In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Kate Macdonald and Duncan Lawie join Dan Hartland to tackle the question of the back catalog. How should reviewers and readers approach writers with a number of books already to their name? How should we think about and access authors who have enjoyed a career of some duration?

Kate's review of The Curve of the World by Vonda N. McIntyre.

Duncan's review of Loss Protocol by Paul McAuley.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 24: On Oeuvres

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode, I’ll be joined by the publisher and editor Kate Macdonald and the redoubtable stalwart of the SH reviews department, Duncan Lawie.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss, broadly speaking, SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we tackle the question of the back catalog. How should reviewers and readers approach writers with a number of books already to their name? How should we think about and access authors who have enjoyed a career of some duration?

And what do we do when they publish another new book?

Kate and Duncan discuss some of their favorite authors, talk about what it means to have an ongoing reading relationship with a writer, and together we offer at least four separate pronunciations of the word “oeuvre.” We will get to the question of canon, don’t you worry, but we began with the two most recent books from Vonda McIntyre and Paul McAuley.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: We at Critical Friends try not to do very straightforward companion episodes. We try to be as random and scattergun as we possibly can be when we pick topics. But both of you put in reviews in the last month for us that we couldn’t not sort of land on and compare to what we spoke about in the last episode.

So, the last episode was about debut writers and reviewing debut books. But you both have published reviews this month with us of writers at almost the other end of the career trajectory. Kate, in your case, Vonda McIntyre, who is sadly no longer with us, so you reviewed her literal last novel; and Duncan, Paul McAuley. Loss Protocol is happily not Paul’s—we hope—last novel, but nevertheless he has a significant corpus behind him already.

So it seemed like a great opportunity to talk about how we approach writers with lots and lots of books, and how we might read those writers and those books in that context, or perhaps we choose to divorce them entirely from that context. What’s the right way of going about thinking about writers who’ve already given us a lot?

And Kate, I thought we could start with your review of the McIntyre, The Curve of the World, because your relationship with McIntyre is quite interesting and deep. So what was it like, first and foremost, just to read this last book of this writer that, you know, means a lot to you?

Kate Macdonald: She did. Yeah, I never met her, but I’d known her writing all my life. Well, from my late teens when I worked in Aberdeen’s first science fiction bookshop, and that was, gosh, early 1980s, I think. And there were Dreamsnake and The Exile Waiting, which were relatively newly out in print. And oh, blimey, I read them and I loved them to bits.

And I started reading more and more of Vonda. And then much later, 2019, I was running Handheld Press, and Vonda’s first novel, The Exile Waiting, was on my wish list. I thought, “Oh, I wonder if she’s still alive. And my God, she’s still alive.” So I found her email because she was very present online, emailed her, and blow me, she got back to me straight away saying, “Okay, it’s New Year’s Eve. I’ll get back to you in two days properly.” Great. Amazing!

So we came to an agreement. We signed a contract. That was terrific. And then about a month later, she emailed saying, “You need to know I’ve got stage four pancreatic cancer,” which was quite a shock. So we got the book into production a lot earlier. I was really hoping it would come out before she died—because it was clear she was going to die—and it didn’t. She saw the cover, and that was terrific. She liked the cover. And the book came out, and it didn’t sell that well, which was a real shame, but I surged on and I worked with Una McCormack to put together a collection of short stories by Vonda.

But by that time, I was beginning to think, “Vonda is not selling in the UK the way she might if we were Seattle-based.” So I decided I can’t risk investing in a collection of short stories by an author who’s not selling well. So I pulled that edition. I paid Una half the fee for her introduction because she’d already done a lot of work. And now, Goldsmith’s Science Fiction have brought it out as a collection. It came out in 2024. So the stories are available for anyone that wants them, and I commend that edition to you.

But in that process, I was doing a lot of discussing with Vonda’s, um, agent, and she told me that there was a novel that had not yet been published. And I said, “Oh, tell me more, tell me more.” And she told me a little bit. So I sit back and I look forward to seeing the book come out in maybe a year’s time, and it didn’t. And then last week, I listened to—well, I was watching—the podcast of the online launch of The Curve of the World taking place in Seattle with Nisi Shawl, Timmel Duchamp, various other people. And the stories came out about how The Curve of the World had evolved as a book. And I think they tried to pitch the book to many publishers, and nobody bought it because Vonda was dead. Nobody could do developmental editing. This was the ostensible reason—I think there may have been other reasons—but so the book went to Aqueduct, and Aqueduct have now published it.

So I’ve known about the novel for a long time, and I was delighted when Una told me, “Here’s an ARC. Can you read it? What do you think?” And then I said, “Dan, I’m going to review this.”

Dan Hartland: And I was like, “Great, good!” So with all that backstory, all that personal backstory—and this is one of the things I think about reviewing authors that have a lot of books, we develop a relationship over time, we gather our own stories around that author’s stories and—

Kate Macdonald: Mm.

Dan Hartland: —you know, inevitably bring those to the readings of the kind of the later stuff, too. So when you open Curve of the World, it’s really interesting to hear, and you talk about this in the review, the kind of absence of that developmental editing is so obvious in, in the text. And it reminds me, in fact, of, another book that we published a review of in the last month, The Illuminated Man, which is Christopher Priest’s and Nina Allan’s biography of J. G. Ballard. Of course, Chris Priest died whilst writing the book, and Nina decided not to do any developmental editing on what he’d produced. So there’s a similar kind of material in that book, although Nina’s then added stuff around it, too.

So when you, OK, approach this book of this author that, you know, you love so much—and I must actually thank you for putting out Exile Waiting via Handheld Press, because although it didn’t sell well, one of the people who did buy it was me, and it was great—

Kate Macdonald: Delighted!

Dan Hartland: —but when you opened that book and started to read it, what was it like? Was it like reading any other book? Was it quite different?

Kate Macdonald: It was totally different. I thought, “This is a historical novel. Okay, I’m, I’m gonna go with it ’cause it’s beautifully written, but where is the fantasy? Where is the other, the parallel, world? Where is the stuff I’m used to? It’s absolutely not science fiction.” And I carried on reading and, oh, fantasy elements! Thank goodness. Perhaps we’re getting there, perhaps we’re getting there. And the more I read, I thought, “Hmm, I’m really glad I was not on the editing team putting this book into shape for publication,” because you could see the dangling loose ends.

You could see the work they’d done to drag things together, and I think it must have been really stressful for them because the four women involved, at least three of them, were really close friends of Vonda. And there are certain aspects of the plot, personally, I would have dropped like a hot, hot potato—absolutely not! But they loved her. This was Vonda’s novel. It was gonna go out as Vonda’s novel.

It is fantasy. It’s beautifully, beautifully written. I cannot stress how well the writing works. She is such a great writer, but it’s nothing like any of her other works. There are in … there are very small thematic or trope things which you can go, “Aha, that one is from this 1976 short story,” and, “Ooh, that phrase there, I remember it coming up in this particular thing.” But that’s so minor. This was a new work. It goes back to a theme that she had been fiddling around with for about forty-five years about an aquatic race of humans, and they’re not even in this novel, but what they give to one of the characters is extremely important. So they’re relevant but absent.

And, looking again at Vonda’s backlist, most of what she wrote is Star Trek, and I am not a Trekkie. And I can imagine that people who come to Vonda because she wrote Star Trek novels will be completely confused by this, because everything else that she wrote I’m pretty sure was nothing, not relevant to, Star Trek.

So her oeuvre—I don’t know if that’s how it’s pronounced, but that’s what I’m going with—it really has tentacular reach, goes in different directions deeply and strongly, but not necessarily relating to each other.

Dan Hartland: And that is one of the things that readers, and especially critics and reviewers, of authors with larger back catalogs have to contend with: You know, sort of that variety within a particular writer’s oeuvre. And Duncan, you talk a little bit about this in your review of Lost Protocol, right? That this is … It’s hard to say ’cause Paul McAuley has a lot of books.

Duncan Lawie: Yeah.

Dan Hartland: So it’s hard to say, “Oh, this is a very unusual book for Paul,” because there’s bits of, you know, there’s bits of this book in his past books.

But you do note that here’s a distinct phase in a writer’s career. You know, it’s not like the space opera stuff that he’s been writing in the last sort of fifteen, twenty years, right? It’s something else. So when you cracked open this one, what did you feel about it? Having read Paul McAuley, I assume, for many years, how do you approach, “Ah, here’s the latest Paul McAuley”? What do you expect of it? What does it not give you back that you might expect? How do you roll with those punches?

Duncan Lawie: I guess I’m approaching something like this with a trust in the authorial voice primarily, and with no real idea of the content. And, you know, that’s one of the things that brings me back to McAuley—that I don’t know what to expect the next time.

Obviously he had The Quiet War series, but even the fourth book of that was completely different from the others, you know, so that kind of tendency to not think about this book essentially as an individual novel and not so much as part of an oeuvre is actually fairly important in this kind of case.

And I mean ... And it does mean that I sometimes feel like when I am referencing the fact that this stuff has happened before—and indeed part of my review says, you know, talks about him writing phrases with full stops, and I thought, “I’m sure he picked that up sometime in the last 10 years.” But then I did go back and get the first novel he’d ever written off the shelf and go, “Oh yeah, he’s always been doing that.”

And it’s the kind of thing where you ... It maybe doesn’t matter to the review, or maybe it kind of tells you that here is an author who’s actually got some chops that he’s been developing for thirty-odd years. And that kind of thing means that you can review it—you can read this book, you could review this book—without actually knowing anything else about the author, unlike, say, the third or fourth Quiet War book or the latest Alastair Reynolds, where he’s back in the same universe as previous stuff.

But I mean, I think that’s one of the reasons I like reviewing McAuley—is because I don’t know what to expect. I feel like I’m going to get a certain level of challenge, and I feel like whatever the author’s trying I can have an honest response to that without feeling like I’m going to upset someone who I slightly know, if he does choose to read the review.

Dan Hartland: And that’s the flip side, isn’t it, of reviewing an author with a lot of books, which is that you bring expectations to a text. You also bring a level of trust to a text. So, you know, last episode we spoke a lot about debut writers and building a relationship between a reader and a new writer. You know, how do you negotiate that sort of process? Here, the relationship is—as Kate was saying, too, about her relationship with McIntyre’s work—the relationship is already there and in some cases it’s really quite a long-standing one. It’s interesting what you say about, you know, particularly a standalone book by a long-standing author: You can just review it in isolation. It’s an interesting question of whether you should or not!

Duncan Lawie: Well, you’re right, and you know, it is a long-standing relationship. The first person I interviewed was McAuley in the mid-’90s, right? And so there is stuff that goes back a long way there, and so it does shape how you feel about a writer and their work.

I mean, kind of interesting that it turns out that both Kate and I pitched these books to you, rather than picking them off the list. You know, there’s something there to say that we were people who wanted to promote work by authors we thought worth promoting. In the same way, as you were saying, the debut conversation was saying about picking up a book to help it get an audience, and the idea that, even at the shall we say other end of their career, you’re still trying to help someone get an audience, right?

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And in fact, you know, sometimes the kind of recency bias or the novelty bias that we see in a lot of kind of literary culture works against long-standing authors almost as much as it does in a different way against debut authors. That, you know, we do find ourselves as reviews editors sort of clicking around going, “Oh another one by them,” and thinking, “Well, you know, maybe we should do some other thing.” But I’m really pleased that you both forced me to do this! Because they are two books of real note, right? They seem like, in their own ways, kind of important books.

The Curve of the World, of course, Kate, is, if nothing else, a historical document. It’s the last words we are going to get from an important writer. And Duncan, in Loss Protocol’s case, it really struck me that Paul McAuley was joining a conversation that’s going on: Your review really reminded me of Paul March-Russell’s recent review of E. J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again. There’s that sort of clutch of British cli-fi going on right now that McAuley seems to have sort of knowingly walked into.

Duncan Lawie: And McAuley’s previous two novels have been closely related to climate disaster topics. But this one’s taking a more positive and a more local kind of view. Because one was about Antarctica greening and one was set after we’ve apparently destroyed ourselves by our climate incompetence. And so having something that says we’re still in the fight, is a very different view from those two. And it’s actually something I didn’t even think about when I was writing the review. But it was another angle that you could have taken to the conversation to actually make it much more directly connect with his recent work and, and, as you say, to the wider field of climate fiction that’s going on—which he’s, yeah, as you say, stepping into that conversation, which is interesting in itself.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: So I wonder whether we should talk about picking up on this idea of the text and the context, or the review and the criticism. So, Kate, The Curve of the World, last novel by McIntyre: You’re kind of reviewing it in a way that is very familiar from reviews of other kinds of book. You know: this is the plot, this is the theme, these are the characters. If you like this, you might like that. All the kind of review stuff.

But there’s also inevitably—and always—here’s this uncertain line between what is a review and what is a critical essay, right? Particularly when you’re reviewing a book by an author that has done a lot already, that line seems to me fuzzier than ever.

So did you have a sense when you were reviewing the book, “I should be doing justice not just to the book, but to the author, to the context, to the other books, to everything that sits behind this book?” Or are you a bit like Duncan, saying, “You know what? Actually, I’ll just take this book, I’ll just talk about this book, and I’ll see where that takes me”?

Kate Macdonald: Well, I only had 1,500 words.

Dan Hartland: [Laughter]

Kate Macdonald: So no, there was no choice. I wanted to make people want to read the book. I wanted them to make their minds up. So it was important to say, this is why Vonda matters, look at the, you know, two lines on her legacy, the extent of the work she has done in many different fields.

And then I was really focused on this is what the plot is, these are the elements that will relate to past work, but not much, and this is what I thought about it. And I was consciously not going back to the four other works in her past, her backlist, which relate directly to this novel. Because, a) readers probably wouldn’t have access to them, because two are short stories from the ’70s, not easy to get a hold of, and the other two … pfft, no, I don’t, it was necessary. Take this book as you find it. This is how I found it, and I’ve got 1,500 words. I cannot write a critical essay assessing her entire project as it ended in this novel.

Dan Hartland: It’s really interesting, this, because we start to veer towards the question of, the sort of shadow of, canon, right?

So, Kate, you’re saying, “Oh, I don’t, you know, wanna talk about these books that are hard to get a hold of, that might put off a reader,” because, as Duncan says, you’re trying to get people to read this book, this new book, and it’s an important element even of reviewing long-standing authors to promote their work. So we don’t wanna create these walls: “Oh, well, in order to read this book well, you’ve gotta read the, you know, in McAuley’s case, I think at rough count 468 other novels that he’s written before. You’ve gotta read them all before you can do this one!” We don’t wanna play that game.

But equally, there is a context. And is there … Were either of you conscious of that? Like, avoiding this, the shadow of canon, getting away from this idea that, “Oh, this is a canonical author that you should read,” rather than just advocating for this particular new book that’s interesting in and of itself. Did that occur to either of you?

Duncan Lawie: Not to me. Not at all, because I don’t …  I mean, I think it’s one of those things where a few years ago, and definitely there was a point when I was reviewing his books and saying, “Oh, why are you doing these thriller things? I know you’re good at science fiction.” And then he did a science fiction novel, and I’m like, “Ugh, why have you done a bad science fiction novel? Like, all right, I’m glad you’ve come back to the fold, but you could have done better!” And you know: a very frustrating experience there.

And I guess I’ve kind of got past that, gone, “Look, I’m just gonna look at this book as a book. There’s no point trying to, um, teach the author that, that he’s not doing things the way I want them.”

But also, maybe he got something out of his system with The Quiet War series, and he’s kind of opened up. And you know, it’s the same as the last few novels by Kim Stanley Robinson. You know, they’re very much individual novels. He’s stopped writing trilogies and series. And that’s kind of interesting with McIntyre, that her last book is actually coming back to everything, or a lot of stuff, she’s done before.

Kate Macdonald: My older daughter writes science fiction/fantasy reviews as well, and she has grown up with my Vonda McIntyre collection and has not the slightest bit of interest in them. No, she does not care. She chooses her own books. And she read The Exile Waiting when I brought it out with Handheld and was sort of mildly surprised how good it was.

So when I wrote this review, I was conscious of trying to talk to people of her generation, which is like, you know, thirty and younger. So bringing in the canon was completely irrelevant. I had to present the novel as it was on its own terms. And so I could have brought out the sapphic elements and the queer parts, but there’s not so much of that, and it’s not such an important part of the, of the plot. But that would’ve really appealed and interested a generation, my children’s generation. But for Vonda, it was … it was a different thing entirely. So no, canon really not that important.

Dan Hartland: There’s a tendency in the discourse at the moment to get quite heated up about canon and about how you shouldn’t have to read all of this other stuff to enjoy what’s being published today, which does seem to me to pose a kind of difficulty for authors that—as you say, Kate—have a really long career. Because how do you bridge that gap?

How do you bridge the gap between, “No, no, you don’t have to read the old stuff, but it’s there. This new stuff, though, is really good.” I wonder, are there other writers in our personal reading story that we can apply these lessons to as well? So we’re talking about McIntyre, we’re talking about McAuley. Are there other writers that we’ve read everything they’ve put out, they’re either still producing today or we think that, you know, that they should be still being read today, and we have a plan for how to bridge that gap?

Kate Macdonald: Well, this was why Handheld Press was set up, because I’m a literary historian and I’ve been pushing these fabulous books from the last 150 years onto the youth today, and I’m sometimes getting it right. Sylvia Townsend Warner is a case in point because she was writing from 1926. This year is the centenary of Lolly Willowes, one of the great classic fantasy novels of British culture. And then she finished her career writing Kingdoms of Elfin, short stories about elves for The New Yorker, came out as a book 1977.

She died in ’78, so it’s still quite a long time ago. I brought out a new edition of Kingdoms of Elfin in 2019, and I took it to Bristol Con. I launched it there in a very small way, and so I did a reading. Chap before me was doing some sort of very violent military sci-fi space opera reading, and that went down well. And I stepped forward, and I started reading the first four pages of one of her short stories, which involved a fairy who flies around towers and goes and discovers that the werewolf pack has got the flu, and they’re all dying because they’ve got mange as well. And you could have heard a pin drop because the youths, the young folk in this audience, had never heard anything like it, and we sold out every book we’d brought with us. Every copy of Kingdoms of Elfin: We sold out at Bristol Con on the strength of that reading … because they just had to hear how fabulous this stuff is.

Dan Hartland: So Duncan, are there writers in your personal reading history that you kind of have, other than McAuley, that you have this kind of relationship with?

Duncan Lawie: I would love Mary Gentle to write another book or publish another book. I’d never come across her before A Secret History in ’99, 2000, and then I went and found what I could at that point, and I’m reading more of them now, and some of them are rereads, some of them are fresh reads.

But, you know, it’s the kind of thing where I was thinking about your question, thinking that if she published a new book I would probably be spending half the review saying, “You have to read it all. It doesn’t matter what order, but you have to read it all. You’re gonna love this!” The last one she published was the opera one, and it was a bonkers book, absolutely bonkers, because it was a plot that was the plot of the plot of the stupid, ridiculous opera. And you could fall down the hole of not getting how many layers she was playing with and just go, “This is silly!” But the silly was the point, and it was what she was playing at and how it was working and the better you understand opera and opera plots and the ridiculousness of those, the more you can enjoy it.

And, you know, it’s that kind of thing that … I would love to do things to bring her back. It’s the kind of stuff where, you know, maybe when I grow up, I can do a monograph or something, and that’s the way that I could possibly bring attention back to that particular author. Beyond that, I don’t know. It’s very … I mean, it is very hard, you know, like it’s … there’s always new books, whether it’s from old authors or new authors.

And sometimes, things feel like they’re in the field or out the field or responding, like we were saying about Loss Protocol being a climate fiction novel—and that’s maybe going to be less interesting in twenty years’ time, maybe it’s gonna be more interesting. But, you know, maybe there’s a benefit to the more fantasy side of things where they are less obviously bound to current issues.

Kate Macdonald: I think that’s a lot of the value in bringing the older writers back, because historical fiction as it is written now is so difficult because we can research so much so easily using the internet.

People think, “Oh, I’ve got this sussed. I can look at the Second World War. I’ll look at a newspaper. Okay, fine, now I go write my novel.” And they get dialogue wrong, they get idiom wrong, they get clothing wrong; they forget the small habits of, of what, what you had to do before you got on a bus and how you paid for a ticket. The little details which are absolutely there and present and authentic in the contemporary fiction of the period.

I had an article—I will have an article out in November—in Planetside, Science Fiction Writers Association, about avoiding anachronism in historical writing, and I had such a great time picking out the really, really terrible examples I wish to hold up in shame. But I didn’t, because you can’t shame the authors publicly! But yeah, there are so many ways to get it wrong, and the older writers don’t get it wrong. Even older writers writing historical fiction which would be historical to them, um, there’s something about the authenticity of their complete coherent vision of what that period must have been like that just works better. It’s more satisfying.

Duncan Lawie: I wonder whether it’s their anachronisms are invisible to us half a century later.

Kate Macdonald: I’m sure. I’m sure they will be, yeah. But!

Duncan Lawie: But yeah, it’s, that is something that fascinates me in reading that older stuff, the Radium Age stuff from MIT Press. Yeah, so the canon is there, but how much it’s in the shadow and how much you bring it into the light and how much … I don’t want to write a McAuley review that says, “And now go and read everything else.”

You know, it’s probably done its job if it actually gets someone to read this. And equally, you know, if it had not landed, I’d already committed to the review, right? And I would have had to find, you know? Radical candor used to be a bit of a term ten or twenty years ago, the idea that you have to say the thing, regardless of your relationship with the author. And you know, I feel I can do that with McAuley’s work. I feel like there are other writers who I’ve stopped reviewing because I don’t think I can be completely honest about my opinion of what they write.

Dan Hartland: You’ve got to give us a name now!!

Duncan Lawie: I mean, there’s something about Ken MacLeod’s stuff where there’s so much polish and sarcasm and humor on the surface, and so much “I am playing with all the tools, I’m playing with all the toys, and you can’t catch me, you can’t touch me for any of it.”

Dan Hartland: Yeah.

Duncan Lawie: And so it kind of makes it hard to review. I mean, I enjoy reading them, but … I don’t know, they just feel lighter than his early novels. And maybe that’s, again, someone who’s now had a forty-odd-year writing career, who is writing for fun rather than writing to make a career or writing to convince us of something.

Kate Macdonald: I was very disappointed with Ben Aaronovitch’s last novel, The Sea and the Sky, the one that’s set in Aberdeen. Because Aberdeen is my hometown, and I was excited—I mean, Aberdeen is very rarely written about from a contemporary perspective, and good Lord, it’s Aaronovitch. Peter Grant is going to Aberdeen!

And I just felt he’d done a huge amount of research, but why he’d written the novel, I do not know. There was no passion in it. It was all about the workings of the plot and getting the famous characters up there, going through their paces. You get the obligatory scene with this and that according to which, you know: The things that those characters are famous for.

And it just was not good. It wasn’t a good novel. It wasn’t a good read. It was, “Here is all my research, and I’m going to tip it out on the table and go away and have a pint.” Yeah. And it was just not good. I was so disappointed. He’s a brilliant novelist, but this one … no, something went very badly wrong. And it’s so atypical, but I think something must have gone seriously wrong, something technical to do with contracts or timing or something in his personal life. But no, it was a shame.

Dan Hartland: It’s interesting because, of course, if you write enough novels, eventually you’re gonna trip over a dud, right? Eventually you are gonna ... It’s almost inevitable. And that might ... It’s interesting what you say, Kate, about that particular book. It’s a series book, right? It’s all the famous characters, and those can become particular kind of dead ends for long-standing writers. They don’t have to be, but they sometimes can.

And I wonder whether … yeah, I wonder whether we might want to talk a little bit about—because Duncan’s talking about, or I spoke about and Duncan raised, the shadow of canon, which is, “Let’s keep the canon in the shadows.” That’s one way of thinking about it.

The other way of thinking about it is that it just casts the shadow over us. There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s, it’s, it’s there. So, and as I say, at the moment, there is a sense abroad that we shouldn’t need to read the older stuff in order to enjoy this newer stuff. Another writer for me that I’ve read a lot of over the years is Mike Harrison, and he doesn’t need me to sort of help sell his books. He’s doing okay. But sometimes every now and then someone will say, “Oh, what should I read?” and I might recommend, you know, Light, for example.

And I did this recently with someone, and they came back and said, “I didn’t like that at all. It, it … What was the serial killer thing about?!” And I did go back and flick through the book, and I can absolutely see why someone reading today in 2026 just might bounce off Light quite badly.

And this is the other thing, right? So when we review books of long-standing authors—and Harrison was already a long-standing author when he wrote Light—and we review them, as you say, Duncan, in a particular moment: twenty years later, that moment might be very different. Do they change through posterity? You know, does the reception change? Does what they mean change? Where does the reviewer or the critic sit in that kind of process of a text literally shifting in terms of the response it evokes from a reader over time?

Duncan Lawie: There’s a very famous Australian poem from the late nineteenth century called “The Man from Snowy River.” And I wanted to reread it, and I looked it up online, and they had twenty footnotes to explain what a pound was and things like that. And I was like, “Really?" People might know that like a thousand pounds, they need to be told one thousand pounds was a lot of money in 1890-something.

And I guess there’s that element of when does something become a historical artifact that needs explaining? You know, would we expect to be able to read Chaucer without footnotes?

And, and, you know, if we’re looking at something like what Kate’s been talking about in the Radium Age stuff, you might put a page at the front to say something to provide a bit of context; but if the story can’t be read without academic paraphernalia, it’s only going to be read by the kind of people who are interested in the history of the field. And maybe that’s enough people, but I don’t know.

I mean, Kate, this one is more …  I feel like I’m stepping into your territory there with this! You’ve got the context that I haven’t.

Kate Macdonald: Oh, Handheld is no more, by the way. It was wound down last year and I’m waiting, waiting to be struck off on the Companies House register, which is such a violent process.

Rose Macaulay, Radium Age. Rose Macaulay wrote a novel in 1918 called What Not, and it vanished without trace due to reasons. And then I republished it in 2019, 2020. And the way I found, the way I thought was the best way, to pitch it was: “This is a novel you’ve never heard of because it’s been completely forgotten, by a woman you’ve probably only heard of because she wrote The Towers of Trebizond fifty years later.”

That is the novel Rose Macaulay is most famous for. It’s not science fiction, it’s just bonkers and beautiful and mad, but it’s also very Anglican, and that’s why it’s retained its power. So What Not, it was by the author of Towers of Trebizond. But also, this is the novel that Aldous Huxley pinched from to write Brave New World because he lifted aspects of What Not.

And because What Not disappeared without trace, and Huxley as a bloke went da-da! and brought out Brave New World, and he was famous and it’s on all the curricula, that was a good selling point from a marketing perspective. And that really worked because we got a story in The Guardian. We had to reprint the book three times before it actually got published because of all the worldwide publicity.

So the shadow of the canon there was spreading backwards. This was a really, really early … Well, not for her it wasn’t early, but it was an early obscure novel that later works made famous. Does that make sense?

And so that really worked for us. When we published Vonda, The Exile Waiting, I tried to pitch it using the novel that came after The Exile Waiting, Dreamsnake, which is her most famous novel, and this is a novel that anyone who has ever read Vonda will always start off with Dreamsnake and then …

And again, I pitched the novel because of what came later. And I think this may be the case for a lot of authors who are now dead, like twentieth-century authors. It’s the stuff they went on to write that became big and huge and successful that cast a shadow in all different directions.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: And that’s why I really worry about the—in some cases entirely understandable—push to shake loose SF from the sort of dead hand of canon. There are definitely some works and some authors we can do without, but there are equally—as you say, Kate—there are lesser-known authors and lesser-known works that we really shouldn’t be doing without. They’re great!

It’s an interesting question for me as a kind of reviews editor (I’ve put that in scare quotes), that the work of Strange Horizons is largely to review books that have just come out. And that’s great, and very often we’re gifted with reissues that enable us to talk about older texts.

But I’m always aware that there’re so many books that have been published not right now, not just now. And there are lots of great blogs and so on, and podcasts, that are looking at older works, which is very important. But for the reviewer and the critic, yeah, there’s … For me, at least, there’s always this tension between the shiny new thing—very exciting—and also, well, you know, there is stuff that we should be reading that is not shiny or new.

Mary Gentle, you mentioned, Duncan, is a great example. I don’t hear a lot of people talking about Mary Gentle anymore.

Kate Macdonald: You know why? She’s not in print! And this is the point. You’ve got two problems as a reviews editor. You have to publicize the books that are in print and can be bought, or you can educate your readers to go and look on AbeBooks or go to Bookshop 451 in Hay-on-Wye, which is a new science fiction secondhand shop, which is terrific.

So you’ve got two different things.

Dan Hartland: So, because I’m very enthusiastic about this sort of thing. Because, you know, Mary Gentle, not in print, no one talks about her; Ursula Le Guin in print constantly, quite rightly, everyone talks about her, quite rightly. She seems to get around the sort of wariness around canon that is often applied elsewhere. The same people who are like, “Oh, let’s, you know, kill the past and just talk about the …” are very happy to talk about Le Guin.

And there are all sorts of good reasons for that, but one of them absolutely is, Kate, that you go to Waterstones and there’s loads of Le Guin still there. What role the critic or the reviewer in fighting that kind of thing?

Duncan Lawie: I think it’s the same ... Well, I can’t help just agreeing with Kate that we’re trying to review stuff that’s recently published because that’s the nature of almost every place you can do reviews. There’s a series that Graham Sleight did in Locus that he was talking about books I loved growing up and, and that kind of thing. And he had an opportunity every month to, to kind of remind people of stuff that was, you know, probably early ’80s or ’90s, but was probably also out of print. And you know, making that space to talk about that.

But it’s also the challenge for any reader. Like, when I go into a bookshop, I’m presented with five hundred books, most of which have been published in the last twenty years. Why would I go and look at the Oxfam bookshelves for something that was published fifty years before that? And that’s the real challenge for all of this.

You know, I’m just looking up at a pile of Gwyneth Jones books on my shelf, who talks about her? I mean, actually someone recently reviewed Spirit somewhere, but that was on their personal blog, I think. That kind of thing: It ends up being a passion project for people to say, “Gwyneth Jones is great. You really need to make an effort to go and find this book.”

Maybe another way into it, is to do the mini-monograph and sort of do a three-to-five-thousand-word essay on someone’s career, whether it’s Gwyneth Jones or whoever, to say, you know, “Here is an author who is beloved of, of those of us who’ve been around the block one and a half times, and you young folk (!) still have an opportunity to go and find this stuff”—without either claiming it as canon or implying that it’s only found in the dusty paperback section of a lost bookshop.

Kate Macdonald: And I think this could appeal to people who are bored rigid with current trends in science fiction and fantasy publishing. And when I say current, I mean the current that was also current five years ago, ten years ago. The trends come and go, and many of them are just, “Oh God, here we go. Let’s get through this.”

But if you go back and taste a different trend and dip into a different fashion, that is so refreshing—and might even show you where the more modern ones came from: This reiteration, it’s going around the block again and again. You know, fifty years ago they were still writing about this. Whether that’s helpful or not, I don’t know. This is where historianitis comes in.

Duncan Lawie: Yeah, and I read a Paul Kincaid review, about five years ago, of a book that I was really enjoying, and I read it when I was about the eighty per cent mark into the book, and he said, “Ah, this is just a retread of blah, blah, blah,” whatever the other one was. I was like, “Oh yeah, so it is.” And I never even finished the book because I was like, “Oh.”

All: [laughter]

Duncan Lawie: So, you know, there is that kind of … if you’re seeing things come around the second or third time, sometimes it can be hard to have any enthusiasm for the new one because it doesn’t hit the same as it did when you read it the first time, right?

Kate Macdonald: Yeah.

Dan Hartland: And one of the things about this is building that kind of knowledge base. Because, Duncan, you’re absolutely right: You can walk into a bookstore and you can see, you know, the last ten, fifteen, twenty years of books in front of you. That’s more than enough to pick from!

The effort of going to a secondhand bookshop and picking through that is not just that secondhand bookshops are harder to find. It’s that, when you get in there, you just don’t know where to look because the recency bias of a lot of reviews and criticism hasn’t equipped you to pick through those shelves.

And that brings us back to … Maybe that brings us back to asking a question of ourselves, because at the start of this episode we were all saying, “Oh, well, when you review a book—when you review The Curve of the World, when you review Loss Protocol, whatever it is—you should review it as a book and, and not worry about where it’s come from.” But now we’re saying, “Well, wait: If we don’t talk about where the stuff has come from, people aren’t gonna know to find the stuff.”

Because we can try to equip our readers to find other great older stuff, but then we overwhelm the newer stuff, or we can focus on the newer stuff and kind of lose the older stuff. It’s a really tricky—

Kate Macdonald: And you might really annoy your readers who just want to be told what’s the new stuff! “I can go to a university seminar for the old stuff. Just give me the new stuff now.”

For a relative newcomer moving sideways into science fiction, fantasy, and fandom in a small way, I’m not up to speed with the magazines where you can get the reviews from, and I should be, and I need to do more about that.

Duncan Lawie: It’s a real challenge these days, the difference between reviews and criticism. But I mean, but there’s definitely a kind of book blog which is about, “Oh look, the cover’s got a shiny cat on it.”

Kate Macdonald: Oh God! “It’s got sprayed edges!” Argh!

Duncan Lawie: And the kind of locations that are going to be purely excited about a book are of much more interest to a publisher, right? Because they’re not going to have an even-handed or thoughtful comment.

But there’s the kind of thing where The Guardian gave a Taylor Swift album nine out of ten and got pounced on for not giving it a ten. I’m sure that people who are really into A Court of Thorns and Roses are not going to accept a mediocre review of the next book by Sarah Maas, right?

And you can fall into that trap very easily, right? Of just doing the things that seem to get you more pats on the head.

Kate Macdonald: But it’s very bad for the soul. I stopped reviewing for Strange Horizons a few years ago, partly because I’d set up Handheld, but also because I think the three books I’d last reviewed for you were all duds, and it just felt bad. And I said to Dan, “I’m afraid it’s another dud.” And he said, “It’s okay, it’s a review. If it has to be a dud, it’s a dud.” I don’t like dissing books unless there’s a very good reason for it.

Dan Hartland: I think, though, that the ecosystem needs people that are willing to be, you know, negative towards a dud. As much as, in a way, it needs the kind of the cheerleaders.

This isn’t my personal approach, right? I’m gonna be very sort of ecumenical and say, you know, the people that get excited that there’s a shiny cat on the cover? They exist! And, you know, they may be of use to publishers, they may be of use to other readers. But I also think—and again, Kate can probably tell us—venues that are willing to be more critical are probably of use to publishers as well, because if you get a good review from that kind of platform, you can trust it.

Kate Macdonald: Absolutely. The quality is known, the bar is high. It’s when you get a reviewer writing for a high-end, well-respected publication who deliberately goes in there to be vicious because they know their review will be trusted. That’s awkward. Or because they are an extremely famous writer who have got nothing to lose, and they’re going to be obstreperous and unpleasant and just snooty about the book.

They’re … And you think, why? What? Okay, you’re publishing this negative review of a, of a book of XYZ value because it’s going to be a controversial read, and people are gonna write in. So that is another dimension to the reviewing, the blogging, the putting one’s opinions out there: Do you want to generate conversation around it, which is all about your opinions, or do you want to generate conversation about that book and get people to talk about the book?

Dan Hartland: It might be worth saying, I guess, that long-standing authors, authors with a longer career, are probably more liable to get that kind of review than newer ones. In other words, they’ve built up grudges with other writers over years who can head into the TLS offices and say, “Have I got a hatchet job for you!”

But one of the themes of this episode, then, seems to be trust. Like, we’ve got to build trust with reviewers, and we build up trust with authors over time, too. You know, we’ve read their umpteen books and we come to have expectations of them or a relationship with them.

I suppose I might ask two things. Let’s say that there’s a great author that we have a relationship with that has twenty books to their name, but that someone else has read one book by. How do we help them—maybe they won’t thank us for it!—but how would we help them get into that author with that huge back catalogue? How do we ease that transition?

Kate Macdonald: Oh yeah, please tell me how to get into Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Dan Hartland: [laughter]

Kate Macdonald: I have tried! I’ve read one chapter, and … no. I can’t! So … enormous amount of novels, hugely respected, very nice man. Tell me why and what I should be reading in order to get a better appreciation of Tchaikovsky.

Dan Hartland: Right—where to get started with a particular author. And the answer will be different with every author, and probably every reader doing the recommendation. I know a couple of huge Tchaikovsky fans who will have recommend one book to start with, but it wouldn’t have worked for me.

And that’s another problem with an author with a large back catalogue, probably similar, Duncan, to McAuley in a way: they’ve written many different kinds of book. So how do you—and Tchaikovsky’s one of these, you know, fantasy, science fiction, books with spiders, books without …

Duncan Lawie: The two kinds of books!

Dan Hartland: There are only two!

Where do you get cracking with … how would you, Duncan, suggest a reader get cracking with—an author with such a varied and long back catalogue?

Duncan Lawie: With someone like McAuley, who’s got a great deal of variety, I’d probably say pick up the latest, or pick up one of the most recent ones—because they are talking about where we are, and responding to the broader conversation of the moment.

I mean, I was talking to someone about this the other day, and she said, “Recommend me a book,” and I said, “Well, what do you like?” and she said, “No, just recommend me a book!” You know, so if someone is a fan of space opera, then I’d say start with The Quiet War, it’s not like any other space opera you’ve come across; or maybe I’d say start with the last of that series, Empires of the Sun, because it is actually a space opera while the others are all set in the solar system and maybe that’s a different kind of angle on it.

Or, you know, if they want to read something classic then Fairyland won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and you can still wander around London and think about what it was like both when he was writing it in the 1990s and when it was set twenty or thirty years later, which is probably now passed by now. And then, you know, you get other authors like Alistair Reynolds, and it’s like, “Well, you should probably start at the beginning, because there’s five books in a sequence that build on each other and that all connect together. And if you don’t want to start there, he’s got another trilogy or maybe start there, bring in a standalone?” And that way you kind of have different points of entry.

As you say, part of it is to work out whether they are the reader who likes spiders or the reader who doesn’t like spiders, and then just start from there.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Kate, by the way, I would recommend the Tchaikovsky: Give Alien Clay a go.

Kate Macdonald: We have that one. OK!

Dan Hartland: Let me know how much you hate it!

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can listen to more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com.

The response to our last episode on reviewing debut books and writers came close to breaking containment. Even Renay, of the famously compendious Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom, was reduced to asking someone, anyone, to collect the various corners of the discourse into a single blog. I will totally fail to capture all the responses here.

But if nothing else, the force of the conversation suggested a vibrant reviewing culture in which this stuff matters. For large part, the discourse was a clash of cultures between perhaps those who write criticism but not fiction and those who write both.

Jonah Sutton-Morse noted that he found himself wishing for more nonfiction writing critics, and Abigail Nussbaum expressed a firm view that when she reviews a book, the last thing she considers is saying anything to its writer. This, I confess, is closest to my practice. I went hunting in the Strange Horizons archives and found several pretty negative reviews of debut writers and debut books that I myself had penned.

In my view and clearly that of others, protecting the space for this sort of work is important, but there’s probably space too for other approaches. Something about the relational expression of reviewing in the episode pushed buttons for many. Casella Brookins noted that for him reviews are only for readers.

There isn’t so much room for a relationship with writers. Romie Stott, my colleague here at Strange Horizons, recalled a negative review she penned years ago which upset a writer. “Not evaluating your worth as an author,” Romie remembers thinking, “but a specific physical object for sale.” Another correspondent, wissewords on Blue Sky, noted that “critics and reviewers are not a writer’s PR staff.”

All fair—particularly as the author of the novel Majestica among others, Sarah Tolcser, got in touch to note that it’s possible to overinflate the value of reviews to an author’s career. Another author, Thomas Ha, he of the collection Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, gently suggested that perhaps it’s right to acknowledge rather than deny the external influences that play on both fiction writers and critics.

For one thing, Dylan Haston suggested that an awareness of whether a particular debut author has been professionally edited before or worked on their first book for decades could be generative for reviewers. I think that’s right. These contexts exist, and they shape work. Indeed, as Tristan Beiter noted, how literature means, how it relates to the social, is a rich theme for critics and requires that material engagement.

As Jenny Hamilton noted, the narrowing space for reviews and criticism means that what opinions are published may possibly now have outsized impact. “Considering the author is rarely the wrong decision,” remarked Charles Payseur, and Niall Harrison helpfully reminded us how important and central author critics have been in the history of SFF.

Might seem odd to be uncomfortable about that now. Vajra Chandrasekera, too, read my guest’s emphasis on author impact as a reflection of the fragility of this specific niche in the ecosystem. That said, Roseanna Pendlebury thought that what the ecosystem benefits from is critical texts which are pieces of art in their own right.

This perhaps requires a certain ruthlessness. William Henry Morris wrote that “judgment according to an aesthetics is still possible.” That is, reviewers and critics must try to avoid knee-jerk relativism and say what they think.

On which note, one of our guests on the last episode, Alex Kingsley, recorded some follow-up thoughts for us. So let’s give them the last word.

Alex Kingsley: Hi, all. This is Alex Kingsley from the last episode. Wow, I can’t believe I said something on a podcast that started discourse! This is so surreal to me, and I’m actually really excited to see what I said has spurred a lot of discussion. Like, it’s actually awesome, albeit a little scary, that people passionately disagree with me.

That being said, I do feel the need to make some clarifications. For one thing, I want to be clear that I was only speaking to how I personally approach reviews. I have been writing fiction for much longer than I have been writing reviews, and inevitably that is going to seep into how I approach those reviews.

I cannot help but write with knowledge of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a review. I know some reviewers want to keep distance between themselves and authors, and that’s totally valid. I am authors, though, so that distance isn’t really possible for me. So instead, I’m focused on being a good community member.

I think it would be dishonest to try to approach reviews as if I’m not going to consider the impact it has on the author because I know I won’t be able to do that, nor do I think I should have to. When I said I like to spotlight what I think is working in a book, I probably gave the impression that I’m cherry-picking elements of the book to make it sound better than it is, and that’s not what I meant at all.

My impressions of books never fall neatly into a binary of this part was good and this part was bad, so I have no desire to present it as such. I think the best service I can do for a reader when evaluating whether or not to read the book is to accurately express what the book was doing and how well it did that thing.

I have one thousand words to tell you about an entire book. I will always have more than one thousand words worth of thoughts about that book. So I am only choosing those thoughts that I find most interesting to write about or that I think contribute most to a larger conversation in the genre. If I have a major problem with a book, that will make it into the review.

If I have a minor problem with a book, then that’s probably just not that interesting compared to some of the other things that I have to say about it. But I didn’t want to imply that this is the only way to review or to tell anyone else how they should be reviewing. In fact, because I come from a fiction writing background, I am relatively new to the critical space.

I say that not to diminish my own work, but to highlight the fact that while many of the people participating in this discussion probably have a particular framework for how they approach reviews, I am still building that framework for myself. I honestly had no idea that anything I said in the podcast would be controversial within the larger critical community.

And if my framework substantially differs from yours, well, I think that’s pretty neat, because that means more perspectives and many perspectives are what fertilize a literary ecosystem. Thanks everyone for being so engaged in this conversation, and I hope I could make my perspective a little more clear, even if you still disagree with it. Thanks.

Dan Hartland: Thank you, Alex. All discourse is welcome at reviews@strangehorizons.com. See you next time.