Review - Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid

Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction is a book I read as part of my attempt to read a bunch of things on the Hugo Awards shortlist; this is nominated for Best Related Work. I am very, very new to this ('this' meaning SFF fandom, but also reading non-fiction related to SFF but also reading reviews of non-fiction and also also anything involving literary studies) and I hope that means I have an interesting perspective rather than a deeply uninformed one. My apologies to Paul Kincaid if I give a poor impression of his work.

Colourfields is a collection of essays and reviews, but primarily the latter. It places many pieces of Kincaid's writing that were previously scattered to the wind into one place in a thematically arranged collection. It's interesting work that simultaneously charts Kincaid's own opinions and those of the authors he's writing about as well as providing some information about what they were writing about (namely, science fiction authors). This is a lot of layers; it makes for quite a dense text.

This brings me to the first challenge of this book: it is not for me. Of all the authors mentioned either briefly or at length in this work, I've read the work of maybe three: Mary Shelley, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Margaret Atwood. (In a moment, I'll get to the issue of this book and women. Bear with me.) I am not a reader of nor a student or researcher who is particularly interested in H.G. Wells or Arthur C. Clarke or the other star-studded names of the science fiction of yore. As a result, I'll probably never read most of the works discussed in this book because of a simple fact of disinterest. This is an issue of me reading for the Hugo Awards: I would never have read this book other than because it was on a list of books that I happened to have access to through the Hugo voter's packet.

The problem of me being the wrong audience is hammered home consistently; I often got lost in sentences I didn't understand. I cared to try to understand, but I think the finer points were lost on me. This also made the sections where Kincaid was writing more directly about authors and their work rather than the non-fiction about those authors and that work harder to parse. My impression is that Kincaid is stronger when critiquing non-fiction rather than reviewing or analysing fiction himself, too, which is fine because most of the book is the former and the latter is far more occasional. I will say that I think I learned a decent amount about the study of science fiction through this book, though I would guess that I picked up more about Kincaid as a critic than I did about anything else. That is (or at least I would hazard a guess that it is) the point of collecting the works of a critic, so I think that while the book wasn't really for me, it nonetheless achieves what it set out to do.

So: onto Kincaid as a critic. Colourfields is a book of literary critique and not a work of history, but I will say: I'm historically trained and I wasn't, overall, impressed by Kincaid's grasp of history. Like a lot of work that talks generally about history but isn't about history, he makes generalised claims about historical periods or events that rankled a little because I know they're simplified. There was also what I would call a slightly embarrassing error when, in correcting someone else's series of historical mistakes, he makes one of his own (he critiques a statement that the Bayeux Tapestry was made by Norman subjects because he says it was made by English people; the Bayeux Tapestry famously depicts the Norman conquest of England). I don't blame Kincaid for not being a historian, and I know that the full nuance of history can't be contained in this kind of work, but it did make me wonder if the effect of this book is that I thought he sounded informed on everything I didn't already know something about (which, as previously mentioned, was most of the book). I get the impression that he's quite a well-regarded critic, though, so I'm not too worried about that.

This book is also, I'm afraid, a bit of a boy's club. I'm not someone who has read many classics of the genre, but I'd note that I'd read almost every woman who receives sustained attention in this collection. Kincaid isn't unfairly critical of the women he writes about, including the work he reviews that was written by women, but his preferred subject is an era of science fiction that is portrayed as squarely male. Also, despite his general annoyance at Anglophone surveys being US-dominated, he doesn't ever really turn his attention to British women writing science fiction. There's an extent to which the blinders on this book are almost certainly influenced by what other people have written about, simply by nature of what it is, but the absence of both women and people of colour in the survey is very, very noticeable. Colourfields includes several brief reflections on the book's composition and contents, but doesn't seem to have space for its exclusions.

Generally, I think I would have liked a little more reflection. Many of the essays and reviews included were written upwards of a decade ago, and I occasionally felt like I was missing context for some of the wider debates being raised in the reviews. There's a sense of a quite vibrant world of discussions of the genre, but I didn't get a particularly good picture of it. Or maybe I just wanted to hear less about Marxist theory (I'm a historian whose work crosses over significantly with 70s leftist movements; I've read enough on that for a lifetime) and more about what was going on at genre conventions in the 2000s. This work is very obviously the result of a long career of very thoughtful contributions to the field, and Kincaid clearly knows a lot. Maybe this book wasn't the place for those more general thoughts, but I would have liked them.

At this closing point of the review, I want to emphasise that I think this is a pretty good book. It covers a lot of things and does so in depth. If you're looking for a book that does what this book does best - reviewing academic work about the science fiction of the 20th century - then this is probably a fantastic work. If you're not, well... it's a large and dense text. Probably go and read something else.