“As readers and critics,” Sally Parlier writes in her review for us this week of Payton McCarty-Simas’s work of criticism, That Very Witch, “we all naturally bring ourselves to the experience of a text.” This is profoundly true, perhaps also obviously true—and in possessing both these qualities it can often go unsaid. But the reality, of course, is that, in writing about a text, critics are also rather often writing about themselves. This isn’t just about autocriticism—that recent form of nonfiction, championed for example by Lara Feigel, in which a critic writes explicitly from within their own life. It’s about all criticism, all writing. As Seamus Heaney put it for poets: “I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”

But this places criticism in danger of accusations of solipsism. We have often written in this space—that is, in the editorial for our annual Criticism Special—about what criticism is, or what it is for. But who is it for?

There’s a telling moment in this issue’s edition of the podcast Critical Friends—a takeover by Tristan Beiter’s Ursula K. Le Guin book club—in which Tymek Chrzanowski suggests that “a big difference between the book club and an academic environment is … you’re in a class  … You are engaging with it for reasons beyond merely your interest and passion. Whereas in the book club, this is a fully voluntary thing we’re doing with friends.” So perhaps part of what shapes how useful criticism is to a given person is the context in which it is made. Are you an academic or a lay reader, an autodidact or a professionalised scholar? And what kind of work are you presenting to an audience as a consequence?

In this issue, we have tried to showcase accessible criticism from multiple settings. Alexander Dickow, professor of French at Virginia Tech, provides us a careful overview of recent trends in francophone SFF; Roseanna Pendlebury writes as a fan attempting to define the genre; O. F. Cieri writes politically about some of its oldest verities. In their own essay, Ruthanna Emrys, Lila Garrott, and Alexis Shotwell align a range of perspectives—the fiction-writer’s, the editor’s, the philosopher’s—to obtain a bird’s-eye view of how SFF does and might yet imagine new modes of being and doing. Our poets in this issue do similarly, offering an analysis of their own work in a really striking bit of self-reflexive criticism. There are, we hope, multiple vectors.

In another of this issue’s essays (we try to treat you at this time of year), Zach Gillan argues that “the best weird fiction leaves us with this uncertainty, this impossibility of knowing for sure.” Maybe the best criticism does, too. But it can only do so in toto, as a gestalt, as … dread word, this … a conversation. Good criticism is accumulated over time, from multiple perspectives and for multiple purposes.

For instance, to review one novel by Ben Alderson, Hana Carolina finds the need to read many. What emerges is a review that is unusually alive to its chosen text’s many resonances, and indeed its contexts. Bill Capossere performs a similar trick in his review of Steven Erikson’s latest Malazan novel. Both these reviews are particularly worth your time—they are longer than our usual reviews, but they offer a lot as a result.

And this is probably the point: good criticism is useful. For writers— Amritesh Mukherjee helps us think about the tricks and traps of adaptation; for activists—Phoenix Scholz unpicks, again at productive length, the ways in which Hiron Ennes achieves their particular kind of queering; and, most importantly, readers—you will find a welter of fantastic recommendations for your next book in our roundtable on influence. In that last piece, Yvette Lisa Ndluvu defines influence, incisively, as “giving permission … to play, to experiment, to be weird.” Our goal here has been to provide an issue capacious enough to offer a range of permissions to as many kinds of readers as possible.

It can feel—again—solipsistic to harp on about the importance of talking about books (and other texts) at this particular parlous moment in history. Perhaps it always has done. But thinking about and with each other might in fact be an answer as well as a way of asking a question. As for the question with which this editorial opened, its answer might be: Criticism is, or at least needs to be (in this moment and all the others), for everyone.

At least, that’s one point of view.