so set in the genre that it’s a cliche—and he does it beautifully, but to approach it like he has somehow deemed to go into science fiction and just make the place a bit more classy is just revisionist almost. And that’s where you need people who are actually engaging with a genre or a form to be the ones who are critiquing it.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I think you were talking about M. L. Clark’s “Who’s Afraid of the SFF Novel” essay. Maggie was a guest on last episode, which was about hard times, and writing in them. And I feel like we’re talking here about reading in them, and what might make us feel slightly better during them!

So we started this conversation by talking about formula, right? In particular about the Blaft anthology. But then we’ve exploded it outwards. And it feels to me like we’re returning to this idea of formula—which, as Tansy comments on, maybe sometimes a given text has something injected into it to fit a certain trend or fit a certain mode which at that time is what people are using to time-pass. The example that jumps out to me is the recent plagiarism and romantasy thing in the New Yorker, which of course was its whole sort of own social media drama. But this idea that romantasy has become this thing with a set of tropes that almost every book in the genre or the mode or whatever you want call it—

Tansy Gardam: And every tag on AO3.

Dan Hartland: Yes! So it, so the romantasy books have to have these tropes, but also a lot of the romantasy texts have come from somewhere completely different again. And they’re having … I won’t say the serial numbers filed off, but they are being remodelled for a different model of publication. And this perhaps will cause trouble for romantasy. Currently it’s dominant, but we started this conversation by saying that ultimately formula exhausts itself. So do we see that as … is romantasy, cosy fantasy, what other elements of what we’re consuming right now, do we think may wind up in that way in kind of the next five, ten years? Where will we be not passing our time any longer that we are currently?

Tansy Gardam: I think you’re bang on that romantasy has a shelf life—possibly when all of the BookTok people discover that AO3 is free. But yeah, I think it’s become really common, partly because of the way that television is now made, that every series is eight episodes. There’s years between the seasons. There’s really no time to attach yourself to the characters, and there’s been a lot of pushback and people talking about going back to older series, the comfort of a lot of episodes.

That is, again, a case of formula. But the fact is you don’t really attach to characters in a sitcom if you’ve only got eight half-hours with them. You attach over twenty-two when they’ve had to fill an episode that is shot just on one existing set because they’ve run out of budget for the rest of the season. Those are the sort of things that people get really attached to and I can see that coming back into fashion in the next couple of years, that idea of a really long-running work—which is really time-pass, it’s about spending time with those characters, and I think that romantasy and just the absolute length of those books is kind of trading on that as well. It is the time spent in those worlds. And so I can see, almost counter to the TikTokification and the shortening attention spans, a return of longer-running stories. Or at least I’d like to!

Sneha Pathak: I think one trope that, or one formula, one trope that I think has been overdone—or done to death in my opinion, especially when it comes to those gritty mysteries and novels and even their adaptations and stuff that—is the figure of the detective, detached and with a storm going on in his personal life. Smoking, I don’t know, some sort of cigarettes or drinking himself to death. The figure of that solitary, I don’t know, very manly maybe? Does he come across as man?

Tansy Gardam: Oh, it’s always a man.

Sneha Pathak: Right? That kind of detective, troubled with the marriage on the rocks or probably something nasty in the past: I think that is something that has been hacked to death and that is something, probably, which is also coming to sort of a closure, although there are a lot of adaptations in which we see, or even original series, in which these kind of detective figures are—you know, that brooding atmosphere.

And on the other hand, are those which are making a comeback even in mysteries: I feel a lot of cosies set in cafes or you know, or cooking—

Tansy Gardam: Old people’s homes …

Sneha Pathak: Yeah. Even old people mysteries, I think there are cases where the mystery becomes sort of secondary in a way. And the relationship with characters and how they are doing that becomes primary. That is another thing that is coming up or has been coming up for the past few years, so setting in cafes or the detective, the amateur detective, is a bookshop owner or maybe, you know, they have got a bakery or there’s a lot of cooking going on.

And I wonder how long these are going to last, even the cosy ones, because after time, I’m sure boredom will set in if we get more and more of such characters. Because how many coffee shops or how many bookshop owners or how many, you know?

Tansy Gardam: By the fourth body in the bookshop, you’re like, “Baby, I think you might be killing these people.”

Sneha Pathak: Yeah. And how many … you know, there even are those cosies with some sort of magical element in them. I remember seeing a cover or something, which is a cat on it. The cat helps catch the criminal! So you know, there’s that genre!

Dan Hartland: The detective with the all the problems, I mean, has been such a persistent … like just, you know, I mean arguably even Sherlock Holmes fits that. So it is just a thing that you can’t get rid of.

Tansy Gardam: Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which is a movie from the seventies that is about how that character is twenty years out of date already. You’ve got Elliot Gould wandering around like he’s from the fifties in the seventies, and he’s a man out of time. He’s just completely incongruous with the world. And that’s a movie that was made about fifty years ago.

Dan Hartland: And you have Rebus in the nineties, and then you just keep on going. You can’t escape. What is interesting is that you can see a parallel in fantasy with grimdark. Grimdark is very persistent, and Adam Roberts in his recent History of Fantasy says, “Look, why are we doing this? It’s not realism!” Like, you know, grimdark is a kind of reaction against, and perhaps the kind of tortured detective is an attempt to striate, the sort of silliness of the mystery, of the genre, with an appearance of realism or grittiness. But these things are so in themselves exaggerated that they, they’re just as fantastic.

Tansy Gardam: It’s, it’s Zack Snyder. It’s that idea of, you know, if this is dark and gritty and sad enough, then people will forget that this is man who dresses up like a bat to fight crime.

Dan Hartland: It’s an interesting seesaw between—as you say, Sneha—this tortured detective character, but also these cosy mysteries, and they are always in tension with each other, right? Because we kind of … yeah, we want both.

Sneha Pathak: Because we find readers for, and viewers for, both of them. So, you know, there is an audience for all of them—and probably, maybe sometimes even the same audiences consuming all of them! That is something which I find really fascinating.

[Musical outro begins]

Tansy Gardam: I am so sorry. My cat is about to knock my laptop off the table. Just one second … Um, observe the criminal.

Dan Hartland: Wheeee! Sorry. That’s not how you’re meant to greet great villains, is it? Sorry.

Tansy Gardam: [laughter] I’m so sorry! I can go back from the start …

[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. Listen to more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com.

A few pick-ups from our last episode on writing in Hard Times: Friend of the podcast, Niall Harrison, noted on Bluesky that any baseline for fiction, whether the optimism of the golden Age as we discussed or whatever we’re struggling with now, can be a problem. He cited Jonathan Strahan’s call for less fear of the future in SF. That’d be really nice.

On that note, kudos to Andrea Hairston, who at Worldcon seems to have inspired some of this. Kameron Hurley for one has said that, after Hairston’s Writing Is Resistance workshop in Seattle, she’s “done with sad defeatism.”

So: onwards! See you next time.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 14

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the writers and critics Octavia Cade and M. L. Clark.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be discussing SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about writing in hard times. How and why is speculative fiction written in contexts of defeat, despair, or decay?

We’ll discuss climate change and artificial intelligence, systems political, biological, and economic, and how SF might be, and yet sometimes isn’t, a key tool in opening up new modes of understanding. But we began our conversation by discussing the two most recent reviews that Maggie and Octavia have published with Strange Horizons.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: So Maggie, your recent review of the Ray Nayler book Where the Axe Is Buried was really—I mean, I’m gonna be honest here, I’ve simply plagiarized all your ideas for this episode of the podcast, because you start that review with a quote from the novel, and I can absolutely see why, it had all my bells ringing too. And the quote is:

She had believed that writing itself was an action. But she had stopped believing that: She had come to see her writing was nothing but empty words. A delaying tactic. Something to do to hide her own impotence in the face of unchanging, unconquerable, indifferent state power.

And you go on in the review to sort of meditate on that and talk about what it might mean to write and to read in a period where it feels as if you are losing, right? That something is wrong. Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, whatever it is. And you talk about AI a lot in your review, but Octavia, in a recent review for Strange Horizons of The Flat Woman by Vanessa Saunders, talks about climate and there are many other fronts on which we could put our gaze to discuss, you know, writing in hard times.

So I really wanted to dig a bit deeper about, first of all, how you experienced that book as a reader and how you think Nayler was approaching writing that book, which is fundamentally—just as your review was—a meditation on the difficulty of creative endeavor at a time when it feels like the walls are closing in.

M. L. Clark: Terrific question, Dan. This reading was a distinct experience for me, perhaps, as opposed to other readers for whom this might be the first work of Nayler they experience. I have followed Nayler’s short stories, novella work, novel work for quite some time, and as a result, when I engage with a work that has embedded in it a sense of a writer reaching a breaking point, reaching a sense of futility with their own product, I can’t help but also think about the author behind it and their own long history of wrestling with a theme in ways that are more pragmatic and a little bit more on the side of … existential … I don’t wanna say despair, but certainly pause.

And that’s certainly what happens in many of Nayler’s stories is you have that existential pause. Here it is a heavier pause, I believe, than usual in his work. And that comes from the fact that the notion of AI that you mentioned in your introduction is not really the element causing the strain in the story. There are futures extending from the AI technologies that we currently have in place, but in the way that they are presented in Nayler’s work they’re simply an extension of a body of human creations that have served sometimes to uplift, but more often to oppress and isolate and estrange us from one another. And it is to that aspect of human behavior that Nayler seems to be speaking and in a way that he is wrestling with: A moment of defeat in the conversation, not the end of the conversation, but certainly there is a heaviness to this point in our history, even though it is obviously presented as being in the future.

We know that all science fiction is truly a commentary about the present. And so it does seem very much to be speaking to a present moment where we are in existential pause.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, you mention early on in the review that the book is a kind of question about whether writing can actually achieve anything in the face of, as you say, political systems that are accelerating our own ruin.

And I found this idea of a book that was uncertain of its own, if not value, then utility, you know, sort of agency in the world really interesting. And Octavia, I said at the beginning of the episode that I fully own up to just essentially stealing Maggie’s whole idea from their review for this episode. But equally, I don’t think I’d have got there if I hadn’t also at the same time read your piece, because it is a similar kind of meditation on a period in which defeat seems likely. And yet the novel is still written and the characters within the novel still fight.

The difference, I felt—and maybe you could talk a little bit about this—is that in Saunders’s The Flat Woman, there’s a sense … there’s almost a note of hope towards the end, where you say the main character of the novel starts to fight back, alongside nature. Because the focus in this novel isn’t AI. It’s climate, which of course you’ve written about more widely for Strange Horizons and elsewhere. I think also specifically of your review of The Mires recently, which has a hopeful note to end on because, in that novel, the community starts to rebuild itself too. So did you experience that sense of optimism in reading about difficult times?

Octavia Cade: Not so much, I’m afraid. Very much so in The Mires’ case—The Mires, I think, is fundamentally about connection, about building connection and resilience within a community. In The Flat Woman, that resilience comes almost from eschewing connection, at least with all the other human elements of the text. In The Flat Woman, this main character—and all of them are nameless, they’re referred to as, you know, the girl, the woman—identity is sort of stripped from. Most of these characters, they become cogs in this very industrial machine. And the only way to survive that really is by limiting the way that you connect with other people.

But the difference, I think, in The Flat Woman is that increasingly other people just aren’t worth connecting with. It’s a very depressing way to look at things. But nearly everyone that the woman meets throughout her life is looking to exploit her in some way, or is entirely indifferent or even takes pleasure in her suffering.

I mean, when her mother, the university lecturer is, is taken away for a show trial and the girl is still very young, she has an aunt. The aunt is not particularly maternal, so the aunt stays living in her own house, and she comes along to see her little niece and brings groceries pretty much once a month and leaves this preteen to just get on with it.

And this disconnection goes through her life. And really, the only way that the woman manages to fight back after she grows up is by accepting that part of her is completely non-human—that if she wants sort of resilience and empathy and sympathy in her life, she has to look outside, almost, the human community to find it.

And as someone who spends a lot of time thinking and writing about the human relationship with the non-human, I find that particularly fascinating. Because in some ways it is a different version of looking at the human-AI relationship. You know, how do we connect with something that is so fundamentally unlike us? In The Flat Woman, there is hope for the main character. But not that much for the world around her.

Dan Hartland: It’s interesting because the ending you describe is not dissimilar to the ending, in some ways, of Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay, in which the main character—and others, but we’ll stick with the main character—is transformed by, in this case, the DNA (for want of a better term) of alien life on a planet.

The particular alien life on this exoplanet has evolved to essentially be symbiotic with all other types of life on the planet, so it becomes part of him and then transforms him into something very other. He still has his memories from his human life, but he is no longer entirely human, he’s something different.

And at the end of the novel, they get in the spaceship and they’re off to transform all the other human societies in the galaxy, which are also broken and have defeated their own sense of humanity. It’s an interesting link there because, as you say, both of those are sort of hopeful in a very depressed and despairing way.

Maggie deliberately shied away from using the word despair about the Nayler, but it’s there, too, and I’m really interested in this. Is there no other hope left for us in either of these novels than, “OK, well, we just have to completely change into something basically non-human in order to get out of this bind we’ve found ourselves in”?

Octavia Cade: I don’t think we need to change. I think we need to realize that we are basically non-human. We have a collective delusion, the human race, that we exist sort of as individuals, that we are “homo sapiens”; but if you look at us on a biological level we are a collection. In our individual bodies, we are a collection of species. I think there is about ten times as many non-human cells as human cells in the human body. There is about a hundred times non-human DNA in the human body than there is human DNA. We are a microbiome. We are fundamentally more non-human than human, and we pretend that we aren’t.

I think we try and separate ourselves from the rest of the natural world as though we haven’t evolved here—as though, you know, every part of our biology and psychology isn’t fitted. To the world we have around us. And then we try and change that world in really fundamental ways. And we think that doesn’t have an effect on our biology and on our identity, and it really does.

So I think this idea of connection with the non-human. Is really a more, a reinterpretation of ourselves in some way.

M. L. Clark: In the other direction as well, Nayler’s work has routinely highlighted the fact that we are part of systems, deep, deep systems, and that there is the conceit—itself a very Westernized conceit, it might be the greatest science fictional element of literature in our time—this notion of the self, being somehow disconnected from the broader systems that shape their behaviors as well as their outcomes. And in which we are constantly, whether we mean to or not, doing violence to one another in a tremendously far-reaching way.

We often don’t fully understand the way that our existences do harm to quite a significant number of other organisms, other parts of the load that we inhabit. And so that does seem to be the one place where we can imagine pushing back on utter despair, because there’s that continuity—when we return to that continuity, not just with the rest of the world, but also with the vast majority of our history.

We are living in a moment that’s a little bit more exceptional in as much as it is hyper-fixated on this notion of our exceptionalism. If we can get past that, if we can return to a much deeper understanding of ourselves in relation to, uh, the broader systems of oppression and possible aid that we have always belonged to, we can perhaps start to eliminate the extraordinary factor in our current societies that is causing us to do so much accelerated harm.

We will still always do harm. We will still always be in a game of push and pull. I think Iris Murdoch actually has something to say about it in The Nice and The Good, this wonderful quote about how we are always going to be part of systems of harm. And the best we can do is to coax weakness and inspire strength and to bring ourselves back to a deeper kindness of a place in the world.

But to get there, we do have to get over this mythologizing self that does seem to consume current movement.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I’m so glad that you mentioned that the Nayler talks about systems, too, Maggie. Because I was gonna, I’m afraid, quote yourself back at you again. You’ve just mentioned Murdoch and you also talk about another philosopher in your review, Heidegger, and you talk about how the Nayler is a novel in the same way as, but in a different way as, The Flat Woman about escaping the system. But you kind of can’t, ’cause we are the system.

And I just wonder whether we’re tripping over here what we might be able to say in answer to the character that I quoted—or that you quoted and then I quoted you quoting in your review, Maggie—where she doubts the capacity of mere writing to achieve anything really. But we seem to be saying that actually we can write ourselves into different understandings, and that might be what we can achieve by doing this silly thing producing text. Rachel Cordasco, in the last episode of this podcast, talked about science fiction being a particularly systemic form of fiction, and I wonder whether that is also part of what writing a specifically science fiction novel might help us achieve?

M. L. Clark: I might want to speak first to the Heidegger because it’s an allusion here, but many people might not be leaping immediately to reading my review for context. But there is something that I tried to highlight in this piece and then other people have discussed as well.

Heidegger, in the essay that’s referenced, establishes a notion of technology that both was a beginning and an end to conversation. So when we talk about ends of conversations, it’s actually quite potent to think about how, from Heidegger on, some people have loosely used one interpretation of technology in that essay to determine how we talk about technology today.

And yet, if you do read the essay, you see that there are many ways to talk about technology, and some of them are more likely to give us pathways forward. If we only think about technology in a very limited modern sense—the computer technology of the industrial complex—we have only a certain view of our relationship to the revealed world. That is possible. If we go back to the other meanings of technology discussed in that text, there are ones in which I also put Ray Nayler’s work as a body of writing—because that’s a kind of artificial intelligence as well. We have been doing the work of technology and we have been using technology to serve deeper ends as a species for a very long time.

If we were to return to the other half of that conversation, if we were to not see technology in that one way that has been locked in in some ways since Heidegger’s essay, but to move into other ways of thinking and being, that might be the out. And so that’s where we have that opportunity to think about an endpoint as also an inevitable invitation to think about other pathways we could have taken and could take now.

Octavia Cade: Yeah. When you’re talking about sort of definitions there of what technology is, it reminds me of something I’ve been looking at a lot lately with some of my academic work: looking at how we see the time period that we are living in. I think the term that has come into most use at the moment is the Anthropocene. But increasingly I’ve been looking at the different ways of describing that. And I think my favorite one at the moment, the one that catches my imagination most, is the Necrocene. You know, the age of death, how we have developed this, and the connection between, I think, politics and the environment—which has always been there, this is not a new thing—and how the two interact with each other and how we engage with this idea of the Necrocene.

Because there is so much to it of blame, of responsibility, and it’s no wonder really we chose the Anthropocene. Because that is a concept that is far easier in a way to deal with. Beccause it promotes that idea of, you know, the humans as a separate influential species somehow disconnected from the rest of the world. It’s so much less confronting than this idea of the age of death which we have ushered in. So the problem of definition, and the opportunities of definition, are something that I find really interesting because they shape the way we think, they shape the way we approach problems.

If we talk about life in the Anthropocene, it is very different from life in the Necrocene, even though they are really both referring to the same time period. That’s something that I increasingly look for in I think the speculative fiction that I read. Many of the authors don’t exactly define it in that way because they’re, you know, they’re working in their own separate universes. But this engaging with the idea of a transformative world in practice and in definition, I think that’s something that works like The Flat Woman and again The Mires do particularly well.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And you mentioned in both of those reviews, Octavia, but in particular in the review of The Flat Woman, that the way in which the texts are engaging in genre is interesting. The Flat Woman, you mentioned, fuses magic realism with science fiction to take both in a slightly different direction. And I mentioned that because it strikes me that in order to imagine our way into sort of different understandings of the ills that ail us, science fiction must reimagine itself.

I’m thinking here of Niall Harrison’s All These Worlds, which opens with this idea that “once upon a time in the west,” he writes, “there was a genre.” And that genre kind of knew what the future was gonna look like. It was gonna be spaceships and it was gonna be astronauts, and it was gonna be, you know, square-jawed men solving things, MacGyverishly.

And sometime around he thinks—I’m not sure this is right, but he thinks—sometime around the 1990s, everyone looks around and thinks, “Well, that didn’t happen.” Ever since, the genre has kind of been, “Well, what do we do with this stuff? We don’t got jet packs!” Both of these novels—and others as well, which maybe we can get on talking about—have to try to retool the genre that they are sort of in dialogue with, if not inhabiting, in order to do the work that they want to do—because science fiction itself is part of these systems that we are attempting to quote-unquote escape, right?

M. L. Clark: I do want to quote—because this is only fair, Octavia: Dan read a piece from my review, and I’d love to read a piece from your review—because this absolutely sang to me when I was reading it.

Liminality can be illuminating. It can also be untrustworthy; so much of climate change is linked with the existence and transgression of boundaries. How far can this water rise, how reliable is this coastline, what borders do we have to cross if we can’t live here? There are often no certain answers to questions like these, which can make the conversation more frustrating—especially as the answers to these questions are often couched in terms of threat and loss. No wonder there are those who are tempted not to have the conversation at all.

And so that speaks, I think, to the fact that science fiction—however we define it as well, speculative fiction perhaps more broadly—does provide the same kind of threat, to many people in our world, as discussion about many of these extremely important challenges. And in that way it is sometimes the most realistic aspect of our existence, because we are surrounded by those kinds of uncertainties.

I go back to the fact that speculative fiction is as long and storied an experience for us as the literature and storytelling. If we go back to perhaps the first science fiction story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh walks into a long darkness. Some people have interpreted it as him walking through the stars or the depths of space, the dark unknown, or to find the afterlife and to be reconnected with Enkidu.

And so we can imagine people of that era also experiencing the liminality of the space in front of them, and the space they could see, but not quite reaching too fully and telling stories about it. So in some ways we talk about yes, needing to be … to reform this moment. But in some ways too, we are returning science fiction to what it was. We are returning to a deeper well of speculative discourse and language that has perhaps been more part of the human experience than this tiny window in which we’ve had science fiction as a commercial genre.

Octavia Cade: Yeah, and I think, too—looking back to what Dan was saying about Niall’s description of that so-called golden age of science fiction as, you know, astronauts and space jets and so on—there’s something almost comforting about that depiction of the future, the idea that technology will fix everything, that it will solve poverty and oppression, even if the stories in which it supposedly does this are quite limited in their applications. You’re talking about the square-jawed male character compared to the people these stories weren’t being written about. But that sense of certainty I think is comforting, but it’s also not very practical.

There is this idea that “in the future it will be like this.” But we have to get to that future. And the negotiations and the compromises that it takes to get there is something that it is difficult for people to deal with, because a lot of those compromises come with the prospect of giving something up. You know, if we do this, we can’t do that. Everything has opportunity cost. And I think that there’s something off-putting about that. We don’t like to deal with it.

The idea of that liminal environment as something untrustworthy, as something that is difficult to navigate, is something that has been with the human understanding of environment for millennia. You’ve just got to look at the history of how, say, wetlands have been understood and interpreted throughout the history of human dealings with nature. You know, they’re not land, they’re not water. They shift about, you go exploring in them. You lose your way all the time. They’re places of confusion and often disease and contagion. And that spreads into our understanding of the liminal.

There are, from a biological and ecological perspective, some really strong advantages to living on the liminal. Life there is exciting. It evolves in new and interesting ways. It’s often extremely biodiverse and so on. Which, you know, goes back to my tendency to make everything about ecology. This idea of living in the liminal, which so many of us are … it has opportunity as well as cost. It’s not just compromise, although that compromise never leaves.

There is the opportunity to insert the science fiction staple that is the sense of wonder into this element of an environment of confusion. And I think that’s something that the magical realist mash-ups with science fiction do particularly well. The Flat Woman does this, The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, as an Indigenous Australian author, very much does this as well. And that has some, I think I said in my review, some similarity to, The Mires as well: This idea that magical realism inserts liminality and confusion into the science fiction certainty, it critiques the genre in a way that it has not had enough of in its native form, I think. And I find that just really particularly interesting.

Dan Hartland: I just co-sign all of that. And I think both of you have touched on this idea that some of what we’re discussing here isn’t at all new. That literature has, since there was literature, been dealing with some of these questions. I think of the critic Edith Hall, who has recently written a book about the Iliad. She reads it in the—this is a quote from the subtitle of the book—in “the light of a dying world.” So any text sufficiently rich will be able to be read in this kind of context—and indeed was in some senses, in the Iliad’s case, written in an elegiac tone in the first place. You know, we have the ubi sunt that finds its way into genre of course mostly via Tolkien—where’s the horse and the rider and all that stuff.

But there’s something specific, I think, about the present moment, which is a little bit different: This idea of the Necrocene as you say, Octavia, or Maggie, as you say, the kind of AI moment (and I agree that term is so lazily applied!) that makes special demands on science fiction to kind of hopefully rethink itself in ways that then enable us to rethink ourselves.

I was reading recently—and maybe we could talk about a few other books that we feel might be in conversation with the ones we’ve sort of focused this conversation on so far—I was reading recently Julia, which is Sandra Newman’s 1984 retelling from the perspective of the titular character, Julia. And what I found so interesting about that first and foremost is that it works and it shouldn’t! You know, when I saw someone was writing 1984 again, I was like, “Please, please don’t, just don’t do that.” But what’s so interesting about it is that it contains room for hope in a way that 1984 doesn’t. Not in a facile way—effectively, the novel ends on a … it ends on a bum note, guys! It’s not a happy ending.

But it’s on a different kind of bum note that is somewhat more cyclical or somewhat more open to systemic change than the original. And I just felt that’s so now. That novel is written that way because it’s written now, and we just need to have that sense of systemic change. Because we’re so aware that it’s necessary, that Orwell was writing in a completely different context where he was essentially warning against a different type of change, a change to that sort of Stalinsit thing that he saw as such a threat. This one is aware that we are trapped in a system that means maybe Orwell was wrong. We got trapped anyway.

And I find this very interesting in present science fiction, because Julia isn’t really doing what Octavia’s talking about it. It’s not being liminal in any way, I mean, it’s so fixed. It’s basically a rewrite of a novel that already existed! But it’s still finding room for that escape hatch, that generic escape hatch, that systemic escape hatch.

Are there other texts we’ve been reading that we think might be doing the same sorts of things?

M. L. Clark: Oh, absolutely. While you were speaking immediately, I thought of Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory, and I think that might be a perfect … I was thinking to myself, it’s the same year. It came out the same year as Julia. So, they’re both really … obviously the writing happens at its own pace, but they came out in a very similar moment. And in some ways when I was reading Some Desperate Glory, I was thinking about how it was pushing back on a few different audiences within genre. There is a pushback on a modality that emerges in Young Adult literature, even though it’s not intrinsically Young Adult. There are elements of it that push back on the kinds of stories that you get within YA, within a Western science fiction context. And at the same time there are elements of the first half of the story it’s telling.

For folks who maybe haven’t read it, the piece begins with a certitude. You are in a character perspective. She has been raised one way to see life in a certain way. She’s been given a certain story of herself and her culture, and then there is a turning point. And what really makes the work special is that there’s then another turning point. And another one. And so it’s not simply a story like The Secret History, in which you go up to a halfway point and then suddenly you get to see everything a second way. There are a multiplicity of stories that will emerge, or different inflection points that will emerge, in this character’s journey as they try to resolve or address all of the harm caused by having lived in the first story.

So there is both what you’re talking about with Julia, the idea of it’s coming from a rigid background, even though the rigid background is internal to this world, and yet the highly fascistic society that she grew up in is not one that can be fixed with a single turn in perspective, a single change in character. It instead involves work that continues. It involves recognizing that she herself will never be able to atone for or correct all of the mistakes that she has made, and there’s no saccharine, easy gloss on that aspect of her character as well. She simply has to live with the knowledge that, whether or not she was aware of it, she was a participant in a very harmful society. She caused harm. And many elements of harm that continue to exist in the world will be beyond her ability to solve or for anyone else to solve in the course for a lifetime.

So, even though it has many elements that you would find within a Young Adult story of a girl learning that her world is not what it was supposed to be or that she was promised, it has depth. Because it doesn’t stop, a little bit like Nayler’s work. It has a forever argument that keeps going, long after the individual character’s story.

Octavia Cade: There’s one that I read a few years ago, Always North by Vicki Jarrett, which really sort of engages in this idea of, of liminality, of pushback between two different types of thinking.

It follows the same character and … how do I say this without spoiling things? Isobel works basically for an oil company. She is part of the science that is actively engaged in ways of making the world worse, shall we say. She has no real ethical understanding of the work that she is doing and no interest in developing it and climate change impacts on the text in quite a significant way. And Isobel finds herself living in the crap-sack world that she created—which is on the one hand, you know, there is some justice there. But on the other, she’s quite an unpleasant character. She really never … she’s never actually really sorry for what she’s done. I think if she was to be able to go back in time in her own form, she probably wouldn’t act, you know, much differently.

But there is a second character, a polar bear—I think Snowball is its name—and poor old Snowball ends up being part of this sort of vivisection experiment. And it’s something very interesting about Always North that it is always interrogating the way that science exploits the non-human and also humans that it considers to be sort of lesser. You know, we see it all the time. Climate change may have an impact on this world, but some parts of it will be impacted more than others. Some populations will be impacted more than others, but they’re not “us,” so it somehow matters less.

I think it was Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything—I think I was, I’m pretty sure it was that book of hers that I was reading. She talks about attending this geoengineering conference about possible ways to start. Engineering the planet in which to limit the effects of climate change. But it was very much limiting the effects in specific places. It’s like, “OK, we can potentially mitigate the effects of climate change on places like Europe and North America, but the consequences of this is that it probably will get worse in places like Sub-Saharan Africa.” And the scientists are just, you know, merely going along. It’s just … “This isn’t some sort of really horrifying compromise!” And that is very much part of what is going on in Always North.

But through part of this experiment on Snowball, the polar bear, Isobel’s consciousness and the polar bear’s become overlapped and there is a sense of time travel when Isobel-within-the-polar-bear goes back in time to try and affect the things that Isobel is doing. And the polar bear is quite insane by this point. There’s some really fantastic creature-horror as it goes—you know, slaughtering everything in its path. And I’m all for that: Go the polar bear. But the way that the book engages with this idea of responsibility and blame and violent response and how sometimes it can possibly be justified, and how to live with yourself in the world that you’ve created, how to either take responsibility or how to completely eschew it.

Because some people do. I mean, many people do. Most of us do. We live, I think all three of us, in societies where we take up more than our fair share of carbon footprint per capita. And yet we still go along doing it. Because, to change, we would have to give up a lot of our standard of living. And are we willing to do this? To some minor extent, possibly, yes. But then we continue, we make bargains with ourselves. You know, I would very much love to visit the Great Barrier Reef, for example, before it dies—because it is one of the fantastic structures on Earth, one of the places of real marvel that is left in this world. And I’m aware that if I get on a plane to go and see the Great Barrier Reef, I’m contributing to its destruction, so I should not do it. But I find myself bargaining. You know, I don’t have children, I don’t have a car. Is that enough for me to cause this extra harm? Objectively, no. Probably not. Subjectively, I would probably, you know, if someone gave me a plane ticket tomorrow, I’d get on the plane, I would find a way to justify it to myself.

And I think the justification in science fiction at the moment is one of the really fascinating elements of the genre as it’s working today. This idea of negotiation, of justification. What are we willing to look away from? And the honest answer is quite a lot! And so I think that’s how we end up a lot of times with these really difficult characters who are often unpleasant to grapple with. That makes them really compelling in my mind, because they are, as you say, reflections of ourselves. We are existing in this liminal space, connecting with these often quite awful people. And I’ve been reading the Nayler, and some of these characters are not good people, most of them, in fact—you would not want to be friends with them. But you recognize their actions, you recognize what they’re doing. You think, in the same way, “I might probably be convinced to act as they are.” And it wouldn’t take much.

M. L. Clark: It is interesting. I might have a slightly different perspective because I did leave Canada to live in a space that would not be considered one of the greatest polluters, and yet it gives me that lens into how human beings are very much subject to the context in which they live. A lot of times I will encounter folks here in Colombia who will say, “Oh, Colombians don’t care about trying to pollute less with the traffic, the number of vehicles here. They’re gonna cause problems. They just, they just don’t care.” They’re saying this about their fellow citizens. And as a Canadian, I’ll say, “Well, Canadians didn’t really care either until there was a little bit of a reframing on a legal level to encourage people to use certain lanes or to incentivize certain kinds of other systems.”

So as much as we sometimes do have reason to castigate ourselves as individuals, it does require a deeper systemic uplift. Colombia is very special in many ways because it is definitely one of the few countries that is trying to disconnect from its oil regime at a time when even places like my country of birth, Canada, is still moving in another direction—despite the fact that there are horrific impacts on our environment every summer, well throughout the year, but we have very clear studies that are showing the direct connection between emissions and world outcomes.

But it’s not easy because there are many other human factors. So, for instance, changing the extraction economy means disrupting a tremendous number of people’s livelihoods. And if you don’t have a plan as a system collectively to address the number of people who need to be moved into different sectors and to have different outcomes, you’re going to be met with a very human struggle. And Colombia is more involved in that struggle than many others at this present moment. But it’s fascinating to see how hard that struggle remains. So we do have a lot to do to create a deeper, more systemic body of discourse around that. And there is a place, there’s absolutely a place for literature to be part of that conversation.

We can be creating narratives that allow us to move through the next problem and the next problem. I think it was Frederik Pohl who said that science fiction isn’t imagining the invention of the car, it’s imagining the invention of traffic. And so—I’m loosely paraphrasing—you have to imagine two problems out in science fiction.

And so here I live in a space that’s two problems out: Colombia is aggressively trying to shift to different green energy futures; and it’s not easy because there’s a lot of pushback, even when you start the process from a number of actors. But the gift of that is that, as Columbia and other places as well try to have those conversations, we can use those stories to help other countries when they decide to finally catch up and start working on this as well. They can anticipate these problems perhaps a little bit better and come up with solutions faster.

Octavia Cade: There is something interesting going on in Colombia at the moment, which has a correlation to New Zealand. There is a similarity there. In 2017, the New Zealand Parliament declared the Whanganui River as a legal person here. I think a couple of months later, the same thing happened to the Rio Atrato in Colombia. And again, the same thing happened about the same time to the Yamuna and Ganges River in India. And so this idea of giving rivers legal personhood—and it’s also happened in New Zealand to a mountain as well—is something, I don’t wanna say science fictional, but it’s something that recognizes that, you know, human values and human identity can be applied on a much broader non-human scale.

And I have yet to see, I think, really a science fiction that engages with the idea of the environment as a legal person. I think there have been many similar attempts in other countries of the world that have just been knocked right over while companies are still given the status of legal human beings. But this idea of story, I think is, is fundamental to that because humans are creatures made up of stories.

And when we recognize the stories associated with places as well as people, when those stories are so linked to the identity of those places, then it becomes easier to see them as, you know, deserving that legal status of personhood as well. And this idea of environmental personhood is something I find absolutely fascinating.

It seems like the science fiction concept: Not only are we granting this ecosystem personhood, but I think it also reflects in a way the growing understanding that as individuals we are ecosystems as well. The way that it reflects the idea between individual and ecosystem, between human and non-human is I think something that science fiction is going to, probably in the next decade or two, really begin to focus on.

M. L. Clark: One would hope. There’s a legal concept that emerges in a lot of South American discourse, so not just Colombia—I don’t want to fetishize any one nation-state in this context—but the notion of “Buen Vivir” is a legal concept that emerges quite a bit, the idea of a sort of holistic wellness that emerges.

It’s a legal concept. It’s integrated into thoughts about how do we develop policy without including overall wellness for ourselves as the society, as a community, as a culture. And that’s something that doesn’t necessarily exist in the vocabulary of a lot of Western policy making.

But it does exist in other discourses. So, when we also talk about the future of science fiction, I might go back to Gibson, who suggested that, the future is here, just not equally distributed. But in some ways that means that a lot of spaces outside the usual places in which we look for science fictional futures might actually be a little bit further along in some of these conversations. We have a tremendous amount to learn, not in a fetishistic way, but just from the fact that many conversations are going on concurrently.

And to go back to your point about violence and literature, Octavia, obviously it brought to mind a conversation that happened after The Ministry of the Future came out, when so many Western reviews were so fascinated, almost excited, almost frothing at the mouth that the idea of, “Oh, terrorism might be necessary. We might be able to shoot down planes because it will lead to greater good.” But a lot of the discourse tended to overlook the other kinds of violence when it was enacted by other countries.

So, for instance, when you’re talking about the possibility of protecting Europe and North America with certain treatments at cost to other parts of the world: That two-thirds world in Ministry of the Future after the heat wave—the horrific, really stunningly written heat wave in the opening scene for Ministry of the Future—India decides, “The rest of the world’s not going to help us. We are just going to go forth and do what we need to do, even if it means that when we protect our skies, we’re going to impact crops in other spaces.”

The idea of other countries doing the things that we take for granted as necessary in our own world is not part of the conversation. Even when we’re talking about violence, even when you have a lot of people who are excited about these possibilities, it’s still so narrow in scope. We still are so fixated by some of our cultural boundaries, and we need to be thinking just a little bit more holistically about the whole world being engaged in concurrent conversations, concurrent speculative thinking about how to go forward.

Octavia Cade: There’s a lot of, I think, continental versus island thinking in science fiction. Yes. And I say that as someone who was raised and who lives on an island, quite a remote one, relatively. There is a tendency in science fiction for New Zealand to be seen as this, you know, refuger at the bottom of the world: “When the apocalypse comes, let’s all go to the bunkers in New Zealand,” that sort of thing.

And it is quite easy to feel that sense of isolation, as an advantage. And so it impacts the ways that I think we look at the rest of the world. In some ways it allows us to be very selfish, because we don’t have to address some of the consequences of living on a continent in ways that other people do. We don’t have the land borders. I don’t want to sort of really underline that sense of refuge, but the horrible truth is that, you know, if climate change really ramped up tomorrow, we have a relatively small population and a relatively high level of food production. We could probably survive in many ways, in ways that a lot of continental countries could not.

There is that sense of not just of isolation, but of insulation that makes it hard, I think, in some ways to look at the compromises that continental countries have to make and not judge them, or at least judge them by different standards, I think.

Dan Hartland: That’s such an interesting point to make in this conversation. Because I, I speak from the UK, which I mean functionally has a long, long history of, particularly the English, thinking of themselves as an island state, which is of course absurd.

Octavia Cade: Because you can swim the English channel! Well, maybe not you and I. We couldn’t. But, you know, it’s ... it’s, yeah. Build a raft!

Dan Hartland: Exactly! Nevertheless, that channel may as well be a chasm, according to some Anglo-chauvinist thinking. And as you were speaking, I was thinking of, and this is somewhat unfair to the book, but I was thinking of a book that was recently on the Clarke Award shortlist, Extremophile by Ian Green.

It’s very interesting to me that most of the books we’ve been talking about today—about, you know, sort of writing in this time of death—aren’t really dystopias, they’re not like that sort of really … even the Julia book that I was talking about sort of undoes some of the dystopian elements of 1984. They’re not really dystopias in that sort of classic sense. They’re something else.

Extremophile is a pretty much a dystopia. It’s a future England—really a future London. Climate change has ravaged the country. And it’s a kind of attempt to make cyberpunk into some sort of … I don’t know, ecopunk or something. It’s not entirely successful in any of that. It’s a very good work of ventriloquism, it has that cyberpunk aesthetic and tone, but to what effect, I’m not sure. But it cannot escape—because, you know, it’s an island-thinking kind of book—it cannot escape a technological solution at the end. It’s a very slim chance of a technological solution. But nevertheless, it is a technological, “Oh, this might work.” It’s not a square-jawed man that does it. But nevertheless!

Then I was comparing that in my head as you were speaking, Octavia, with another book I recently reviewed for Strange Horizons, Archipelago of the Sun by Yoko Tawada, which is this wonderfully strange book that also takes place in a near-future, climate-ravaged Europe and very much is continental. The characters spend most of their time on a boat, on a ship—on a cruise ship, really—trying to get between the various countries. And the coastlines have changed and people aren’t sure whether the countries are where they used to be. And all of the characters in this liminality, this uncertainty, this adriftness, start to rethink their identities and they start to even rethink the languages in which they speak. And it does something with the time of death which Extremophile does not, almost because it is a novel in transit.

There are deep waters there that we, you know, I would love to plumb further—particularly as I think, when we are talking about giving personhood to rivers and mountains and elements of the natural world (natural world in scare quotes!), we come full-circle in the conversation back to where we started, which was with Ray Nayler. That book is so interested in a corporatized world, and of course we’ve long since accepted for some reason that corporations are, as you say, Octavia, are people. And yet if we’re talking about escaping anything, surely we wanna escape from corporations are people to rivers might be—actually, it might be better to say that (!).

Octavia Cade: I mean, I have not accepted that corporations are people.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I’m still with you on the barricades! Yeah.

Octavia Cade: I have not! I find it extremely easy to accept that mountains and rivers are people.

Well, you were talking before about this idea of a novel spent in transit, through islands and continents. Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day, published in I think the late 1990s, does that extremely well. The earth is a crap-sack—in the future, the earth is a crap-sack world, you know. Dust bowls and everything. And this group of Quakers decide to set out on a colony space mission to another planet, because they exist as an island in the North American continent. Basically, this small community of people whose land and way of life is consistently being encroached on, they see themselves being sort of overwhelmed by the continent around them, and they know that it’s not sustainable. So they set out on this generation-long journey to find another world.

And of course, as they travel in this generational ship, they are an island in space. But at the end, when they get to this planet and they are terraforming it to their own requirements, they are colonizing it with plants and animals from New Zealand. They have become the continent by the end because there is no island on that planet that is capable of opposing them.

I think there’s something quite fascinating about that, about how transition works in the way that we approach environment and that sense of ourselves as belonging to an isolated community versus belonging to a global one, the balance between that. She does it really well.

M. L. Clark: I haven’t read that one, but it does seem to tie into another thread that we’ve been carrying through this conversation.

With respect to certain tropes in science fiction and fantasy, there has been a longstanding desire to sort of clear out other people to sort of bring things back to a smaller society or smaller community—as if that would somehow give us more agency and a better path forward, as if the problems that we face could be managed if we just happened to be a lot fewer.

And it does sound like that kind of work is bridging and maybe pushing past a little bit the tremendous weaknesses of that trope, especially when it talks about our capacity for moral courage and moral imagination. Because if we’re thinking on that scale, we cannot come to solutions that are going to serve the world in which we actually operate.

I do think that what our role as a critic is, in terms of opening up that conversation—I think we’ve done some of that here—I would encourage maybe in thinking about all of these works, which are themselves trying to carry the argument forward, to just be cautious in ensuring that when we review them, when we talk about them, we are doing precisely that in the way that we speak of them.

So, if it is a work that is trying to carry conversation forward, it would be I think quite dangerous for a critic to come along and try to close or solve the conversation. To be able to carry forward the best of the argument that is presented in the book is maybe the best that we can do for our audience in general.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I would say certainly that one of the concerns that I have about genre criticism—literary criticism in general, but since we’re talking about, spec fiction and science fiction and fantasy—is this sense that, “OK, I need to figure out how this book is science fiction, right? So I need to be able to fit it in to the framework and I might have to file an edge off here or, or, or create a precedent there.” I would plead with critics to yes, be more open to the idea that this is all very fuzzy and they are …

M. L. Clark: Liminal, I think somebody used that word!

Dan Hartland: That’s right! And there are related literatures and there is all kinds of play between them that doesn’t need to fit into this kind of progression, this sort of heritage, this idea of a family tree. We don’t need that, we just need the conversation.

Octavia Cade: When science fiction is open to these sorts of discussions, is open to the argument, is looking at stories that are open-ended, that envelop a number of range of perspectives, it becomes a much more lively and interesting debate. It becomes one which is more resilient, which helps us to understand the future and the present in a much more constructive and productive way. So yeah, the idea of the argument as necessary not only to genre, but to existing in the Necrocene is I think something that needs to be prioritized.

[musical sting]

Octavia Cade: Well, thank you to Strange Horizons as well. It is, I think, the only review outlet that allows me to blather on for two thousand words about a book and never says, “You have to stop here!”

M. L. Clark: I got to throw in Heidegger. How many places would let me throw in Heidegger?!?

[laughter]

[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 grandevalise.bandcamp.com.

And while I’m here, a note on last episode, which you’ll remember was about SF in translation from small presses based in the US currently faced with an immediate funding crisis as a result of … well, shall we say, changes at the National Endowment for the Arts.

We were glad to see the episode prompt some discussion. In particular, a few kind souls got in touch to note that SFT is reviewed regularly by a number of folks at Locus. This of course is good! In the episode, Rachel Cordasco especially was expressing the need for features and essays, and a concern that recently those have dwindled. We hope to see more of that stuff. But it’s very good that stuff of other kinds is very much available. Stay critical, friends!

See you next time.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 13

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by critics and reviewers Rachel Cordasco and Will McMahon.

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.

In this episode, we’ll be discussing SFF in translation. Why do we read it? Why don’t we read it? And, in the face of a number of in some cases urgent challenges, how can we ensure it reaches ever larger audiences?

We began by discussing the immediate spur for our conversation.

[Musical sting]

So I guess we are all gathered here, the three of us, to talk about SF and translation via small presses. But there’s a reason for us doing that, which is not great.

Will, you emailed me a few months ago now and said, “This thing is happening. It seems like a thing that we should do something about,” and I agreed. Do you want to just talk a little bit about why you emailed me, what about?

Will McMahon: I would say, if anyone out there is unaware, my and Rachel’s country has been taken over by a kind of gang of fascists. This was a long time coming and I won’t get into the background, but a friendly correction is: it was barely over a month ago, ’cause that’s how the speed of these things go. Feels like the accumulation of years.

But yeah, basically at the beginning of May, a series of nonprofits, small presses, and literary magazines in the United States received a very bizarre email from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying that their grants from the NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts, were being terminated because they did not fit with President Trump’s priorities. And those priorities were listed in just kind of a stream-of-consciousness chunk that included things like AI proficiency and veteran services. And anyway, kind of the upshot of that is that there’s a few dozen literary arts organizations in the United States who have lost funding pretty much effective immediately.

And, when looking at the initial reporting, something that was very striking was that they were disproportionately presses that fund the translation of international literature. And it’s not that big of a leap to connect that to the kind of inward-looking nationalism of the kind of reactionary government of the day.

So, I think that’s the situation—and what we can do about it or why we’re talking about it, maybe we’ll all get into. Yeah.

Dan Hartland: I’m amazed it’s only a month because I get so used to not replying to emails in good order that thought it must be at least eight weeks! As you say, it’s also a function of the amount of stuff that gets thrown at us, which is why I was really keen when you emailed to do something about this ... just with whatever platform we have at Strange Horizons Reviews to give some focus to this at a time when it’s quite hard to sort of know where to shine the spotlight.

And of course, Rachel, the reason that then the first—literally the first—person that I emailed after getting that message from Will was you is because you’ve established yourself—you are going to object to this, I’m sure—but you have established yourself as the expert on SF in translation. See, you are objecting already!

Rachel Cordasco: No, no expert!

Dan Hartland: Well, your website, SF in Translation, your reviews at Strange Horizons and elsewhere, you’ve just ... you read a lot of this stuff. So I emailed you straight away, because I wonder whether you could talk a little bit about the SF in translation ecosystem and why, if we are looking at the future health of small presses, that this will impact upon SF in translation.

Rachel Cordasco: Yeah. While Will was talking, I was thinking of what I’ve been kind of complaining about for a long time. You know, I started SF in Translation, the website, in May of 2016, so next year will be ten years. And, as with all things that people kind of start and get involved in and then get excited about, I jumped into it and was like, “Oh my God, look how much there is.”

Like, there is a ridiculous amount that is actually available. You just need to be able to get it. But then, as the years went by, I saw the rise up to 2017 into 2018—I guess between 2017 and 2020, honestly, which was interesting—there was a definite rise in the amount of SF in translation that I was kind of capturing and seeing what was being published.

Most of this was because of Lavie Tidhar, and Francesco Verso, and the Apex Book of World SF. There were five of them. Francesco has also done a lot with Future Fiction, putting out all kinds of anthologies. Haikasoru, which I’m still crying about, which is one of the greatest publishers of Japanese SF in translation—they shut their doors a couple years ago and, and we have really suffered for it. I know most people don’t even know what that is, but you know, I miss it ‘cause it was amazing! And then Kurodahan Press, which did the same thing, also shut their doors the last couple of years. So there’s been a steep decline that I’ve noticed actually since 2020 in short fiction, in long, just across the board.

A lot of this is because these presses … so I put together a list of the presses that are based in the US that publish SF in translation. None of them focus exclusively on it obviously, but there are eight. So there’s Europa, Graywolf, Two Lines, Deep Vellum, New Directions, Wakefield, Restless, and Open Letter.

And all of them are, yeah, small, independent presses. Their thing is translation. But you know what is probably going to be cut first? Speculative fiction, because it’s the least read. I mean, if you’ve got like, I don’t know, Elena Ferrante versus Yoshiki Tanaka, people are not going to go for the Yoshiki Tanaka, unless they know who he is. They’re going to go for the literary fiction. They’re going to go for what they know.

Honestly, if you’re even reading translated fiction … If you’re reading, okay? That’s great! If you’re reading fiction, that’s amazing. If you’re reading translated fiction, that’s even better, you know? So by the time you get … I mean, SF and translation is so niche that you can’t compare it to the world of literary fiction.

Speculative fiction is always about what it means to be human, but in a way that’s thinking about the planet itself, everyone, it’s thinking about our place in the universe. It’s a lot more specific like that. And seeing all of these books across these different publishers and across the years shows us that it’s so important to read internationally because, at least from the US I mean, the news is very sparse when it comes to international news. I don’t really know much about what’s going, I don’t know anything about what’s going on, in Italy. I don’t know what’s going on in Korea. I don’t know, you know, if I just turn on the news, I’m not seeing anything. I would have to go to specifically to like the world news and it’s like clips, you know?

But I feel like when you’re reading widely and you’re reading in translation, and you’re learning about how other people are seeing the world, I mean, that’s only a good thing. And yeah, like Will said, it breaks through that parochial, inward-looking approach. And I honestly think the SF world in the US is very inward looking, which is very surprising, and so this helps kind of break us out of that.

And that was a big rant, so I’m sorry!

Dan Hartland: No, there’s so much good stuff in there! I think I’d really like to get a little bit actually into the science fiction community in particular and how it relates to these works in translation, because I think you are right that they are seen as “something else” sometimes. But before we did that, I did want to quickly circle back, because you were right to circle back yourself to what Will was saying.

Because of course, everything you’re saying about the importance of reading widely, the importance of reading in translation in, uh, in order to be more aware and more informed and more empathetic brings us right back to what we were saying about the gang of fascists. And it tells us something of why they might want to withdraw by fiat over a million dollars worth of funding from exactly the presses that are publishing this stuff.

You know, Will sent me the Publisher’s Weekly piece about this and, of the presses you mentioned, several of them are mentioned just in the PW piece. You know, Deep Vellum is mentioned, Open Letter are mentioned, and these presses that—you’re right—SF should be looking to, should be relying upon, for providing this service to the literature are now at serious risk.

I wonder whether we should get into—because this is Critical Friends, so we are critics and we are meant to be able to expound upon the virtues and values of literature—I wonder whether we should briefly pause, rather than take for read the value of SF in translation. You know, Rachel’s just done a great job of advocating for it. Will, I wonder whether you wanted to talk about your relationship to these kinds of texts and why for you it was “ring the alarm bell, this is happening” as soon as you, you saw that piece.

Will McMahon: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that when they talk about this—not just this situation, but literature in translation, and in the genre—critics really rightly point out that it is almost uniquely parochial. The percentage of published literature that’s in translation in the English language market, three percent, is significantly lower than even other major language markets. And that’s really—at least in the US, which is the dominant English speaking country in the world (sorry, Dan!)—is, you know, easy to tie to that nationalism of course. You know, we’re the home of Hollywood, of New York. You know, “everyone wants to read our stuff.” And, you know, narratives of where—whether it’s the origins of science fiction where everyone wants to talk about Hugo Gernsback or maybe some older English authors, but English—there’s kind of this, um, kind of Anglo-chauvinism. And even beyond that, I think it’s just … there’s so much out there. It’s very easy to just be like, well, I’m just gonna keep reading the people that I like and know from my country or my language.

And I think that that leads to a literature that can be overly self-referential, overly kind of self-iterative, where we just kind of recycle the same—whether it’s plots or ideas or tropes or cliches. And innovation is measured by how much of a twist you put on them or, you know, a new perspective to the old thing. And that’s not to say those things aren’t valuable, but there are literatures, there are perspectives, out there that read as far more fresh. If you can encounter them!

And I think I would say that if you have—obviously there is, like Rachel was talking about, a small readership that specifically seeks out literature and translation—but if you have a speculative fiction reader that maybe you read it here or there, but you know, you’re mainly in kind of the core of the English language field, you are benefiting greatly from the fact that these translations are happening—because a lot of the writers you are reading are drawing from this.

I had a great conversation last year at Readercon in the US with Jeffrey Ford and Sofia Samatar about how both were very influenced by the work of Roberto Bolaño, and particularly his short fiction. Now, in the US that was translated by New Directions, which was not receiving NEA grants. But I looked up several of Bolaño’s translators and they were receiving the NEA translation fellowships that are also being cut. So, you know, we’ve got a very good Sofia Samatar novella up for the Hugo this year and, you know, you want to talk about this is work that’s having a very large impact on the English-language field that might not be there, or wouldn’t be the same, if not for this ecosystem of literature in translation. And so I think that it’s something that we should do more of, but what’s already happening is a really key engine of innovation in the field.

And I just did want to tack on that I’m doing the podcast on my end from Rochester, New York, and last week I reached out to Chad Post of Open Letter, which is based out of the University of Rochester, just to get a little more background from him. And the first thing he said when I told him what we were doing was, “Oh, have you talked to Rachel Cordasco?” So I think we’ve got the right people here or one person is the right person!

Dan Hartland: We have Rachel, that’s all we need!

Rachel Cordasco: Yeah, you’re too kind.

Dan Hartland: So I wanna co-sign everything you just said, Will, and I want to dig even deeper.

So Rachel, you mentioned that in all your reading of SF in translation—and then also just sort of as Will was saying about basically Anglophone SF, right?—you perceive a kind of strange relationship.

So at Strange Horizons, we do what we can—I’m sure we could do more, I’m sure we could review more texts in translation, but we try for all the reasons we just talked about—but there is undoubtedly a perception that it is its own thing, that it’s not as integrated as Will is correct in saying it actually is.

So can you talk a bit more about that—how you perceive the wider community of SF to kind of receive or not receive SF in translation?

Rachel Cordasco: I think Strange Horizons actually does the best job, honestly. I’m not just saying that because you’re here, you really, you really try to make a big effort and, you know, I’m honestly super impressed whenever I look through each edition and I see  people like Will—and I mean, there’s so many other people I can’t even think of all of their names—who are reviewing SF in translation.

I’m seeing a lot of it and then I look at Locus. They have Ian Mond who does most of the reviews for SF in translation, but he only does so much. I’ve been in contact with them for years and I’ll send them something. I believe Locus was the one that published my kind of grand review of the ten-book series Legend of the Galactic Heroes, which was, you know, huge. But then, I emailed them last year about something; I don’t hear anything. You know, I emailed them about something the year before; I don’t hear anything. There’s no kind of contact.

And I’m not saying that I need to be the one, I’m just saying I’m not seeing the kind of coverage that they actually used to do, honestly. They used to have a page, Jeff VanderMeer used to do a ton promoting SF in translation, and Lavie and everybody: They used to have a page where they’d kind of have a paragraph of what’s being written interesting in Bulgaria, what’s interesting in Portugal, what’s interesting in Bosnia. And I love that. Give me more, you know! But I’m not seeing so much of that anymore.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: What’s behind that?

Rachel Cordasco: I think, and I’ve talked to some people who are kind of like, “Well, why would the SF community in the US kind of promote what isn’t itself?” Like, it’s going to, it wants to promote itself. It wants to, everybody wants to, do what’s kind of promoting themselves.

I think there’s such a massive market of English language SF that the ugly stepsister is, you know, the SF in translation. I hope I didn’t offend anyone! But why are we going to, you know, promote something that’s coming out of Italy or promote something that’s coming out of Croatia, when we’ve got all these other people, all these very established people here?

I guess what bothers me is the fact that there’s the talk of, you know, “We are, look at us, we are so diverse and we love everybody and look at our Hugo Awards.” That’s my huge ... I mean, I wrote an essay that I put on my site that’s pretty like, you know, it’s like me being pretty bitter! And, I know no one wants to be reading like a bitter essay, but I was just like: Just because, you know, Cixin Liu won something once and Han Kang won something once, and then ten years ago, Thomas Heuvelt won something. that doesn’t a world prize make!

And we can go into the whole thing, which there’s another big lift again this year of trying to get a translation category in the Hugo Awards. If you look at all the other awards—the French awards, the German awards, the Dutch awards, the Italian awards—they all have a translation category. And, you know, you’ve got, again, another person, Neil Clarke, who has done so much to bring short SFT to English language readers. Most of it is Chinese, you know, it’s not a broad range, but it’s a lot. I mean, we are not wanting for Chinese SF and it’s thanks to him, he’s done a lot of that. But he and other people think that it’s a bad idea, because it would ghettoize certain things and keep them on their own instead of them being like eligible for like other, bigger awards or something.

And you know, honestly the question is a question of visibility: Nobody is gonna know what’s out there if nobody knows what’s out there. And I can tell you, I wish my website was the place everyone went. Like, you wake up in the morning and you go to Rachel’s website. That’s not how it works. So how are they gonna know what’s available? And these awards are a huge way of promoting that and saying “some random people that you don’t know said that these books are awesome.” And you’re like, “That book is from a country that I never even knew they wrote SF!” or something. And so then you go look it up and then you say, “This looks cool!”—and that’s it, you’re in.

You know, even if it was just one year, just one year, one translation category, one year! And then, cut it, you know? You’d get like ten more people who’d be reading it. But everybody’s had a reason why it’s not a good idea.

Will McMahon: So I think it’s interesting talking about … You know, we have to this point been largely talking about the English language and translation. So you might get the idea, there are two languages in the world: There’s English and there’s Translatio or whatever. But obviously, you know, the spectrum is the rest of the world.

I mean, good call-out on Clarkesworld doing really great work. And I think they have, I think a year or two ago they had like a Spanish-language submission window. I know they’ve done a number of other things, too. But, when I was talking with Chad at Open Letter and kind of asking him what he saw, the kind of carry-on effects of this—because the NEA grant funding isn’t the majority of any of these presses’ money, but it is a significant chunk—he suggested that in addition to potentially being one or two fewer books a year put out—and right now they only put out ten a year, so that’d be a pretty significant cut—they’d have to look for alternate sources of funding. And there are countries that will on the other side fund translation into English.

And then there’s increased market considerations, where it’s like, “Well.” The people who buy translated literature are not a monolith. Something translated from French is likely to sell more than something translated from Slovenian or whatever, right? So, even if you can cobble together enough money to say, “OK, we’re gonna keep up the translations,” the world narrows, right?

Like Chinese science fiction has entered the English-language market—partially, not as much as maybe it should, but, but it has kind of staked out a bit of a reputation, whereas, you know, for smaller languages it’s even more of an uphill battle.

Rachel Cordasco: Yeah. But like I said, it’s always been a struggle, I guess, with a lot of these languages. If the government is not … if there’s not funding from their governments to publish here—like, you know, Romanian, let’s say, they’ve got such an amazing world of speculative fiction that has made its way into the US but in strange ways, and only because of funding that dries up and then comes back and then dries up and comes back—you’re, you’re gonna get less and less.

But you know, like I say, the two major Japanese publishers of SF in translation: They shut down. I mean, feel like it was just yesterday, but it may have actually been three or four years ago. Haikasoru was VIZ Media, and VIZ Media was like looking at all of the things they do, and it’s like: Manga sells, but SF in translation, not I guess selling as much. So let’s just cut it.

Dan Hartland: You know, more and more I’m trying to center this kind of, these sort of, material questions in my criticism. I don’t know if I do very well, to be honest, because I prefer the abstract! But it strikes me as so important to acknowledge all of these material conditions in terms of the texts we get and how they reach us. Which of course this whole episode really is about, and I find it really interesting, that historical arc that Rachel’s painting for us—that maybe in the early 2000s, you know, like you say, we had people like Zoran Živković, who I think is great, winning the World Fantasy Award.

Rachel Cordasco: Very much. Yeah. He really deserved that.

Dan Hartland: Yeah! Awesome, awesome author. But that kind of focus has dissipated in recent years, and I can’t avoid the conclusion that it is because people felt their job had been done a little bit.

Rachel Cordasco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm!

Dan Hartland: Right? “We did it.” You know, “We gave one of these guys an award. What more do you want?!” And critics, too, are I’m sure guilty of that. You know, this idea that, well, we reviewed one once and, you know, we did a big thing and a splashy thing and now we’ll just go back to normal. Whereas what we are aiming for is a kind of more integrated approach rather than this consistent, “Oh well, we looked at that special thing a few years ago and now we can just revert backwards.”

And I think this is because—for me, the reason this is important is because—I agree entirely with what Will said about this is how we get new ideas. This is not to say though, right, that as critics we should be wholly positive about all works in translation.

So we are in this episode advocating and saying, you know, please go and read this stuff, support it, because they are losing other forms of support. But as critics, we also need to be able to say, “Okay, this one is good. And this one isn’t.” And I wonder whether there’s a tension there for us, because we are simultaneously saying how important work in translation is in the general, in the aggregate.

So how do we then go about this, when we find a book that isn’t quite so good—and Rachel, I think pretty recently you’ve published with Strange Horizons in, in this way—when we come across a specific work in translation that just doesn’t work for us? How do we handle that?

Rachel Cordasco: I mean, you know, how many emails have I sent to you where I’m like—it hasn’t been many, but it’s been a few!—where I’m like, “This book is bad. What am I gonna do?” Because it’s really hard to write.

I mean, I could unleash, but like, what’s good about that? Who’s that gonna benefit? You know, that’s just a screed. Like I think SF translation is honestly held to a higher standard. International literature is held to a much higher standard. And what’s interesting is that I feel like the percentage that’s good, like just a kind of objectively good, is actually higher in the amount of international literature we get, because things have been vetted so many times.

Dan Hartland: And this is where the material context comes in, right? The bar is higher.

Rachel Cordasco: The bar is so high. Like, first you need to get published, right? Then you get published in your country, then someone needs to make the decision to translate it. Then you have to translate it. Then you gotta get it published again, and then, you know, by the time you get it in the hands of the readers—believe me, I am the first one to be like, this translation sucks, you know?—but I rarely come across bad translations.

I just have to say it’s like the translators feel like they have an extra burden on them because the most annoying thing to hear is like, “This reads kind of like English, but not really.” No one wants that. So the translators, often writers themselves, are really going above and beyond making the translation sound. As you know, what people want is for it to read … they don’t wanna know that it’s translated. They wanna just read it. And they wanna enjoy it. And these translations are done very well, these translators are very high quality. And the publishers are choosing high quality translators. You’ve got Open Letter, you know at the University of Rochester, I think they have a program, and a bunch of other places around the country have translation programs, where you can get your degree in translation.

I feel like it is a very high bar. But yes, I recently read a couple of books in translation that I really wanted to like, I really did. The translation was perfect. The translation was excellent. These translators have translated books that I’ve loved in the past. So it wasn’t them, it wasn’t the quality of the translation, it was the story. I’ll let you go for a long time before I say, “OK. That’s just, we’re not going there.” And you know, sometimes you get to a book where you’re like, “This is … what are you doing? You’re just rambling. You’re all over the place and it’s not working and I feel like you just wasted my time.” And I get real mad when I feel like a book is wasted my time.

But it’s just so rare. And all I really read is SF in translation, so I can tell you. You’re absolutely right. We shouldn’t say, “Well, it should all be published. It’s all good. Everybody should love it. End of story.” It’s like any other thing. There’s high quality, there’s low quality, there’s stuff that gets through for one reason or another. There’s stuff that other people will say … I’ll just give one more example and then I’ll shut up.

A few years ago, another critic, I don’t even remember who it was, and I both reviewed a work of Japanese, kind of classic SF—almost like a Stanisław Lem type. It was surreal, you know? It’s like science fiction and then it’s like, you know, inward science fiction. It’s the mental and the universe and everything, and I just thought it was really fascinating. I’d never read anything like it before. I took it for what it is. And I thought the translation was excellent.

And the other critic was like, this sucks! Because, you know, “I don’t like this about it. I don’t like that about it. I don’t like this about it.” And then the great international literature reviewer Michael Orthofer I remember put up a tweet and said: “Hold on! So-and-so said this was great, So-and-so said this was horrible, what?!”

And I said, “Well, we’re approaching it … I was approaching it very textually. They were approaching it kind of culturally, politically.” They wanted the book to be what it wasn’t. I was approaching the book as it was, not how I wanted it to be, which is very hard sometimes. You want a book to be a certain way and you’re disappointed; but, you know, you, that’s what you get. Sometimes you get a book that two people think is completely different.

But like I say, I just think the quality is really great and people don’t realize that.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I mean, Will, I don’t know what you make of this question. I mean, one thing that that struck me as Rachel was speaking was, when I’m reviewing a work in translation, I am intensely aware that I can’t really rate the quality of the translation, except in so far as it feels natural. The prose feels natural, you know, in terms of … I suppose by quality, part of what I’m talking about is the accuracy. Is this the book? And of course, that’s a whole other thing we don’t need to go down.

Rachel Cordasco: Yeah. You can’t know.

Dan Hartland: But, when you read as widely as Rachel does—and we try, Will!—you can’t be an expert in the cultures from which every single one of these texts is coming. So you do have to read in a very open way, I hope. But there will nevertheless still come—even if you read as openly as possible, and even if you let the translation speak to you and don’t worry too much about this, that and the other—there will still be books that maybe don’t work for you. So, yeah, I don’t know whether you’ve had that experience, Will, and what you think the critic’s role is when it comes to, “Yes. in aggregate. But what about the specifics?”

Will McMahon: Yeah, I think the bigger picture answer is that the way we get towards a more global perspective on, literature as English-language readers is by making sure every discussion of literature and translation doesn’t feel like an advertisement, but to kind of treat it equally—as, like, I’m just gonna engage with this like I would with any book. Now obviously it’s not really like with any book because you’re saying the cultural context or kinda the history of the things that people would have reading in that context.

I read a lot in translation—or, I don’t know, I try to read a lot in translation, I’m actually just in general a slow reader, so that’s always been a struggle—but I vaguely tilt myself towards Latin American literature and, and originally, Spanish language, but far from exclusively. So I try, and especially if I’m doing a review, to understand something of the context.

One of the best books I read last year, coming out of one of these affected small presses, Transit Books, was The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini, originally published in the 1970s in Argentina, a beautiful short fiction collection. Some of the stories didn’t work great for me, but it was really only a couple. Overall it was, just really scintillating prose, really fascinating ideas. But, you know, also all the narrators of all the stories, or almost all of all, were men, and had like pretty, just in general, a pretty reductive and objective view of women. And I noted that in my review for the Ancillary Review of Books, which also does a lot of reviews in translation.

But just put it in the context of, you know, this is not particularly surprising for an Argentine man in the 1970s, just like it wouldn’t be for an American man in the 1970s—or frankly today. But I think just kinda like noting it, if you understand something of the cultural context, you do need to be a little more careful around those cultural elements.

Oh, and I just want to append, because especially in this discussion, I should really be noting the translator’s names as well: That one was translated by, uh, Jordan Landsman. You know, you gotta talk about style and prose, and I think you just have to, in that case I think you have to say Bonomini’s prose, as rendered by Landsman, right? You know, this version that I am reading.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: Will, you just mentioned Ancillary Review of Books, and we should mention that the editor there and our friend, Casella Brookins, is the person behind what Rachel was talking about, which is the potential award for translated work Hugo. Rachel was talking about the pushback there has been against that, even though I agree entirely that it’s a chicken and egg situation here: It’s really hard to argue you can’t have a Best Translated Hugo because no one reads best translated work, because then the cycle just never stops.

But I guess, Casella’s work there—and I, I know Rachel, you are working really closely with him on it as well—brings us to this other question that jumps off my kind of poor critic idea: “Oh. What do you do when you’re reviewing a book? It’s so hard!” What can we do as critics—as readers, as engaged citizens!—to improve the lot of SF in translation? The obvious answer is just read more about it and write more widely about it. But at this time of potential, in the US, crisis for SF in translation—and every single one of the publishers that I have contacted for review copies and just to let them know we’re doing this thing, have responded immediately, which with all due respect to my publisher friends, is not common, so my suspicion is they feel the urgency also—what can we do?

How can we help, you know? What is it that we should be looking towards in terms of the future of SF in translation?

Rachel Cordasco: Well, I would like to put the burden on—and I know that, you know, this is just me talking, everyone can roll their eyes and ignore it—but I can tell you that I get very few notes. I don’t know why this is hard. Put a sticky out. You work at one of these publishers, put a sticky on your laptop and it’s just got my email. Anytime you’re going to be publishing a work of SF in translation, just let me know. I mean, no one tells me!

So, you know, that’s part of the work that I’ve taken on to do myself, which is to hunt for it. But why should I have to hunt for it?! If you just … I mean, I will literally splash it across my, my website. I’m finding things out months later. This is not like my full-time job. I’ve got some time where I’m able to focus, but you know, I’m doing twenty-five million other things, three young kids and a part-time job. And I’m trying to keep all this going! But, like you’ve said, you know, my website has a purpose. It’s a very specific purpose and I have a number of people—I’m not on all the different social media sites, whatever—but I have a certain number of people that have followed me for years and they look to me to aggregate this stuff. So all I’m saying is, if people let me know what is coming, I can distribute that widely, not eight months later when I suddenly find out, you know?

But if people will just tell me, come to me, and just email me: “Guess what? We’re publishing this, end of story!” You know, “Look, this is coming out.” I’ll be like, “Great!” And I’ll put it on there and you know, I know people do go to my site. So people will go to the site and they’ll see it and I will then ask you, Dan, or I’ll talk to World Lit Today, or I’ll talk to Words Without Borders. I will help distribute that knowledge of what is coming out, what exists. I should email people more. I should, of course I can review more. I can do more, you know. But I’m saying there’s some stuff they can do, you know, that would help.

Dan Hartland: Rachel, I would like to submit for the consideration of our listeners that in fact you could not do more! There is no more that you can do as a single human being!

Rachel Cordasco: When my children are in college, I’ll do more! But until they’re in college, you know, we all have a limited amount of time. I’m trying because I love this. This is like this what, this makes me very happy.

Dan Hartland: We do all have a limited amount of time and resource and that is why step one—which is what you’ve just told us and which is so important—is use the platforms we have already.

Rachel Cordasco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dan Hartland: We have them, and we can use them more, and people can reach out to them more.

I mean, I do think that one of the functions of what we’ve been talking about—which is this slight-slash-increasing separation between “core” SF (and I put that in scare quotes) and SF in translation—one of the functions of that is that the people who are publishing SF in translation don’t automatically think of us when they are promoting their books—which is fair because some people just don’t reply about this stuff! And it is about, as a magazine, reaching out to these publishers and saying, “Please, please, we define speculative fiction very widely. We set out to have a global perspective on the literature. Please, please, please tell us about this stuff and do some of the work to integrate the cultures a bit more.” I guess that’s something that I will commit to doing!

Will McMahon: Yeah, I think the, the critic’s role is that we could be meaner towards English-language work.

You know, and I say that jokingly. I don’t want to over-blow this, I mean there’s some amazing work coming out of kind of Anglophone literature, though that itself is now very internationalized, which is one of the very positive things that I have been going on in the field. When I was talking with Chad from Open Letter and we were talking about this book I’m reading from them right now, The Fake Muse by Max Besora, originally in Catalan, and it’s very mosaic and crazy and shifting. And you know, he said to me like, “Oh, and you know, that makes me think: I just bought this book on a friend’s recommendation and it was Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera.” You know, friend of Strange Horizons! So there is some really phenomenal stuff obviously happening.

But I do think that in the Anglophone genre and at least kind of the mainstream conversation, whatever that means—I don’t know, the Hugo scene or whatever—I think that there is not nearly enough discussion of style. I think in kind of the English-language speculative fiction that’s getting put out, especially in short fiction, there’s a lot of experimentation in form, but it feels like not quite as much in style and—and I think especially in the novel field. I think that there’s a couple of dominant styles in kind of quote-unquote mainstream science fiction and fantasy in the English language.

And I think it’s just kind of taken for granted. It’s the water and a lot of the discussion—and, I’m not talking specifically about critical discussion—is just about like the ideas, the characters, the plot, and, you know. None of those things actually exist, right? The only things that actually exist are the words. It’s just a string of words. I actually was just reading the recent reissue of Ursula Le Guin’s essay collection, The Language of the Night, which is very good if you can wade through the four different introductions and prefaces and whatever that they’ve tacked on over the additions.

But there’s one essay I was just reading, and I forget the name of it, where she’s complaining about the kind of lack of good criticism in science fiction. And this was in the 1970s where she was saying, “If you’re a concert violinist, someone will tell you if you’re second rate. But if you write science fiction, people are just gonna buy it. And then, you know, it’ll drop off the face of the earth after, you know, the first printing or whatever.” And I, I do think that this has probably only gotten worse as we’ve gotten out of … like, newspaper reviews are dying. Criticism is kind of moving off to its little online silos, and then there’s the ascendancy of Goodreads and the reader as consumer.

And if we shift what we’re talking about and if as critics at least are able to broaden the conversation just a little bit to be talking about what exists and what is possible when it comes to style and how these stories are being told, I think that just makes a very natural opening to frankly the much more expansive possibilities that are out there in the translated literature.

And, you know, hopefully we’ll just make things better in general!

Dan Hartland: And it links back to what Rachel was saying about the higher bar, right? So we’re reading these SF in translation texts and we are aware that the bar is so much higher for those books getting published. Yet somehow, perhaps some of us in the critical discourse aren’t making those bars visible.

Rachel Cordasco: So steps, right? Moving forward, keep doing what we’re doing. I think maybe other things to do: continue to reach out to publishers, continue to stay on their radar. Continue to kind of engage, find ways of engaging readers. You know, I tried to do, and totally didn’t work, and people could have told me this if I had asked! But I tried to do an informal best best SFT novel, best SFT story. And I did like a Survey Monkey or something and people game it and mess it up, you know? But it was a way to try to engage people. Sometimes I’ll on social media do trivia and I’ll say, “What do you think was the most published language this year in SF? Was it Spanish? Was it Korean?” And people are like, “Ooh, what a question!” And then, and then I’ll point them to my spreadsheet and I’ll say, “Here’s the spreadsheet, you can look at all of the charts and you can see kind of what was big this year.”

And then the question becomes, why was Korean surrealism so big this year? Why was French horror so big last year? Keep lists. Keep lists of the things that you wanna write about. And then send them, you send them to Strange Horizons, World Lit Today, Words Without Borders. I have to say, World Lit Today has been more responsive to me than a place like Locus, because they’re really, really trying to, capture international lit, which pulls in SF. And Strange Horizons, which focuses on speculative fiction, you’re capturing the translation.

And I think there is also, only so much you can, because the pool of readers is itself quite small—readers, period. And so I’m starting to not care if people’s eyes glaze over. I talk to people at my kids’ school. They say, “What do you do?” I say, “Oh, well, let me tell you!” And I talk to people, if I’m talking to people at a grocery store and they say, “What do you do?” I’ll say, “Oh, I’m a freelance writer, but you know what I write about?!” And I’ll tell ’em. And if they seem kind of bored, you know, maybe a few days later they’ll be like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe I’ll look it up.”

It’s a lot of talking, it’s a lot of word of mouth, it’s a lot of pushing forward, you know, and waiting for the next wave—because I can tell you, there was a wave of interest in SFT in the seventies, there was a wave in the nineties, there was a wave in like the twenty-teens, and it’ll come back again. It seems to be pretty consistent generationally, because every generation has people. There’s always going to be a generation of people who raise this up. I just need to keep contacting as many people as I can, because this is what I love and I want everyone else to love it.

If you look at the long, broad sweep of history, I feel like it’s really positive, honestly. Things always come around.

Will McMahon: Yeah. Things I would just point people towards: We’ve mentioned Open Letter several times, one of the publishers affected. Anyone who’s interested in the situation as it’s happening now and what these presses are thinking and what the future might hold, I would really strongly recommend the three-part podcast—The 3% Podcast is the name—the podcast put out by Open Letter. They did a three-episode series last month, with Chad Post as the host, and he brought in a number of people for each episode from the organizations affected. And that was really informative and I think they had some really fascinating discussions.

I mean, one thing about the scale of the problem here: We’re talking about it like it is this huge blow to literature and translation, but that is such a small market. We’re talking $1.2 million a year, these direct NEA grants. You wanna talk about all these arts councils and translation fellowships, but you could endow that for $25 million, right?

This is pocket change to, say, the Big Five publishers and, frankly, considering how much they benefit from this work, both directly—like, you have an author that breaks out with one of these small presses, pretty soon they’re gonna be getting published by Penguin Random House or Macmillan—but also indirectly, like I said, it, this is like the fertilizer keeping Anglophone literature relatively healthy. It would be nothing for these large publishers to endow an independent organization that just kept up these grants. The danger is when you’ve got kind of these individual donors, right—like, the Elizabeth Koch situation.

So, yeah, I think it’s interesting to look at, and people are thinking about how these nonprofit small presses aren’t nonprofit just because they make no money, but because they’re also like doing things like Rachel was saying, they’re attached to translation programs. They’re trying to do things, put things out into the field. So I think supporting them in that—and then, the last thing is read. People should read more work in translation. I don’t want it to sound like homework, right? It’s the same thing that I think genre readers often have when discussing like quote literary fiction (which is not a coherent category anyway): It sounds like kind of stuffy or like eating your vegetables, which I don’t like. (I like vegetables if you cook ’em right.)

But, you know, this stuff is great. It can be wild, it can be off the wall. I mentioned I’m reading The Fake Muse by Max Besora, translated by Mara Faye Lethem from Open Letter right now: This thing is insane. The text is littered photos of giant hamsters shooting lasers out of their eyes and it’s kinda like a zine and there’s all this wild like typography, it’s just a blast. Some of the best science fiction, short fiction I’ve read recently was from a Bolivian writer, Liliana Colanzi. Her collection, You Glow in the Dark, translated by Chris Andrews for New Directions, is dark cyberpunk, really good. This stuff is great, right?

So this isn’t, “Do it because it’s good for you,” but because it’s good. We wanna support these presses, do it because this stuff is great. And I think, when we’re talking about being too inward looking or not looking at the rest of the world, the biggest sin there is against ourselves. We’re missing out on so much great literature when we’re not engaging with the rest of the world. Literature is a conversation. All art is a conversation. And if we cut off who we’re talking to, that conversation is just gonna be less interesting.

Rachel Cordasco: I’m so glad that Strange Horizons does so much to promote SFT. It’s been really great talking to you guys. Thank you so much.

Dan Hartland: Honestly, thank you. Really appreciate it.

Rachel Cordasco: Thank you. I’ll talk to you guys later then.

Will McMahon: Yeah. Bye. Thanks.

[Musical Outro]

Rachel Cordasco: I, yeah, just keep working and staying positive is really my suggestion.

Dan Hartland: Rachel, it is entirely not on brand for this podcast to end on a note of optimism, but thank you.

Rachel Cordasco: Oh, I’m glad I could bring some, because I’m, sometimes like, “Oh, everything just sucks.”

All: [laughs]

[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.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 12

Dan 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.

Transcript

Critical 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.

Transcript

Critical 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.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 9

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 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.

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.

Transcript

Critical 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.

Transcript

Critical 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.

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.

Transcript

Critical 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.

Transcript

Critical 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.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 4

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 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. <laugh> 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! <laugh>—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. <laugh> 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. <laugh> 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 <laugh> 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 <laugh>, 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 <laugh>, 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. <laugh> 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. <laugh>.

Gautam Bhatia: There was a one-star review that was pissed off about my Harry Potter views. I remember that one, yes! <laugh>

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. <laugh> 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! <laugh> But the substantive point you made did influence writing of The Horizon. So, uh, so yeah. <laugh>

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. <laugh>

Gautam Bhatia: I feel like it would be OK if they would all be like you?

Aisha Subramanian: Would it?

All: <laughter>

[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.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 3

Aisha 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

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 2

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF Criticism Podcast.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I'm Aisha Subramanian.

Dan Hartland: I'm Dan Hartland.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: And I'm Maureen Kincaid Speller.

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.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: In this episode, we'll be looking at the question of trust, what role does it play in criticism, and how is it built or lost?

Aishwarya Subramanian: That means we'll be thinking about the relationship between the reader and critic, the text and the review, and asking what makes a piece of criticism worth paying attention to.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Okay, so maybe we can start with some concrete examples. Which critics do we pay attention to and why?

Dan Hartland: When I was thinking about this, I realized that an awful lot of the critics, particularly SFF critics, that I trust already right for the reviews department of Strange Horizons, which is a strange coincidence. I mean, it's an odd thing. I don't know how we feel. I kind of think that I have a policy here of not mentioning names, because if I mention one of our reviewers, the rest of them are going to get so cross. They're such a highly strung group of people! So I was wondering about why I trust rather than who, and that led me to a name as an example from outside of SF. I'll read anything, for example, that Jacqueline Rose writes, and I wondered why I thought it was because and this is personal. Obviously, we'll all trust different critics for different reasons. And it struck me that one of the reasons I will read anything Rose writes is because she is aware of context, willing to reread the context and bring in different intersectionalities and all that stuff, but also alive to the text itself. So her approach is holistic in that sense. I suppose it doesn't hurt that she's a little bit iconoclastic, too, but she doesn't write about SF. So I can't talk about Jacqueline Rose.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I don't see why you can't talk about her.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Yeah, I don't think we need to necessarily. Obviously. Yes, as SFF reviews editors and critics, we're interested in SFF criticism, but it is a subset of criticism, which is the thing we care about.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I think I'm going to throw something in. I mean, I read a lot of things like New York Review of Books, TLS, and for my sins, The London Review of Books, which is the one I like least. And there are various authors writers in there in those magazines. Fintan O’Toole is a reviewer who I don't care what he's writing about, but nine times out of ten, it will be interesting simply as an exercise to see what he does with a book and a topic because he writes so beautifully. I think we've noted before, I have certain bête noir, not looking at you, Andrew O’Hagan, but okay, I'm looking at you, Andrew O’Hagan. Again, I read Andrew O’Hagan because it's kind of like driving past a road accident. What is he going to do this time, and how horrifying is it going to be when he does it? Now he's a perfectly blameless writer, but the point is that he's not really writing book reviews. He's reading a book and thinking about how it intersects with his life. And then he writes a little memoir in which he slides in a few mentions of the book and it drives me to distraction. I keep going back to see what he's done this time. The worst one was review of a book about the Colony Room in Soho and all the people flitting in and out of that. And it was basically out of four full-page columns. Three and a half of them was him was lamenting that, in fact, he was never at the Colony Room in its heyday. And in the last half column he mentioned the book, which was nice. I appreciate it, the fact, but this was reviewing as a, I don't really even know how to describe it, actually, other than infuriating but in the end if you put Andrew O’Hagan next to Fintan O’Toole. I know exactly what I'm going to get from both of them, and I know that in the case of Andrew O'Hagan, I'm not going to be very happy. Whereas Fintan O’Toole will expand my horizons in various ways.

Aishwarya Subramanian: Well, those are both a form of trust in a way, though, aren't they? You know that you're going to get a certain experience, and in one case, you know that you're not going to like that experience, but you can rely on its consistency.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: This is a good point. It's like watching Peter Bradshaw review genre films in The Guardian. He's giving it a two. It's going to be fantastic. I'm going to love it. He's giving us a five. Oh my God. I remember there's a friend of Paul Kincaid’s, he once said to Paul, I know that if you write approvingly of a book, I'm going to hate it, whereas I know that if you hate a book, I'm really going to enjoy it. And it was completely consistent. Apparently, whatever Paul disliked, he was going to enjoy and he read Paul's reviews in precisely that way. He was obviously getting something of value out of them, but it just seemed to me to be rather odd.

Dan Hartland: So it's part of developing trust. I think Aisha is right that even trusting a reviewer to be wrong is a kind of trust. Maybe we talk about relationships instead, developing a relationship with the reviewer is about the consistency of that reviewer.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yeah, it's actually exactly what I was about to say. It isn't so much trust as establishing a relationship. I always enjoy reading Gary Wolfe's reviews in Locus. I always feel that he's very kind. He's a very generous reviewer, but I like the fact that he can draw on intelligently on many years of reading. And he's a brilliant contextualizer. And it was quite a long time when I was reading one of the old collections that Beccon Press put out of his essays from Locus, and I'd been sort of reading this all day, and I suddenly realized that once you actually understood the language of Gary Wolfe reviewing that there were some quite pointed little comments scattered throughout the reviews. But if you weren't paying attention, the reviews were very pleasant. But if you actually started digging into them and you read a lot of them, there was something else going on underneath as well. But I could say something about the ways in which certain journals encouraged their people to write. But that's another issue. Perhaps there was the critical component to the review that I would look for, but it was not immediately obvious.

Dan Hartland: It's interesting that you mentioned the organ, the venue in which a review appears, and I was really interested in you talking about the LRB, because I kind of agree. I don't know how I feel about that paper right now, and I do think that the way that magazines encourage or any venue encourages their reviewers to write is important. But the danger perhaps, of emphasizing consistency in a reviewer's oeuvre (thank you) is that you begin to expect or they begin to think you expect a performance. And I'm thinking of people like Adam Mars-Jones. I mean, every piece is how can Adam Mars-Jones fillet this book? Because that's what Mars-Jones has come to be known for, and there are diminishing returns there.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I know that Erin Horáková—who has written for Strange Horizons quite a lot, so this is us plugging one of our own people again—but Erin has complained about the fact that she sometimes feels like she's being called upon to perform a sort of amusing anger, and that's something that, when she does, is hilarious. I very much enjoy that, but it's not what is valuable about her work, and it's a bit of a shame when that becomes something that readers are looking for or that readers are expecting from you.

Dan Hartland: So how do we avoid that? And when I say we, perhaps I am meaning Strange Horizons reviews. How do we, whilst hoping that our reviewers have a consistency which helps them develop a relationship with readers? How do we prevent each voice just becoming a performance? How does any paper or journal or magazine or whatever do that? How does any reviewer do that?

Aishwarya Subramanian: So all the names that we've been referring to so far are people who have these quite long, quite established careers, and that kind of expectation is built up over that time, and that's in some cases great, in some cases maybe not so great. Whereas when we're working with a very broad range of reviewers in the first place, where we can keep holding reviewers to account as far as the actual text is concerned. So the text is still the priority, at least at some level.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I'm wondering if you're in one of those situations, I'm going to take something like the LRB again, where you have your favorite reviewers and they are so favored, effectively, either they don't really like to be edited or you don't want to edit them anymore. Whereas I think that's one of the things that we do certainly with Strange Horizons and I value it anywhere else that does it. We're prepared to engage at the level of editing and have that dialogue with the reviewer. Does this work? Have you thought about this? This is very nice. Not so sure this is does what you think it's going to do. So there's actually that process, that editorial process is going on.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. The invisible hand of the editor. So there are two lines of thought here that we're sort of juggling. We're talking about the relationship between the critic and the reader. But there's a mediating thing in the middle there, isn't there? Unless the critic is a blogger. And we spoke in the last episode about, quote/unquote, the demise of blogs. There can be—and we could talk about that perhaps—like a really immediate relationship between a critic and a reader. But in a lot of situations, there isn't. There's this invisible editor person who is there to … what?

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I mean, one of the things I often joke about in my other daytime editing job as an editor, it's my job to save the author from themselves. It's very amusing of me, but at the same time, I think there's a certain truth in that, because if you're close to something, there are certain things you just don't see. Reasonably experienced reviewers are actually very good at spotting this, and others are so intensely engaged with the text that they do find it difficult to step back. And on the whole, they do seem to be grateful for an editor's ... I'm going to use the word "intervention", but I don't mean it in a very heavy-handed kind of way. Just maybe the editor's engagement in the text as well, just to actually sort of give them that extra space to sort of take a step back and look at what they're doing. And it's like going around the museum with a friend, the art gallery with a friend, and looking at things. Once two people are having a conversation, you can see a particular work of art in a very different way as a result of the exchange. And I think the same pertains to actually looking at a piece of writing. So saying that I think one of the things an editor can do is to help the writer to become the best possible reviewer they can be, but without turning into a parody of the best possible reviewers they think they are or a version of the editor. I don't want this writer to write the review that I would have written. Actually, I always used to feel like one of the big problems with the LRB was that there was a kind of a very strong editorial, too strong an editorial impression on it, if that makes sense. In the many years I've been reading the TLS as well, there's only been one period when I knew actually who the editor of the TLS was, and it wasn't a good time. It was actually quite happy when the editor of the TLS sank back into obscurity and I'm focusing on the reviews again, rather than somebody's vision of the TLS. Mentioning no names.

Dan Hartland: I would agree that the TLS is a more transparent read than the LRB can, although of course the LRB has recent had a change in editor. And anyway, this is not Critical LRB Friends, although perhaps it should be.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I believe that's the job for somebody else. To be honest, I would comment upon, say, the reviewing in something like Foundation, except that I'm not the reviews editor and I just do the copy editing. I think one of the interesting things here with something like Foundation-the-journal is that it gives a lot of space to younger, in terms of inexperienced, reviewers and gives them a chance to strut their stuff. And it's very interesting to watch the balance between, “I am writing an academic review and I am writing a review for an audience that is not entirely composed of academics.” It has to strike a very particular balance. Foundation has just changed reviews Editors. So it's going to be interesting to actually see what direction it goes in next. But I've always found it very interesting in the considerable time I've been doing the copy editing. That how it gives the thread of the reviewing between all those different disparate groups of people.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I think that raises something that I was thinking about in relation to this idea that you build up a relationship with a critic with a body of work, which is one of the ways in which we can avoid that a kind of mode of reviewing or a kind of reviewer's persona becoming set in stone is to have a really wide range of new reviewers all the time, which is obviously something we try to do. But also that means that none of those individual reviewers is going to have that kind of body of work behind them. And so our relationship with them as critics is slightly different.

Dan Hartland: I think that's a really good point, and I was thinking the same thing as Maureen was speaking. There is a danger, in focusing on the relationship that a reader builds with a critic, of falling back on the same people all the time. And I think SF reviewing can be a little open to that. I think certainly from my background in British SF reviewing, it's a relatively small pool, and it takes effort to expand that pool. And as I said, we try to do that at SH, but it's always a constant job of work to do. But it's really valuable because I do think that it doesn't just bring new reviewers in, it refreshes the old reviewers. And that seems to me really important.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes. Actually, while you were saying that, I was just thinking of all the different ways that we acquire reviewers, let's put it that way. There's a certain amount that we are open recruiting for reviewers. We're talent spotting people, the people who come to us independently. Some we turn down because and others we take on because actually it's a very complicated process. I think more complicatedness than people actually realize at times is trying to keep that flow of new people coming in and actually maintain the regular stable of reviewers. Because as we all know, things change. People spend some time with us, they move on because other things are happening in their lives and we're welcoming new people and regretfully saying goodbye to old people. But I think one of the things I really like about the reviews department of Strange Horizons is it is fantastically dynamic.

Dan Hartland: The other thing, therefore, that I might ask is in terms of newer reviewers, perhaps. So we've talked about relationships building over time; but newer reviewers: how do they establish that relationship immediately? Because it strikes me that we've been talking about a relationship over time. But each individual review, it seems to me, needs to establish, if not authority—I don't like that so much—but some credibility with a reader? Okay, a critic over 5, 10, 15, 20 years—whatever—can be trusted. How does a new reviewer, or even an old reviewer writing in a new venue instantly start to develop that? What is the sign of a review, rather than a reviewer, that we can trust?

Aishwarya Subramanian: The very act of accepting a review, editing it, and putting it up on Strange Horizons; that's an act of trust. “I don't feel embarrassed by this” is the bare minimum that we're saying about anything we put up.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I think we need a little more than that, though, don't we? Actually, we need a fair bit more than that. Okay, let's put it another way. When somebody comes to any one of us, when we get somebody sending us in a review and we've not heard from them before, and we're looking at the reviews and thinking, “Do we want to run with this? Do we like what this person is writing, even though we don't want to review this particular thing?” What is it then, that actually sort of pings the button for us?

Aishwarya Subramanian: I think I respond slightly differently depending on whether it's a pitch or whether it's an actual draft review. With a pitch, I'm looking for a consistent position. I'm looking for someone who knows where they stand in relation to a text, a film, whatever they're reviewing for us. When you've said, I want to write about this, I think the bare minimum is that you have a clear sense of where you are in relation to it with an actual draft review. I think I'm just looking for anything that gives me something I wouldn't have had before I started reading. I think sometimes there's a moment where you just think, okay, I have an insight into this thing that I wouldn't have had if it hadn't been for this person, even if it's not very polished or even if it's a bit lacking in direction. If there's an insight that changes my relationship to the thing that's being reviewed or that opens something out for me, then the question becomes whether that insight is enough to put in any work that this review needs. And sometimes, of course, the review doesn't need that much work, and it's brilliant. But one of the nice things about working with a lot of new reviewers, I think, is that we get to do that: we get to actually take someone who is not necessarily that confident about their work or not necessarily able to articulate some of these ideas and put in the time because we think that what they have to say is probably worth being out there.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I will say the nicest part of that when I get the little note by saying, oh, my goodness, this is amazing what you've done here. I think, well, actually, you’re—the person—amazing because you paid attention to what I said. No, seriously, they took it on board. I pointed you in certain directions that I thought would be productive. But you're the one who actually went away and did the hard work and turned what was an okay review into something that's a lot better.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I think that's another thing I'm looking for when we get something like that: a willingness on the part of the writer of the reviewer to engage with the editorial process. Does the person actually want to make this as good as it can possibly be? Are they convinced that it's fine and publishable and that's it? I think we've all had people who said, well, we'd like to suggest you do this. No, absolutely. This isn't happening. Okay, fine. The reviews are not happening. Never heard from them again.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I used to get quite depressed by that, actually, but I realized it's a part of the process circle of editing life. Some people, they're just going to move on to somewhere that will take their work immediately. And I'm quite happy that we are not that place that we are actually going to have an editorial engagement with the review in question. I mean, speaking as a reviewer, I love being edited because it happens so rarely. I love the fact that when I'm reviewing, I get to hand over my work to one of you to eviscerate it for me and make it better, because I've been doing this for a long time. But that doesn't mean I can't do it better. If somebody actually looks at my work and gives me a view again, too, that goes, I think, plays back into the whole idea of trust. As a reviewer, I want to be able to trust a venue, and I measure that trust in how willing they are to engage with what I give them and sort of come back to me with editorial notes.

Dan Hartland: While you were both talking there, I was taking off, actually, my editor hat and putting on my reader hat – and thinking what I look for in a venue. So when I pick up a paper or open a website, part of the trust thing isn't just for the individual reviewer, it is for the venue. And it's because of that thing that you were just talking about, Maureen, which is some venues do feel to me less engaged in working up the product than others. And when I go to a review, I kind of want it to have been pre-tested for me so that I don't have to do all of the probing of the review. I can trust that a bit has been done already, and that trust is a significant part of how I approach a piece and whether or how much I pay heed to it. Am I off-base? Does that seem fair?

Aishwarya Subramanian: I think it's fair. I think that we don't necessarily want venues to have a house style to the extent that everything sounds the same. But we do want a venue to have certain priorities and certain standards regarding those priorities that we share. I mean, there's an ethos which you tend to share with the journals or the magazines that you care enough to pay attention to, and you want that ethos to be in play at some level in what they publish.

Dan Hartland: Yes. I'm thinking now about, for instance, we haven't mentioned it yet, the Los Angeles Review of Books, which is a strange sort of curate’s egg kind of place, because particularly perhaps a few years ago now, it did publish a lot of genre reviewing, a lot of SFF reviewing. I don't know whether I've noticed it as much recently.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: They're doing a fair amount.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, that may be my error. What makes me think about that is that it is unusual for putting the effort into SFF in that way, and sometimes in the non-SFF press – LARB and other venues being notable and honorable exceptions – sometimes the SFF is not given that weight. Quite the same level of … “respect” is the wrong word. But you know what I mean. I'm thinking of Maggie Clarke's recent piece in the Criticism Special that SH did a few weeks months ago.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Well, if you remember, we did a book club on The Buried Giant all those years ago, because I remember the reason that particular book club came into being with the three of us exchanging frantic messages that morning when I finally got my hands on a copy of The Buried Giant and was able to fully express the outrage that had been brewing as I started reading the reviews. And it had become apparent to me already, even before I got the book, that several reviewers were not really paying attention at all. They had completely got the wrong end of the stick, and in one instance, they were very deliberately getting the wrong end of the stick to prove a point about fantasy, which proved me absolutely nuts. But I found it very interesting at that point to actually sort of work through the comparison of all the different attitudes to a book like The Buried Giant.

Aishwarya Subramanian: So are we suggesting that one of the things that builds trust, or at least doesn't undermine trust, is a basic knowledge of context?

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I think I might be. You don't want a review to be written by somebody necessarily who's completely familiar with every aspect of an author's work or a particular literary context, because that kind of that's another kind of limiting. Yeah. I mean, it becomes a kind of echo chamber, doesn't it? But it says reviews, and you say, I have absolutely no idea what this book is about. Why did you even bother reviewing it then? Either you're not prepared to do the legwork to try and understand what's going on.

You’re being incredibly lazy about this. You're churning out an opinion, but it doesn't feel like a very well supported opinion.

Dan Hartland: Is there a difference between trusting and agreeing?

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Well, here's a question. Where does that point of agreement come? Because does this agreement arise from reading what the critic has read a lot of weird things about sort of reviewing and critical writing. Are we actually going to read the books? Have we read the books that the critic has read? The number of things I read? I know I'm never actually going to read the book they're talking about, but I'm interested in what they're saying.

Aishwarya Subramanian: So there's trust in the fact that I'm relying on them to report back in a sensible and timely fashion and an interesting fashion. And when it's a review of a text, there's also trust that they're giving us a kind of faithful account of that text.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: In the good old days, we then had the leisurely, “But so-and-so is wrong about this,” correspondence in the letter pages of the journal. Whereas now, as we were suggesting last time, this is played out over several torrent hours on Twitter, and then nobody ever hears anything about it ever again.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I was going to say, I suppose reviews don't exist in a vacuum, do they? So although last time we were talking about perhaps some of the deficiencies of the current ecosystem, in theory, you should be able to check a particular review or a particular reviewer.

Aishwarya Subramanian: It strikes me that this is a really interesting conversation in the context of SF, where we have, on the one hand, that regular conversation about the canon, whether or not to what degree people are expected to have read the canon, assuming that such a thing exists. I think most of the time we'd be on the side of saying, no, absolutely not. You do not have to read the or a canon in order to engage with the genre, in order to engage with specific texts in the genre. But it's also a case of, if not the canon, you do need to be able to contextualize a book in something.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes, I tend to think of it as having a feel for what's going on in SFF publishing at the moment, because we can't all read everything, it's impossible. There's too much being published. So as long as there is an awareness of being able to sort of situate oneself broadly within that. I'm perfectly happy with that, because it's always interesting to see people tackling something that they're not entirely familiar with.

Aishwarya Subramanian: But I suppose there's a kind of distinction between a lack of sympathy, should we say, and a lack of familiarity, and also an acknowledgment that books exist in multiple contexts. You may have a great deal of knowledge and sympathy with one aspect of a book, and you may be encountering other things for the first time, and that can actually be really a really rich space in which to analyze a text.

Dan Hartland: One of the things that strikes me is that the undercurrent here, the great unspoken. The implicit assumption is that trust can be lost, that actually trust in the critic is fragile. And we've discussed a few things here. We've discussed a few reviewers and a few reviewerly errors, which can almost immediately lose trust. So you review that book and it's clear you don't know enough about it, or you spoil it without warning me, which is a whole other thing. And immediately, perhaps, the trust disappears. So you can build this up, this relationship between reader and critic; but it's also quite a fragile thing, is it?

Aishwarya Subramanian: I'm very wary of trust as a concept when it comes to criticism, because part of the point is, of course, that you want someone to be able to take you through their working, at least at some level, so they are actually showing you the process a little bit. So I can trust an individual review, and I can feel a certain degree of, okay, this person is probably going to have a good position on this thing that they've written about.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I was thinking, I suppose, how much should we rely on trust?

Dan Hartland: As opposed to … ?

Maureen Kincaid Speller: well, then you find the weakness in my thought. Personally, I just don't like committing myself either. It's a very incoherent thing. If you get to the point where you trust someone, then that replaces … or you trust someone's reviewing, or I was going to get too broad with this! If you trust somebody’s reviewing to the point where you don't actually stop to ask yourself, “Am I just going into this blind, or do I need to actually stop and look at what is actually being said?” I sort of occasionally worry, I have worried in the past, where I'm sort of wildly enthusiastic about somebody's writing, somebody's critical work. “Everything this person writes is completely brilliant and amazing!” And then you come to a point where you think, well, probably it is still completely brilliant and amazing but I need to be a bit more critical about what I'm reading, as well as the kind of interplay of trust and the critical eye—I suppose how the two work together. Because, even with that which we love and admire, I think we do ourselves disfavor if we don't keep testing it as well.

Aishwarya Subramanian: So trust is … essentially what we're trusting in is that this will stand up to scrutiny. But that can't mean that we don't scrutinize it.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Exactly yes, I think scrutiny is a good word, actually.

Aishwarya Subramanian: I love scrutiny, it's a great word!

Maureen Kincaid Speller: It's a lovely word, yes, I think it's a very important thing. I think generally, actually, scrutiny is a concept—a process—that is actually much underrated in society. Things happen, people say things, but there should always be the people who are scrutinizing what is going on.

Dan Hartland:  So I know we're only two episodes in but can we change the title of the podcast to Scrutable Friends?

Aishwarya Subramanian: No!

Maureen Kincaid Speller: No, because that sounds really weird!!!

Outro

Maureen Kincaid Speller: 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.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 1

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast.

Aisha Subramanian: I’m Aisha Subramanian.

Dan Hartland: I’m Dan Hartland.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: And I’m Maureen Kincaid Speller.

Aisha Subramanian: In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be talking about SFF criticism, what it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

Dan Hartland: In this episode, we’ll be talking about where SFF criticism can be found online right now, and whether it can be found at all.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: That means we’ll be thinking about how criticism is doing online, why it’s being done that way, and where we might take it in future.

Dan Hartland: Okay. We’re here this week to talk about where, if anywhere, we can find this thing called SFF criticism.

Aisha Subramanian: Um, if we say nowhere, does that just make this a very short episode, or …

Dan Hartland: That’s the concern? Yeah.

Aisha Subramanian: Okay. So we’re not, we’re not saying nowhere, okay.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: We’re not saying nowhere, but I think we might be suggesting that it’s not always immediately obvious where we might find these things.

Dan Hartland: I think that’s really important because if it’s not obvious, it’s incredibly difficult to build a community or critical mass around a particular discussion or topic, if no one can find where the conversation is happening, it’s actually quite difficult to have a conversation at all.

Aisha Subramanian: I think that criticism as a whole has been one of the casualties of the move away from blogs, that often when I see any sort of conversation happening, it’s happening in spaces like Twitter, which … not great for archiving conversations or indeed for having them at all, but that’s a different matter. Or places like, at least five or six years ago, Tumblr and these are sites which are really not built for preserving a body of text and people’s responses to that body of text in any sort of sustained or even just basically chronological way. And I found that really difficult to navigate, personally.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes. I always have done as well. I enjoy the cut and thrust of a Twitter debate, but you do kind of have to be there at a particular moment. There’s no asynchronous forums that I can think of, places to actually go and debate something at the moment.

So again, it may be that I’m just not seeing them, but everything I can think of, if you say, talk about, using a Discord, for instance, you have to be there. If you have to sort of sit and read back, you’ve just lost the thread of the discussion before you’ve actually got into it. I tend to notice, being an early riser and on GMT or British Summer Time, that I tend to actually miss a lot of what’s going on because it tends to be late at night, at other time zones. So I usually get up in the morning and find that something’s—it’s like a storm that’s been through overnight and all I could do is look at the debris and think, oh, okay, and then it’s already gone before I’ve actually had a chance to engage with it.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I think there’s something really in this, and I know that Abigail Nussbaum, who is one of the few people still really waving the blogging flag, and all power to her for that, thinks as well, that, especially, the death of Google Reader really had a huge impact on blogging, which was where a lot of criticism outside of journals that very few people have access to was actually happening.

So, in the absence of that kind of space, where as you both rightly say, people can lay out their arguments in a way that sit there so that other people can mull over them too, before responding either there or on their own blog, I think that the whole conversation is kind of evaporated. If not evaporated, then certainly become extremely atomized and difficult to gather together.

I remember years ago, blogs such as, I’m thinking Torque Control, which was Niall Harrison’s BSFA Blog, would gather links, links to these essays that people could read. And although I’m not as against Twitter threads… as some are, you know here is my thread number one of 472,000, they are no replacement for a blog, which looks very similar to a traditional essay.

I mean, maybe that’s part of the problem, that we’re looking for something that looks like that, maybe we should be looking for something else. So for instance, some of the best criticism I’ve seen recently is in video form on YouTube.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yeah. Actually, one of the things … I’ve had a couple of projects in mind, one of which was to actually sort of start looking at YouTube and book vlogs. I’m not a visual person, so I don’t tend to go for things where I have to sit and watch, but if I can treat it as a podcast, so I’ve got it running in the background and I don’t sort of bother much with the visuals, so I think I could probably get engaged. The other thing I’d actually been thinking of for a little while, and Paul Kincaid and I’ve talked about this without really sort of starting anything, was to actually start some sort of little project to gather up links on a regular basis and put them in a place, probably another blog.

So actually put them in a place where people can go and look at them and see if anything comes out of that. I mean, I think too, that there is almost certainly a certain level of conversation going on through the back channels now, you know, through things like Slacks and private Discords and whatever else there is available.

And so of course, there’s the trying to get to where those things are happening . Apart from that, as well as trying to sift through all the podcasts that are available. And if they provide transcriptions, that’s great. There’s stuff that you can read if you don’t want to actually sit down and listen to everything. But again, it’s as you say, Dan, everything is very atomized. And if people aren’t aware of what’s out there, it can be very difficult to get a foothold in the landscape of the discussion.

Aisha Subramanian: I feel like there’s two problems here. And one of them is, as you both said, that things are very atomized, that a lot of the time, the conversation is happening somewhere, but unless you are already a part of that conversation, you don’t necessarily know where to go and access it .But then there’s also the problem that a lot of those spaces aren’t accessible and sometimes for good reason, I mean, I don’t think any of us necessarily wants our private channels where we discuss current SF to be necessarily available to everyone. If we were to actually collect the links and put them in one place, I’m still not sure there would be that many links because the conversation has shifted so much to these other venues and these other formats that I’m not sure what we would be linking to.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: This is probably why we haven’t actually started the project yet.

Dan Hartland: Is there a tension here then in that, on one hand, we’re saying that it is difficult to find criticism. And on the other hand, we’re saying actually there’s quite a lot. Maureen mentioned you need to sift through all the podcasts that exist and there are lots and we’ve just added another one to the list.

There’s video essays that may or may not be right for some people, there’s umpteen Twitter threads that go out at all sorts of different times of the day. So if people are in different time zones, they can’t see them. Is the issue one of quantity or is it one of character, of type? I’m not going to say quality, but of, you know, the stuff of it, how we’re doing criticism rather than whether we’re doing it.

Aisha Subramanian: Yes? Um, that was a very tentative yes. I think that we’re in a place where the mediums we have—the media we have, for criticism, very much about responding to things, but they’re not necessarily very good for a large block of idea, if you can separate ideas into blocks. And I think that in some ways that’s quite useful for some kinds of criticism, I think the fact that we’ve all been focusing on conversation as a big part of how we think about criticism at the moment. These are really good mediums for conversation, but if I want to have a conversation and also put large blocks of thought into that conversation, I’m not sure how to do that right now. And I’m not sure that these are formats that necessarily provide much space for that.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I admit there are times when I feel like what I’m actually searching for is a kind of online rehash of seminars when I was at university. It’s a format I still miss, you do the readings beforehand, then you get to get together and discuss it. There’s no way of actually translating that, as far as I can see, into a kind of public forum. I keep testing this idea and I can’t come up with a way of making it, actually translating it into a thing that everybody can engage in.

Dan Hartland: That’s really interesting because I suppose I associate the seminar format with—it depends on who you get in the seminar, but hopefully a consideration of a text, more than what Aisha was talking about, which I think is spot on, a reaction to it. And we are very reactive. As again, Aisha was absolutely right to say that the media that we have are either inherently or the algorithms encouraged them to be reactive.

And this seems to me a much wider question than one merely about SFF criticism. I think it’s a cultural issue, more widely. But there is something in this. We get towards what is criticism and what is a review? A review is, in some senses, a reaction. Criticism is not that.

Aisha Subramanian: I mean, having said that, I’d want to add the disclaimers that a review doesn’t need to be just a reaction obviously, and that criticism can be a reaction. So, I sort of, kind of agree with that definition, but also, want to disclaimer it to the point that that definition is no longer necessary. Uh, sorry.

Dan Hartland: No, no, I think—I think you just did criticism.

Aisha Subramanian: No, I was reacting, which makes this a review of your definition.

Dan Hartland: Well, the reason that I ask about that is because, instinctively I felt that you were right to say that the media that we have encourage—I was going to say reactionary, but I won’t—encourage reactions. So why is that bad?

Aisha Subramanian: I think for me, it’s partly what—earlier on, we were talking about the question of asynchronous discussion is no longer possible. And I think that’s a big part of it. When I am trying to respond critically to something, I want time. I want to be able to take away my response to it, and chew on it for a while, and pace the room a bit, mutter to myself a bit, and then eventually come back and maybe make some kind of claim. I’m not a very reactive person in general, or at least I try not to be.

So now of course, if I’m trying to have a conversation on, say Twitter, about something that’s just come out and everyone’s very excited or very outraged, because those are the opinions available to you... By the time I’ve chewed on it, cleaned the house, gone through a long walk and come back, everyone is now outraged about the next thing. And there’s no way I’m going to respond or quote tweet the thing that was said three days ago and get any sort of conversation going. So I end up just not saying it, or saying it somewhere that is private for a few people that I know want to engage with that idea. And that of course is unavailable to the majority of the internet, which is probably not a bad thing most of the time. But if someone did want to engage with that idea, they’ve lost that opportunity.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Yes. I used to feel that way about the sort of culture of the hot take, because by the time the hot take had happened and I’d read it and was ready to respond to it, there was a different hot take happening. It was just always way, way too late. So I never ended up participating in all of that.

So I’m sort of toying with something that I think it’s connected, but I’m not quite sure how, so one of you may be able to deconstruct this for me, but we’re talking about sort of being reactive, but it’s actually struck me, since the days of things like Google Reader—I’m not going to say the death of blogs because I don’t believe they have died, I think they’re just in abeyance at the moment—but there is a kind of passivity in play at the moment. There’s a lot of consumption of criticism. If we assume that criticism is available to us in one form or another. I wonder if people are, given the way the world is, simply happy to consume, and disinclined to engage because they don’t need to, because it’s been done for them, or is that that a wildly off-base idea?

Dan Hartland: I think it’s interesting. Is what you’re suggesting that there is demand for criticism, but not necessarily an equal supply?

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I’m not entirely sure what I’m suggesting actually, because I’m throwing the idea out there to test it.

Dan Hartland: I think you might be on to something, that people want to see it, but they are not necessarily doing it.

But whether that is a cause of the phenomenon we’re talking about or its effect, I’m less sure.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I mean, it’s also, there’s the sort of levels that don’t necessarily want to do it. Do they want to respond to it? I mean, yeah, before we started this, we were casually talking about people who are saying, oh yeah, I do criticism of films, I read criticism of films, but I don’t want to read criticism of books.

So I’m sure that goes the other way as well. People who are not very comfortable with the idea that certain forms of criticism exist, because it requires something of them. Whereas they can read a few lines of notice or a very short synoptic review of a book or a film or something else. And that’s the level of engagement they’re comfortable with. I wonder if we’re asking people to do something that for a lot of them is beyond what they want to do.

Dan Hartland: I think we might be, I mean, criticism has always, I guess, being a minority pursuit, but its benefits, I would hope and probably argue accrue more widely.

It’s interesting, what you were talking about, Maureen—people may not want to do criticism, but are they responding to it? And for me, responding to criticism is partly doing it. The critical ecosystem, for want of a less awful term, relies on actors of different volumes. So there are some people that engage with the criticism, but don’t do it. There are some people that do it and ignore everyone else’s. There are some people that do the lot, and you need a bit of everything. And perhaps one of the things you’re describing is that at the moment, there are a few people—and this is online—bearing an awful lot of the weight.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: You’re absolutely right with that. While you were saying that, I was sort of thinking, if we do think of this as an ecosystem, is this is suggesting that parts of the ecosystem are rather weak at the moment? You know, this sort of very small pool of critics or people engaged in the pursuit of criticism on whom to draw. You know, we’re sort of there going full, “we must recruit more people”, because we’ve seen fandom do that and we all know how that went down. Do we just have to accept that this is the thing that ebbs and flows, because at the moment, yeah, it has ebbed, the tide may be on the turn. To judge from people’s responses, it begins to feel like it might be on the turn, but I’m not quite sure where we go. How do we encourage a healthy ecosystem? And one that is a well balanced ecosystem.

Aisha Subramanian: I think the one concern I have with the idea that, okay, things ebb and flow is that they are still held up by structures that, as we’ve been discussing, are maybe not currently very conducive to have them flowing essentially.

So I don’t know if part of encouraging a healthy, critical ecosystem is to build those spaces. Or if we just accept that certain forms of conversation are increasingly not possible and we should maybe try and adapt the kind of conversations that currently are possible to serve our current critical needs, and I’m not really sure what those would be. So please do not ask me .

Maureen Kincaid Speller: One of my own views is that—okay, I’m going to rage against the dying of the light. The question is how we rage and I think you’re actually onto something Aisha, with the idea of adapting. You know, it’s actually looking at what is available to us and how we can adapt this.

I mean, even on something like Twitter, if we actually accept that the longevity of the threads is fragile, but I’ve been struck by, I think it was the Lit Crit Guy who had actually sort of set a time, for people to turn up and talk about something online every week. I never participated, but that’s my problem, not his, but in fact, that people knew that there was a place online that they could be for a period every week to talk about a particular thing, and that seemed to work quite well for him for a while. But again, not everybody’s going to be there for that. It’s almost as though we need a format that hasn’t actually been invented yet, but which will be completely perfect when it does turn up.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I think there may be something in that, that the reason that we’re in a lull, again as Aisha says, is that the structures that we’re all currently operating within don’t necessarily provide the appropriate support for the activity that we’re advocating should take place.

That is difficult, especially as I was struck by Aisha’s "walking around the house muttering to herself" thing, as what is necessary for criticism, I agree. And the slow movement in all sorts of things is one of the reactions to the reactiveness of the structures: slow food, slow travel, all those kinds of thing.

Criticism is an inherently slow activity, which we’re trying to get going in a set of structures which emphasize speed. What we perhaps need is something that sits parallel to those structures that enables—we’re looking for something that records a conversation, as well as enables the conversation to happen, I think.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: It sounds perilously like we’re going back to forums and bulletin boards.

Aisha Subramanian: Let’s not. It was terrible. But I also think it’s worth stating—whether we do anything with that is a different matter, and I’m not sure that there is anything to do beyond stating it—that it’s not an accident that we are currently working within media that emphasizes reaction over any sort of slow reflection.

And that’s not going to change, unfortunately. So anything that we do build has to be built with an awareness of that larger political context as well.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I a hundred percent agree. And I think part of why I’m so enthusiastic about the sort of critical approach that we described here is that it feels profoundly counter-cultural in the present moment, this idea of taking stock, and thinking critically. It feels to me quite powerful, but you’re absolutely right, it’s not necessarily the ways in which we’re being encouraged to behave. I think of, for instance, Pankaj Mishra, An Age of Anger, in which he lays out fairly bluntly the obstacles that we face, if we are not to live in an age of anger. And it strikes me that criticism is not an angry pursuit. Is that fair? Sometimes, in fairness, I really hate a book ... but would that be fair to say?

Aisha Subramanian: I mean, I’m angry about a lot of things when I’m doing criticism, and sometimes it’s the quality of a book or a film, and sometimes it’s a world in which this book or film got made. This is me versus the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So I think anger is useful, and I think anger can be a part of our response to things, but it’s also an anger that has had a chance to cool down. It’s not, you’re not lashing out. You have thought about this and you are still very angry sometimes.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: But it comes back to what I still often say. I don’t mind people being angry about things, having particular views, as long as they can explain why they have that particular view. When I’m editing reviews, we’ve all seen this, if somebody makes a judgment, but can they actually underpin that judgment and explain why they’ve made that judgment. And it’s the explaining why that to me is always the important thing. And as long as you can justify your anger, then that’s absolutely fine.

Dan Hartland: That’s right. And the number of times as an editor that I find myself encouraging the reviewer to own that anger, I’m losing count of, you know, or I mention The Age Of Anger, which is Pankaj Mishra’s book, but reviewers seem more interested than ever in, in not hiding anger, but being careful …

Aisha Subramanian: Apologising for it sometimes.

Dan Hartland: Yes. And they clearly don’t like the book, but they don’t want to say they don’t like the book. It feels wrong to do that.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I wonder if we’ve been trained? Well, I have been trained because I’m past redemption on that, but I wonder if there is something about the current climate, particularly of engagement online, where people are being trained into being very careful about what they say because they fear the social media pile-on. So in the old days, when it was print only, you might get to the pile-on, but it would be very, very slow. I mean, you still see it in the letter columns of the Times Literary Supplement, for example, fought very slowly over many weeks.

And I mean, at that point, it’s quite funny because again, everybody has time to reflect upon what they’re saying and we can all tune in for the latest instalment. But when you’re putting something online, I think even if you don’t articulate it, even it’s not in the front of your mind, you are probably aware of what’s happened before and you probably don’t want that to happen to you. And running alongside that is the cult of "if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all". Which is another thing I’m not massively keen on. I am really not keen on that.

Aisha Subramanian: I’m a little susceptible to that, I think. I am extremely non-confrontational in many ways, unless the anger builds to the point that it has to have an outlet somewhere. And I think as well, a lot of what I see online is, so for example, if I follow an author on Twitter, which is always a terrible idea—some of them are lovely people, I accept this, but responding in this very wounded way to reviews that they’ve seen of their work, for example, and I’m not even talking about the author who has been doing that all over the British press, but even quite innocent and not awful responses can still look very sad, and then you suddenly have a group of people comforting this person and saying, no, actually you’re brilliant. That person must be awful. And they haven’t necessarily read what was said about this particular work or engaged with it in any way, but the idea is still this nice person that we know has been hurt by someone saying something somewhere.

And that becomes your main lens through which you then access the piece that was written, which is sometimes quite lukewarm. I mean, they weren’t really saying that this person should be hounded out of existence. They were saying, well, the ending of this wasn’t great, was it? And somehow that was enough to trigger this kind of response.

Dan Hartland: Can I propose then that one of the—we were talking about adaptation earlier and perhaps, perhaps we can’t put the genie back in. Well, there are several genies and several bottles here, but the social media has personalized criticism in a way that I don’t think it was before. Of course, fandom, and we’re here talking about SFF in particular, fandom has always been a small pool and reviewers have often known authors. And certainly when I first started getting involved in SFF reviewing, I was scandalized how close some reviewers were to the authors that they reviewed. Although in most cases, once you read the reviews, it was clear that that didn’t really affect the work, but on social media, this is amplified an awful lot.

And again, it’s linked to the immediacy, the reactivity of the media, and perhaps criticism does have to evolve a little bit to reflect and accept that. I’m not sure.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I think it can be a problem when you are a newer reviewer, or rookie reviewer, and you’re also trying to find your own feet in this space. I’ve been reviewing for donkey’s years and I’ve got to the stage where I don’t particularly care what anybody thinks about what I say. I can just brush it off because I come from a print culture where I probably didn’t really sort of see what people were saying about my reviews and because opportunities for being in touch with authors were very limited anyway, so there was unlikely to be a reaction to anything I’d said. So I learned my craft in that way, and that sets a sort of certain attitude in my mind, you know, how I felt about authors. So I review now and I’m not going to lose any sleep if authors or indeed fans of authors get upset with me, but that’s not going to be like that for a lot of people because you are apparently so, you appear to be so close. There’s just a screen between you and them. I would imagine it is incredibly daunting on occasion. And also, I mean, I choose not to get too close to authors. I have friends who are authors, but I feel, I like to maintain a certain distance. The criticism is important to me and I want to be able to do criticism.

Aisha Subramanian: I think that it can depend quite a lot on context though. I’m thinking of, say, very niche genres or very specific communities. And say, for example, if I wanted someone to review a book of poetry by an Indian trans writer. It’s very unlikely that I would find someone who would have a reasonable level of understanding and engagement with the material and who would have absolutely no connection with the author. And that becomes a challenge.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Science fiction and fantasy poetry is particularly interesting because it is such a tiny community to begin with. I remember feeling quite scandalized when I discovered that poets were happily reviewing one another and none of them thought that that was really strange. Whereas, when it came to me and something I needed to deal with, I was thinking, oh my God, that just feels wrong.

I’ve made my peace with it, but it seemed to me to be such a strange thing. But when you sort of think about it, I mean, it’s one thing we find with Strange Horizons. It can be quite difficult to find people to review poetry anyway, since it’s a much more niche thing, but I suppose it’s sort of having to learn to adapt to the situation.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah. And I think there’s a difference between that, where we’re basically thinking, who is the best person to give a reader insight into what this thing is and how it works. And it turns out to be this person, fine. Whereas I probably wouldn’t commission you to review one of Paul’s books, even though you would also have an astonishing level of insight into the process.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: That’s a very interesting example because (a) I’d never do it, because I absolutely would refuse point blank because that would be a much too close relationship. If for whatever reason I was obliged to do it, what I would actually be doing, the reception of it would be so heavily reliant on people knowing that I would absolutely not give Paul a gushing review, if I thought he’d got it wrong, if he’d done something really awful. I hope people understand that I am firm, but fair. I like to think I’m firm, but fair. It’s up to others to decide, but that’s what I work for because I am not in a position to be all things to all people and nor do I want to be.

Dan Hartland: It’s interesting, you mentioned Strange Horizons in there, and I did want to bring the conversation back to what we do there, because I’d like to think we’ve been talking about trying to build somewhere that this stuff can happen in. And I like to think that’s what we’re trying to do with Strange Horizons and both in terms of being firm, but fair, but also accepting that conversation on Twitter is important or happens.

And I think we do find reviewers in the way that Aisha suggests, that are relevant to the book, but also have the knowledge to do it justice. But secondly, certainly I edit very, very clearly with a view of what the reception of a review might be. And obviously the focus must primarily be on crafting the best review, but often one of the ways to test whether the review is the best it can be is imagine what people might say about it.

So in that sense, in Strange Horizons’ case at least, and I wonder whether we can think of anywhere else online that is obviously not as good, but similar to Strange Horizons ... The conversations on these slightly ill-fitting media that we’ve been talking about, whether that’s Twitter or YouTube or a Discord or whatever else, they are shaping what we’re doing at Strange Horizons.

Certainly for me, I consider it. So perhaps all is not lost, could be better, but it’s... all is not brok.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: It’s funny. I was just going to say, actually, I wonder if we’re thinking about particularly focused on one part of the ecosystem, we need to actually think about the ways in which it all interlocks. None of these things exist in isolation, but just because we can’t see how they all join together doesn’t mean they don’t somewhere in some way link to one another. And the question is, do we actually want to find a way of making those intersections more immediately visible?

Aisha Subramanian: I think part of the point of criticism of any sort is any way making intersections between things visible, isn’t it? So from that perspective it’s part of our job, whether it’s actually possible to encompass entire ecosystems in digestible, coherent ways, that’s a slightly different matter, and I’m not sure it is.

Maureen Kincaid Speller: I was going to say, I think it’s something to strive towards perhaps, while accepting it may actually be impossible to achieve, but the journey is the interesting part of the endeavor.

Dan Hartland: And I do think that this podcast may well map at least one aspect of our journey in that way.

Aisha Subramanian: Thank you for that, Dan.

Dan Hartland: You’re welcome. Will we find any of these connections? Tune in next week—

Maureen Kincaid Speller: Wait, I don’t remember saying weekly!

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 hear more of their music at GrandeValise.Bandcamp.com. See you next time.