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

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.