One of the recurring themes of Strange Horizons Criticism Specials has been that we try to avoid grand claims. It is all too easy when one is an enthusiast for a thing to argue that the thing is also important. This is doubly true for a thing that has such a history of self-aggrandisement as Literary Criticism. Only recently, for example, we had one literary scholar being sorry-not-sorry to opine:

It is no coincidence that the decline of reading has coincided with the plummeting cultural authority of literary criticism. If we want to save reading, we must restore literary critics to their former rockstar status.

We must save reading! Literary critics, assemble. But wait! There are even greater, even graver, problems that our method can—and must!—solve. In a recent essay for the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton argued that “[c]ulture in our time has become nothing less than a full-blooded ideology,” and showed in his working how—in his view—good criticism might be used to arrest this rot. Even those, such as Merve Emre in the New Yorker, who believe all is not well in the critical field seem invested in the idea that it should be, since good criticism—if we could only ensure the good kind was ascendant, or be sure what the good kind is—may serve the common good.

But we’re reminded here of Annette Kolodny: “our purpose is not and should not be the formulation of any single reading method or potentially procrustean set of critical procedures nor, even less, the generation of prescriptive categories for some dreamed-of nonexistent literary canon.” We should not trust criticism as a method—its primary goal is not to be or even to do good, but to question. Sometimes it struggles even with that.

We might hope that criticism has made great strides in achieving a mindful self-knowledge since Kolodny wrote in 1980—that it is now better placed to ask questions without insisting on particular answers. But—as Elizabeth Anker has argued in the Los Angeles Review of Books, or as Simon During has written in the Chronicle of Higher Education—there might be a “reactionary turn” underway in particularly academic criticism. This seems to aim not towards continual regeneration but a return to the methods of I. A. Richards.

All of which is by means of saying: We wouldn’t want to tell you that literary criticism can save the world; we wouldn’t even want to say it aims to.

And yet. This year’s special arrives at a time of rude health for specifically science fiction and fantasy criticism. From Nerds of a Feather to the Ancillary Review of Books, BlueSky’s burgeoning critical community to whole new publications such as Typebar and Speculative Insight, there appears to be not just a desire on the part of some to write SFF criticism, but on the part of others to read it. A recent special issue of the longstanding critical journal Foundation focused on the fiftieth anniversary of Brian Aldiss’s foundational history of SF, Billion Year Spree (1974); that so many critics are still in this field, and still have readers to speak to, might after all that time be achievement enough.

One of the contributors to that special issue of Foundation is also present in this edition of Strange Horizons. In “Who Is In Danger?”, Paul Kincaid writes for us on the complex history of one of science fiction’s most infamous anthology series, Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions sequence. In particular, he focuses on the “final” volume published last year, taking a tour through the history of science fiction to look at the ways in which “this is not the book that was promised.” In other words, he employs the tools of criticism to construct a context in which a work might properly be understood.

On the topic of understanding texts, it’s always such a pleasure to work with our Poetry Editors to include verse in these specials—since they help animate and dramatize the abstractions of criticism. In “The Egg,” River shows with constructive creativity how many ways we might read a text; in “The Resolution of N,” Lillian Tsay provides an alternative ending to another; and in “Frankenstein’s Tongue”—a poem that draws on a novel which rears its head a few times in this special—Liam Campbell posits the sort of death of culture against which one hopes (though it is not always clearly so) criticism is set.

What these poems inevitably do is turn us back to interpretation, and how to do it. Paul’s essay for us is a marvellous example of how to “do” genre history as one form of practice. (It’s also a demonstration of why his forthcoming Colourfields, to be published later this year by Briardene Books, will be essential reading.) Historical context proves important to some of the special’s other critics, too. In her essay on ectogenesis, for example, Zoe Tongue spends considerable time on the 1997 movie Gattaca; and in a piece on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy (2001-3), Tansy Gardam looks back on the details of that storied production, seeking to understand the impact of the films through the circumstances of their production.

But of course criticism is also forward-facing, bridging from a reading of the past to an assessment of our present: in Tansy’s case, her assessment of what are now canonical works of cinema leads to conclusions about the malaise of contemporary Hollywood; and in Zoe’s we come to learn a great deal about the visions and values that now inform the US’s newly minted billionaire ruling class, from Elon Musk to Marc Andreessen. It's a sign of our times, in fact, that Andreessen also appears in Jacqueline Nyathi’s essay, which focuses not on the past or the present but on how we might imagine our futures: in “Collective Dreaming,” Jacqueline argues that SFF—and culture more widely—must complete the work of shifting, expanding, reorienting its points of reference and view in order to construct more productive possibilities for ourselves, our species, our planet.

The answer to most of our contemporary questions, Jacqueline suggests, lies not in narrowing our focus but in expanding it radically. In an interview for our SH@25 podcast series that appears in this issue, Bogi Takács notes that reviewers can serve as curators of recommendations, helping to widen an individual reader's pool of choices—and maybe steering the collective gaze to under-appreciated or unacknowledged works or authors. Nat Harrington’s essay on “Celtic” and Celtic fantasy argues similarly, proceeding from analysis of eighteenth-century romances towards twenty-first-century novels in Gaelic—and concluding that fantasy has yet truly to reckon with the cultures it has plundered to create itself. This postcolonial theme—shared across multiple pieces in this issue—is echoed, too, in our reviews from Eugen Bacon and Prashanth Gopalan … and the week ends with M. L. Clark’s look at a book-length work of criticism, We Are All Monsters, which—again through historical as well as literary analysis—brings us back to the start: Who, when we write speculative fiction in a time of monsters, is in danger? And who should be?

What of material effect will all this criticism have achieved? Reader, we can’t say. Maybe none. But maybe some. Who knows? What is clear is that there are many questions to ask—and to answer—in the speculative field, and that the community asking them feels more cohesive, and more productive, than in some years. Even in our first of these editorials, in 2022, we worried with our late friend Maureen Kincaid Speller that reviewing was devolving into an adjunct of marketing. Perhaps in some quarters this is still the case—the wailing and gnashing of publishers’ teeth around BookTok’s recent near-death experience in the USA is a case in point. But there is also a sense that perhaps those of us who hold differently haven’t yet surrendered. These special issues are, if nothing else, one record of texts worth thinking with—and the thinking we might do with them. Barbara Christian once wrote that, for her, “literary criticism is promotion as well as understanding.” For the moment, maybe that’s claim enough.