Paul Kincaid, "Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction" (Briardene Books 2025)

Here I am, writing about Writing About Writing About Science Fiction

Paul Kincaid is a leading critic and reviewer in today’s science fiction. He blogs, reviews widely and writes essays and critical monographs. Indeed his output has been on a steady path of acceleration: alongside the stream of shorter pieces he published a excellent study Brian W. Aldiss (2017), the superb The Unstable Realities Of Christopher Priest (2020), Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood: A Critical Companion (2022), and then in quick succession Keith Roberts’s Pavane: A Critical Companion (Palgrave 2024)—recently shortlisted for the BSFA Award—and the hefty Colourfields, a collection of reviews and essays about science fiction criticism. These pieces are, as Kincaid always is, thorough, expert and judicious, generous without sacrificing acuity or judgement, wide-ranging without losing focus. It might be asserted that criticism about criticism is a somewhat niche undertaking, somewhat inside baseball. I don’t think so, though of course, this is a baseball I am myself inside (I could be bounded in a baseball and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that … I have bad dreams). It seems to me that the critical debates in and around science fiction are vital to the continuing vitality and diversity of the genre. They happen whenever two fans sit down and debate the respective merits of their favourite SF. They are the justification of SF as such, and the arbiters of what is good and bad, what it worth noticing and what not, what is better and worse, where the genre has been, where it is and where it is going. To that end it’s hard to think of a better account of the state of SF criticism over the last quarter century than this volume.

Colourfields opens with ‘Part 1: Histories’, pieces on various critical histories of and companions to science fiction, first a ‘personal account’ of Brian Aldiss, whom Kincaid knew, and whose venerable Billion Year Spree (1973, updated with David Wingrove’s help to Trillion Year Spree in 1986) remains a cornerstone of SF criticism. Then the volume’s first named review: of my Palgrave History of Science Fiction. So we arrive at the rather mise en abyme situation of me reviewing Kincaid reviewing me reviewing science fiction. Perhaps Kincaid will choose to respond to what I write here, on his website, and readers would be treated to the edifying spectacle of Kincaid reviewing me reviewing Kincaid reviewing me reviewing science fiction—to which I could then reply, such that I would be reviewing Kincaid reviewing me reviewing Kincaid reviewing me reviewing science fiction. But why stop there?

What I can say is that Kincaid’s review of my book is engaged, fair, detailed, neither dithyrambic nor aggressively negative. He notes his disagreements with my argument, and lists various errors and howlers (he adds a postscript saying that these were by and large corrected in the 2016 2^nd edition—as they were—though he hasn’t read that edition) but he also has a few more praising things to say, and defends the validity of advancing original, or controversial, or boundary-pushing arguments as part of the critic’s business, even if he doesn’t necessarily agree with my specifics. This is generous. I may as well jump to the end of the volume and note that Colourfields closes with another review of me: this time of my literary biography of H G Wells, which Kincaid considers alongside a number of other biographical and critical works on the man. He is less positive about my work here, preferring Sarah Cole’s Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century (2020), and Simon J. James’s Maps of Utopia: H.G. Wells, Modernity, & the End of Culture (2012)—which is fair enough. Of mine, Kincaid does note, which almost no other reviewer of the book did, that its account of Wells’s output omits the important and influential A Modern Utopia (1905) and In the Days of the Comet (1906): ‘it is as though, at some stage during the production process, one entire chapter was simply excised from the book’. I can report that this is indeed what happened: the chapter on literary utopias dropped out of the production process for some reason, such that by the time I got proofs, and noticed the lack, I was told it was impossible to reinstate it (the chapter I wrote could, I suppose, be reinserted in any second edition, but it is unlikely there will be any further versions of this book: the original material, out of which the missing chapter was worked-up, is available online, here and here; I also wrote a short-story sequel to Days of the Comet which is, though I say so myself, pretty good).

Kincaid, overall, has mixed views of my critical writing on science fiction: identifying not just gaps like this, and doing the reviewer’s due diligence of clocking errors and flubs, but also deprecating what he calls ‘tics’ of my writing, wordplay, puns, psychoanalytic knots, recurring crotchets and King Charles’s Heads—what he calls my ‘idiosyncrasies’. I cannot gainsay this. Idiocy, of one sort or another, surely characterises my writing, creative as much as critical. I mean the word not in the standard disparagement sense (which is, to be fair, not the sense in which Kincaid is using it) but as Rebecca West uses it in her marvellous Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941): her magnum opus, magnus not just in size—it's more than 1100 pages long—but in richness and detail, in observation, and in meditation on how history shapes the present, and how both factor in specific identities, societies and cultures. One of West’s key ideas is that women are idiots and men lunatics. At the book's beginning she recalls being in hospital in 1934 and hearing on the radio ‘how the King of Yugoslavia had been assassinated in the streets of Marseilles that morning’. She adds ‘it appeared to me inevitable that war must follow’:

I rang for my nurse, and when she came I cried to her, “Switch on the telephone ! I must speak to my husband at once. A most terrible thing has happened. The King of Yugoslavia has been assassinated.” “Oh, dear!” she replied. “Did you know him?” “No,” I said. “Then why,” she asked, “do you think it's so terrible?”

Her question made me remember that the word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy; they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

I wouldn’t sign-up to the gender essentialism of West’s characterisation here, not least because I recognise my non-female self in her account. But it is an important and I think penetrating distinction.

But let’s not dwell upon me (or dwell upon Kincaid upon me): though I bookend, in one sense, the colourful field of Kincaid’s collection, I’m not that important. The meat is in the middle. The scope of this big book is one of its most impressive features: a wide range and a synoptic sense the latitude and variety of critical responses to and engagements with SF. The title speaks to Kincaid’s core thesis: not that some of these critical approaches are ‘right’ and some ‘wrong’ but that SF herself is a multifarious spectrum of possibilities and applications, a rainbow of differences that blur into one another.

This doesn’t mean that he is equally positive or accepting of every colour-strand in this spectrum. To move from idiocy to lunacy, he is less impressed by a number of Marxist critical approaches to genre—not from any GB News or right-wing knee-jerk hostility to left-wing framing, but because he finds the approach itself procrustean, unable to capture the protean diversity, the whole colourfield, of science fiction as such. Of 2008’s collection of essays by various hands Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville) he says this:

Marxist theory has been incredibly productive and valuable in the study of SF, but I have never been totally comfortable with it. For a start, as this volume demonstrates, it can be authoritarian. It is authoritarian in the obvious sense that these essays constantly appeal to authority. Names like Adorno, Benjamin, Jameson, and Žižek litter the book not to raise debate but to settle it … it is authoritarian in other senses also. It uses a language that, in effect if not necessarily in intent, excludes many potential readers.

This, I thought, is a little overegged: the sample quotation he provides of jargonistic obfuscation reads, to me, perfectly straightforwardly: ‘Jameson defers to history as the ground of his analysis while discursively constructing this history, relying on texts to construct that which is also a material horizon for the production of meaning.’ There’s a third dimension of ‘authoritarianism’ that Kincaid deplores: ‘the way that, once an idea is “theorized” (a favourite word of all the contributors [to this volume]), it becomes retrospectively true.’

The opposite of this procrustean—a word I have now used twice in this review, though it’s not a term that appears anywhere in Kincaid’s collection—authoritarianism is a critical discourse that acknowledges not just the size and scope of genre, but the way its teeming variety overspills taxonomy. Kincaid likes Paul March-Russell’s Modernism and Science Fiction (2015), though thinks it overcompressed and too short: ‘it needs to be two or even three times the length it is, to provide space to more fully develop the connections and arguments.’ He praises Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s enormous anthology The Big Book of Science Fiction (2015) for its capaciousness, although in the end it is not capacious enough entirely to satisfy Kincaid’s sense of the multifariousness of SF: ‘will this book resolve science fiction’s identity crisis? Does it give us an account of science fiction that we can feel confident about? … No. But it will tell you a part of the story that is well worth knowing. And it will provide an awful lot of pleasure along the way.’ And what he likes about the Cambridge History of Science Fiction (edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, 2019) is not that it is huge and wide-ranging—though it is, covering not just European and American SF but traditions in the genre in South America, Africa, Asia and the Far East—but precisely that it doesn’t purport to comprehend everything: ‘the fact that this “history” earns its scare quotes by being at best partial and inconsistent enhances its value. Because this book contradicts all those previous histories’ … including mine, Kincaid says … ‘that attempt to enfold the whole of science fiction within one consistent and comprehensive narrative. The very nature of science fiction as laid out in this book denies the possibility of such an all-encompassing account. Rather, we are given glimpses of a global literature that is far too big and far too varied to be taken in at one glance.’ This perspective is salutary, and hard to deny.

Kincaid does a deep dive into criticism about the science fiction magazine, in reviews of Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (2018) and Mike Ashley’s multi-volume history of the Science Fiction Magazine: The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (2000); Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970 (2005); Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1970 to 1980 (2007); Science Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1981 to 1990 (2016); The Rise of the Cyberzines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1991 to 2020 (2022) (Kincaid reviews the last three of these volumes). At the beginning he agrees with Ashley that the magazine ‘has been, for most of our history, the primary locus for science fiction’, which leads to problems—the exaggerated influence of John Campbell upon the genre as such, via the prominence of Astounding/Analog (with nice understatement, Kincaid calls Campbell the ‘not necessarily benign editor, John W. Campbell’). Have magazines really been so overdetermining? They were the chief mode of delivery of SF from the later 1920s through to the 1940s, but by the 1950s their influence was waning, and books and novels (many of them, to be fair, fix-ups of stories previously published in magazines) became the dominant mode, with paperbacks moving centre-stage in the 1960s and 1970s—after Star Wars (1977) I think it’s fair to say that visual texts, films, TV and video games, supplanted verbal texts as the main form of science fiction, a state of play that continues today. And before the 1920s SF was not predominantly a magazine format: depending on how far back one wants to take the history of the genre, this could be many decades or many centuries. But we can trace Kincaid’s engagement in, as it were, real time: Ashley’s history becomes more and more detailed and extended as the influence and circulation of magazines were, in the real world, declining, circulations shrinking, titles closing. By the end Kincaid is arguing: ‘the history of science fiction can no longer be equated with the history of the magazines; indeed, the story of the magazines forms no more than a curious sidebar to the history of the genre.’ Kincaid self-characterises this view as ‘dyspeptic’, but it seems to me nothing but the truth.

Section 2, ‘Topics’, takes a wider view: accounts of Science Fiction Criticism, edited by Rob Latham (2017), which he praises for its argumentativeness: a full, even fulsome, account praising the criticism of John Clute (‘John Clute is the air that we breathe. His influence reaches into every aspect of our appreciation and understanding of science fiction’); a more measured account of Clute’s collaborator Peter Nicholls, via Dave Langford’s collection of Nichollsian fugitive pieces, Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years (2022); and a positive review of Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (2008), which Kincaid considers ‘to be one of the best books about the nature of science fiction’ not least in the skill with which is incorporates both academic and popular apprehensions of the genre. Kincaid is respectful of Darko Suvin and full of praise for Frank McConnell, who died in 1999 at the lamentably early age of 57:

There are very few academic critics of science fiction whose style is immediately identifiable. There’s a critical language to be used that militates against an individual style, there’s an amassing of supporting evidence and a careful laying out of a case and all sorts of other reasons, though as often as not it simply comes down to the fact that most academics are not good writers. But you could probably give me, sight unseen, a page from one of Frank McConnell’s papers and I would know instantly from whom it came. No one else, I think, in the world of SF academe threw off papers with such bravura flair, such a cavalier disregard for the minutiae of critical disputes, such a range of references, such a love of good puns and bad jokes.

Speaking as one of the not-good-writer academics to whom Kincaid here averts, I can only agree with this assessment of stylistic uniqueness.

A third section, ‘Authors’, includes a range of critical responses to genre writers who have also perpetrated criticism, with more or less thoroughness: Margaret Atwood, Peter Ackroyd (a slightly anomalous figure to include), John Brunner, Thomas M. Disch, the great and lamented Alasdair Gray, M. John Harrison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Bob Shaw & James White, Cordwainer Smith and finally, to return us to a figure already mentioned, H.G. Wells. The Atwood piece is a slight review of a slight collection of occasional pieces, that touches on Atwood’s disinclination to be considered a writer of SF; the Ackroyd an encyclopedia-style entry overviewing his career which feels out of place in the collection as a whole; and Kincaid is not impressed by Jad Smith’s John Brunner (University of Illinois Press, 2012), on the peculiar grounds that Brunner, alongside masterpieces like Stand on Zanzibar, wrote a lot of crap for the money, and that Jad Smith overpraises these works. There is a careful, detailed account of Samuel R. Delany’s The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch – “Angouleme” (2014) that explores the writing of both Delany and Disch, and a mixed review of Gavin Miller’s Alasdair Gray: The Fiction of Communion (2018). I haven’t read this particular book, but from Kincaid’s summary it seems to make what sounds like an untenable connection between Gray’s fantastika and R D Laing. Then three lengthy, detailed essays on M John Harrison, full of intelligent insight: one on Viriconium, one on his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy and one on his anti-memoir, Wish I Was Here (2023): taken together, these constitute one of the most important critical engagements with Harrison that we have. The piece on Ursula Le Guin opens with Kincaid saying that he once made her laugh, and including the joke he told her that produced such hilarity. Kincaid on Bob Shaw and James White is good, and he is generous to an underpowered and underlength monograph on Cordwainer Smith.

Were Matthew Arnold to dictate through a spirit-medium The Function of Criticism About Criticism At The Present Time, Colourfields would be case study in the strengths of the mode.