Month: May 2025

Paul Kincaid wrote recently about his response to a review of his new (and excellent) essay collection Colourfields, and how that review had made him take a closer look at what constitutes ‘his’ science fiction, and what that might say about him both as a reader and as a writer.

It’s a ruminative, almost elegiac post, looking back at a forty-year stretch as a science fiction critic. It includes a lovely anecdote in which Paul approaches Chris at a convention – the first time they’d met – and asks him to sign his copy of Inverted World. Chris, apparently, brushed him off and told him to go and get the book signed by the illustrator instead. Given the thousands of copies of his books that Chris was more than happy to sign in the years following, I can confidently say to Paul that his reaction at that early stage of his career would have been entirely down to feeling overwhelmed and vaguely embarrassed that someone had actually read a novel of his and thought enough of it to initiate contact. Chris was just thirty when Inverted World was published, Paul Kincaid twenty-two. You see what I mean about elegiac.

The deeply considered, wide-ranging and thoughtful review of Colourfields Paul is addressing is by Roseanna Pendlebury, who clearly gained much in the reading and – more importantly – was prepared to engage with the book on its own terms even when those terms diverged from her particular interests. She then went on to write a follow-up essay in which she gave more personal insights into her own version of science fiction. It’s this kind of investigative, text-focused writing that has always characterised the best criticism within SF as well as beyond it, that has been a primary source of inspiration in my own critical practice. ‘My’ SF – both in the kind of writing I’m interested in and the frame through which I view it – is much closer to Kincaid’s than to Pendlebury’s, but it is nonetheless a source of gladness and relief to know that there are younger critics coming down the line with the talent, wit and rigour to continue with the job of building SF’s critical hinterland. (Yes, I am still using that phrase, and yes, said hinterland is still as important as it ever was.)

Though the books Kincaid and Pendlebury list and discuss as best examples of what constitutes their personal science fiction are markedly different and say equally different things about SF, one thing I noticed about both critics’ posts was that they each made reference to a book that precipitated a radical change in their understanding of science fiction, what it could do and how they related to it. For Pendlebury it was her reading of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, ‘the hinge upon which all this turns’, and which happened to coincide with ‘a shift in my own awareness of genre, where I began to genuinely pay attention.’ For Kincaid, it was his encounter with Keith Roberts’s Pavane, the novel that switched him on to science fiction as a mode of literature with an identity all its own.

Kincaid mentions also a period of childhood illness that necessitated him spending several weeks at home in bed, away from school and outside of his normal routines. It’s interesting, how many writers share this experience. Chris wrote more than once about a cycling accident at the age of fourteen, which left him with a concussion and a two-week ‘memory gap’. He often cited this sudden insecurity around the subject of memory as the germ of all his future fiction. Versions of the accident itself – or enforced periods of absence from school – crop up in several of his novels. In a recent interview on Radio 4, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell speaks eloquently of a serious childhood illness that led to her being hospitalised for several months, territory she has previously explored through her 2017 memoir I Am I Am I Am. Her premature awareness of the nearness of death, together with the physical separation from others of her peer group, completely altered her view of the world and pushed her to examine her thoughts and emotions through the medium of writing. When I was twelve, I unexpectedly developed pneumonia, and was away from school for most of the Easter term. I was already a compulsive reader, but this period of enforced isolation had a significant effect on me. My English teacher sent me a package of reading material that included Alan Garner’s The Owl Service as well as other books I might not have come across otherwise, or at least not then. This was also when I first started listening to Radio 3, hour after hour of ‘secret education’ that laid the groundwork for all my future interest in classical music.

There was something else about that time, though, something less immediately identifiable or tangible but profound in its effects. Time to think and time to be. Time to reflect and form opinions. Time to get to know oneself and one’s opinions as distinct from the crowd. I have heard others say similar things about a week at a writers’ retreat, a religious retreat or even just time away in a different location.

It is easy to become locked into patterns, into established ways of thinking, and most especially in the compilation of lists of significant books! I have made so many of these during my life as a writer. I enjoy creating them and I find them interesting – other people’s as much as my own. It’s no secret that I’m a lists kind of person. But in recent years especially an element of doubt has begun to creep in. Either my choices seem pre-ordained – books I have chosen before, and so gravitate immediately towards, as one might automatically assume the same position on a well-used mattress – or they reflect nothing so much as the most recent shift or enthusiasm in my current reading and writing. Not that this is uninteresting or without value, but looking at it from the inside it can be laughably predictable.

Which books have really, really changed me? I know that Chris’s A Dream of Wessex did. It was the first book of his I read, on a recommendation from a friend. This was in my middle twenties, and I had not yet started writing seriously for publication. I had not heard of Christopher Priest either, and before reading A Dream of Wessex I had no idea that this kind of science fiction was even possible. I wanted more of it – more especially of books by Christopher Priest. This was long before Amazon or Abebooks and getting hold of titles not currently in print was a much more difficult, some might say a more exciting challenge than it is today. It was mostly a matter of stumbling across them – in second hand bookshops, in the local library, both of which I made use of in my search for Chris’s backlist. Each new find was a source of delight and minor celebration. By the time Chris and I actually met, I had read everything of his with the exception of Indoctrinaire, which was impossible to find. In an echo of his earlier equivocation around signing Inverted World for the young Paul Kincaid, it was some time before I finally persuaded him to give me a copy.

(And of course I found it remarkable, his portrait of the artist as a young man.)

I had a similar experience reading Mike Harrison a number of years later. Signs of Life was the first book of his I read – it had not long come out – and I knew instantly that Mike would be an ‘auto-buy’ writer for me from now on. But it was his short fiction collection Travel Arrangements, published in 2000 and more or less at the exact time I first began sending my own stories to magazines, that opened up a new awareness of what one was allowed to do in fiction, if one had the gall to try. These strange, elliptical stories had no easily definable narrative – yet they immediately felt like a part of me, of what I understood to be the meaning and function of writing as a vocation. Their effect on my ability to read was similar to what had happened to me with Eliot’s The Waste Land, some fifteen years before.

There are three writers in particular whose whole oeuvre has cemented itself in my consciousness as indispensable to the way I see not so much the world at large but the business of being a writer who lives in that world. Iris Murdoch always wrote in the knowledge that ‘the mundane’ is a kind of myth, removed from the miraculous by the narrowest of margins. This, to me, has always seemed self-evident, and it is probably for this reason that Murdoch is a writer I can always drop everything else to read and then for however long I choose to linger in her world find it difficult to pay attention to anyone else. Vladimir Nabokov was a life-changer for me, the summation of my love affair with Russian literature but also my mentor and my guide. For Nabokov, writing was the thing, the only end, the life choice. Critics tend to get so wrapped up in his mastery of language that they often fail to mention how many of his novels are encoded autobiographies, the story of himself, told in different voices, the ultimate autofiction.

Chris and I discovered Roberto Bolano together and fell equally in love, which is its own set of memories, but Bolano for me – like Priest, like Harrison – opened a door into a new way of writing, and thinking about writing. His apparent looseness of style, his discursiveness – the polar opposite of VN – which is really a diversion, a unique construct through which Bolano approaches his subject matter, which is writing, writing, always writing. His repurposing of generic archetypes – the science fiction story and in particular the detective story, both of which he loved – to suit his own ends, which are invariably tied up in his obsession with form.

I always used to say to Chris, that if I were stuck on a desert island with only books by Murdoch, or Nabokov, or Bolano then they would definitely keep me going until I was rescued.

I have now been writing professionally for twenty years. My relationship with reading has changed, or rather, it has evolved, becoming both more urgent and less innocent. It is impossible simply to read; as a writer, one reads with the unspoken question: how is this done and what can I learn from it? And yet those high-wire moments of joy are no less forthcoming. I still think most days about Maria Gainza’s novel Optic Nerve, which I happened to turn to during a moment of acute foreboding. It showed me what could be done with fact inside fiction and through its discussions of art literally gave me back my sense of why I am on this planet. I think all the time about Emlyn Williams’s great, great true crime novel Beyond Belief, the darkest of subject matter set against the most brilliantly evoked urban landscape of lived reality, the ultimate masterclass in what this kind of writing should be and why it is necessary. Reading Gordon Burn’s Sex and Violence, Death and Silence and loving how he wrote about art as urgently and as brilliantly as he wrote about the subjects he is best known for. Seeing how such apparent contradictions are a continuum, how knowing this is important, especially to me. Understanding, every time I pick up a book by Helen Garner, that I will never come close to her naked and unflinching deployment of the pronoun ‘I’. Having to try and find my own way around that, but feeling through each moment of reading her an overwhelming and dizzy gratitude to be sharing space-time with this extraordinary writer.