Colourfields
Sep. 20th, 2025 07:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
paulkincaidThere is a flatteringly good review of COLOURFIELDS in the new Interzone (#303, September 2025) by Val Nolan. Honestly, I would quote the entire thing if I could, but that might be excessive (and besides, you should go out and buy Interzone to get it for yourself). So here are a few brief passages:
"There are no priests here to interpret the holy scriptures for us (not even Christopher Priest who, unusually for a Kincaid project, receives only a few brief mentions). Instead there is just confident dissection of significant interventions into the discourse of speculative writing by a critic whose knowledge of science fiction, particularly historical examples, occasionally verges on the humbling."
"Indeed, little encapsulates his approach more than his summation of The History of Science Fiction: ‘On a number of occasions where [Adam] Roberts stands up to be counted, I would be very happy to shoot him down; on just as many occasions I would join him at the barricades’. In that way, and though he has issues with it, Kincaid recognises the undeniable merits of Roberts’s book as an ‘excellent contribution to the ongoing critical debate’ and, as such, this is a fine example of the work presented in Colourfields."
"Kincaid makes no claims to be part of the modern intellectual industrial complex. ‘I’m not an academic,’ he says here in acknowledgment rather than declaration, and, honestly, it is for the benefit of all of us that he has not been siloed away in some kind of Mulderesque photocopier lobby in the basement of a regional university spending most of his time on bureaucratic form-filling and Sisyphean marking loads with only an occasional paywalled article to his name. No, Kincaid’s position as adjacent-to-but-outside the academy is, perhaps counterintuitively, a privilege; the freedom from contemporary academia’s reflection-wrecking distractions appears at least partly to be what has allowed him to publish so accessibly and so often, in the process making the kind of contribution to literary criticism that many scholars would be covetous of. And they’d be right to feel envy given that his analysis, his writing style, and the level of his critical
engagement – as evidenced not just by Colourfields, but by last year’s volume on Pavane by Keith Roberts – is of a standard that, frankly, is at or beyond a lot of what passes for criticism in the academy these days."
(Never really thought of it as a privilege before, but there you go.)
By the way, if you want a further incentive to go and invest in Interzone, there is also a review by me, of Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts. Yes, I know, me writing about Roberts again, this could get to be a habit.
"There are no priests here to interpret the holy scriptures for us (not even Christopher Priest who, unusually for a Kincaid project, receives only a few brief mentions). Instead there is just confident dissection of significant interventions into the discourse of speculative writing by a critic whose knowledge of science fiction, particularly historical examples, occasionally verges on the humbling."
"Indeed, little encapsulates his approach more than his summation of The History of Science Fiction: ‘On a number of occasions where [Adam] Roberts stands up to be counted, I would be very happy to shoot him down; on just as many occasions I would join him at the barricades’. In that way, and though he has issues with it, Kincaid recognises the undeniable merits of Roberts’s book as an ‘excellent contribution to the ongoing critical debate’ and, as such, this is a fine example of the work presented in Colourfields."
"Kincaid makes no claims to be part of the modern intellectual industrial complex. ‘I’m not an academic,’ he says here in acknowledgment rather than declaration, and, honestly, it is for the benefit of all of us that he has not been siloed away in some kind of Mulderesque photocopier lobby in the basement of a regional university spending most of his time on bureaucratic form-filling and Sisyphean marking loads with only an occasional paywalled article to his name. No, Kincaid’s position as adjacent-to-but-outside the academy is, perhaps counterintuitively, a privilege; the freedom from contemporary academia’s reflection-wrecking distractions appears at least partly to be what has allowed him to publish so accessibly and so often, in the process making the kind of contribution to literary criticism that many scholars would be covetous of. And they’d be right to feel envy given that his analysis, his writing style, and the level of his critical
engagement – as evidenced not just by Colourfields, but by last year’s volume on Pavane by Keith Roberts – is of a standard that, frankly, is at or beyond a lot of what passes for criticism in the academy these days."
(Never really thought of it as a privilege before, but there you go.)
By the way, if you want a further incentive to go and invest in Interzone, there is also a review by me, of Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts. Yes, I know, me writing about Roberts again, this could get to be a habit.
