Science fiction is a bastardized genre—with no clear family tree, many claimants, and a deep well of insecurity. “Is there any branch of literature so insecure, so uncertain of its own status, as science fiction,” Paul Kincaid writes in Colourfields, the third collection of his criticism on the genre. Like the two collections that came before it, What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction (2008) and Call and Response (2014), Colourfields is not just a sampling of his considerations of various science fictional texts but a familiarising with their bastardization, an examined intimacy with the genre’s messy intertextuality. Kincaid’s titular analogy isn’t a family resemblance or a layered map, but technological, drawn from his experience of “working with computer designers […] those colourfields you get when you are trying to define the colour for a website or document.” This is also to say that definition remains at the heart of science fiction narrative and criticism, but Kincaid (and perhaps, we as well) have grudgingly made our peace with its fuzzy multiplicity.

Colourfields is a personal book, one cut and shaped by Kincaid’s own editorial discretion, seemingly answering the question, “How did we get here, to this particular peacekeeping between these rigid definitions?” By the author’s own admission, he’s been a reader since his teens, a part of the fandom since 1975, and a writer of critical reviews since 1978, which makes it difficult to split that which is occupational or critical from a hazardous love of the world of SF. “[T]here is a plan,” Kincaid announces about his chosen structure deeper into the book. He calls it a “journey” and an “exploration,” full of “excisions” and “reformulations”; but the plan isn’t ever announced. What we have instead is a careful construction built of Kincaid’s considerations of how science fiction has been nefariously, variously considered. Colourfields is composed of reviews (and a few speeches and conference papers) that are, by turns, polemical, thorough, anecdotal, expansive, focused, digressive, and temperate. While I could paraphrase the reviews and graphically point to places where Kincaid makes interesting interventions (such as his insights about SFF historiography, his nuanced critique of Darko Suvin or Marxist interpretations, and especially his review of Rob Latham and on the divisions in science fiction criticism), I want to think through it as a collection, as a parenthetical construction, as a book about narrativizing a world.

But here’s where it starts to get metatextual: Kincaid reviews books that are about books, such as Adam Roberts’s The History of Science Fiction (2005), or that edited collection of criticism by Rob Latham, or scholarly monographs on authors like Le Guin. Each of these reviews is about books that seek to determine science fiction—be it as a concept, a market, an approach, a theoretical epicenter, a genre, a history, an oeuvre, or a seemingly iterated pattern. Colourfields is divided into three parts: “Histories,” “Topics,” and “Authors,” but the sections titled “Topics” and “Authors” are further subdivided, and segments like “Utopias” or authors like “H.G. Wells” are approached from various angles. For the sake of tautology, we can take the metatextuality further: Science fiction criticism and scholarship, which is what Kincaid variously reviews here, is always concerned with determining itself first and foremost, and it does so using histories, texts, or concepts. Moreover, the examples that these texts consider, be it from the Golden Age of science fiction or the New Wave, are also performatively pushing the boundaries of what exactly science fiction is. In one way then, Colourfields is a book about other books that study books that are, in themselves, about other books. Through tautology, then, we arrive at an intertextuality that Gerard Genette would call transtextuality—i.e., a relationship with and between other texts. This is as much about a science-fiction specific network (however concealed, fraught, or multifarious) as it is about moving through a built community. Rhythms. Pauses. Exercises. Does the title then fit? I’m not certain it is meant to. It is, as Kincaid may say, just another iteration.

Colourfields, therefore, also is constituted by tensions inherent to the genre. Insofar as much of the definition that structures science-fiction criticism is always posing and then managing an epistemic crisis, each definition resorts to canon-formation. Each definition (for example: speculative fiction) enables expansiveness as well as specialization, producing a fuzziness that invites scholarship to detangle. Since “reviews are at the beating heart of science fiction,” as Kincaid notes, the particular movement of Colourfields appears to be through textuality itself, a writing about writing that doesn’t eschew the autofictive. It is possible to read this collection (and as with every edited collection, the question of reading inevitably arrives) as a book with great breadth: It has introductions and insights about a lot of scholarship. But it is also possible to read it as autobiographical, a personal grappling with the messy genre and a life lived within it. Asides pepper each review as well as the epigraphs—about the author’s friendships with critics and writers, experiences of the fandom, the intimacies of rereading and thinking. It is hard to separate the text from the occupational intertext. It is also the case that science fiction is intricately vocational as a genre: The network is composed of practitioners, a counter-cultural occupation sustains writers, and the technical side of science/technology sneaks in despite the expansiveness of science fiction texts themselves. I liked looking at the book as a grander schematic structure because I enjoyed traversing through its patient sensemaking, one which coincides with my own intimate push-and-pull relationship to science fiction criticism. What does it mean to do science fiction criticism when science fiction itself is so indeterminate? When it is constantly attempting to canonize and cannibalize itself? And what does it mean for science fiction to continue to situate itself as counter-cultural when it is constantly becoming the most popular “genre fiction” in the market and in scholarly circuits alike?

Kincaid does not quite answer all these questions. He responds through writing about writing the self and situating the world of science fiction as a historically legible and fuzzily legitimate landscape. He does not shy away from claiming with feeling, and at many moments he will interject not only in the first person, but with intimacy (for example, “Aldiss was the very definition of an unreliable narrator,” where the emphasis is on a studied familiar). Elsewhere, he will introduce ambiguity and assumption (“Roberts comes close to saying” or “it is clear that this volume is intended as a teaching aid”). Additionally, time intrudes. Kincaid will include a revised review, a hyperlinked reference, or a new consideration. The temporal movements of the text, of a life lived alongside science fiction, are achieved through these asides as well (italicized and provided in parentheses, others appearing digressively at the apparent moment of their conception). It produces immense breathing room, despite the reviews not being linearly or chronologically ordered. The text is reviews, revisions, relations, and reinscriptions. You may as well sink into this network, which is alive and breathing, meeting a very small but real public sphere of science fiction writers, critics, scholars, and readers. And, as Michael Warner will tell us (for example, in Publics and Counterpublics [2002]), the public sphere is built not only through the circulation of texts but also through this mapped textuality.

Another way of reading this collection, then, is to appreciate how Kincaid is attempting to apprehend a public. I wouldn’t say he unmistakably succeeds, but, as I already note, he does textually produce the effect of movement through an opinionated public, and we do arrive at a wild and thorny set of conventions. There are perhaps five primary approaches that define the collection. First, Kincaid writes in ambiguity: Is it that “there is no history of science fiction” or that “no one is talking about the same science fiction,” as Kincaid opens in two different essays in “Histories”? He repeats himself, almost assuming the reader would be tired, with a later “by now the reader will know” that he believes in science fiction’s shared indeterminacy. Second, he argues that the need for determinacy and definition is a potent desire. Thus, Kincaid turns to analyzing the methodological questions employed by almost every one of the scholars he reviews: of historiography, apostrophizing, cataloguing, taxonomizing, and theorizing the science fiction field/genre. For Kincaid, the method determines the genre that is produced and then replicated. His own method, then, has been to contextualize the multiplicity through a hesitant historicizing, without much provocation directed towards the community to which belonging is so emphatically assigned. Is this definition-canon-formation-expansive multiplicity a good direction for science-fiction criticism at large, or simply the default?

Third, almost pedantically, and in the manner I associate with the kind of geekish fandom SFF inspires, Kincaid includes constant parenthetical details about editorial mistakes and mishaps. Through these, he is able to invoke circuits that are undeniably science fictional: fan culture as well as an editorial cultural sphere. Fourth, Kincaid is a critic who considers the scholarship’s promise and the author’s ability—or inability—to fulfill it, probing the distinctions between the reader and the text. These reviews continually reflect on elisions and omissions (a missing text, a forgotten angle of analysis, a too-quick glance at an oeuvre) because their author knows science fiction’s expansiveness intricately, drawing examples from an unending stream. Fifth, likely as a corollary to the fourth, Kincaid is a British science fiction critic begrudgingly aware of how American imperialism has corralled the genre, and he brings his breadth of reading—be it of anthologies, magazines, scholarship, or translations—to every essay, expanding each review with annotations. The text expands outwards, keeping the beating vocational heart alive.

In these ways, and through other auto-fictive, intimate, and critical moves, Kincaid produces a sensibility of both science fiction and science fiction criticism’s perpetuity and mobility. By the end of this collection, we have a closely related, intricately debated network of science fiction scholars, writers, and practitioners, a textual and intertextual circulation amidst a consistently morphing public sphere. It exists because of “contradictions” and “revisions,” as Kincaid regularly repeats throughout Colourfields—and by yet another iteration of a non-contained institution. And by the end of this collection, we arrive at a contentious yet faithful belonging to a field that we can call science-fictional.