A view on SFF that gets a little too tangled in its own specific perspective
Back in April last year, I reviewed Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid. While I had a lot to get to grips with in my reading of it, one of the things I uncomplicatedly appreciated was its stance on the "project" of science fiction, the idea of the singular whole of the thing. Or, specifically, the absence of such a monolith. Kincaid constantly comes back to the idea of the multiplicity of the genre, and that multiplicity, the titular colourfield, is important. And I concur; every person's path into the genre - both genres, because this applies just as truly to Fantasy - and their context, their reading habits, their tastes, their friends' tastes, their location in the world, all of it, feeds into what SFF looks like for them. We are all of us overlapping genre sets, growing and shifting through time.
I came back to this thought often while reading Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy (hereafter simply Trace Elements) by Jo Walton and Ada Palmer. Like Kincaid, their volume is drawn from a selection of previously published pieces from different venues (though augmented with some new essays for this publication). But, unlike Kincaid, this variety is not particularly reflected in the way they approach genre. I have two overarching thoughts, upon completion of the book, and the first is a sort of estrangement from the science fiction that they seem to be implying throughout the work exists as a singular, coherent beast. It is at once familiar and unfamiliar to me, and, more importantly, as the second thought, never tackled up front. I'll get into a lot more meat of discussing the content, but truly, the core of my argument is that the whole of this thing, this product of years of reading and writing about SFF, sits atop a pile of assumptions that implied to me a singular way of performing a genre I wholeheartedly believe is anything but single. When that implication is conveyed, as it is here, with casual authority, with easy certainty, and never once given pause or thought or the interrogation it needs as a foundational assumption of this type of work... nothing built upon it can stand quite aright either.
To step back slightly, Trace Elements is a collection of essays, predominantly drawn from their previous work in a number of venues of genre discussion, like Reactor (tor.com as was), Strange Horizons and more. These are supplemented with some essays new for the piece, along with some of the authors' poetry. The essays cover a broad swathe of topics, but they all circle around foundational questions about the nature, value, purpose and process of science fiction and fantasy, with some side quests into associated topics along the way, as well as some more personal pieces about the authors and their life experiences. It's a fairly wide-ranging set of subject matter, and one that is divided up into sections, starting at the front with the more big, general pieces and then progressing into the more specific, niche or intimate towards the end.
As per the title, these are conversations on the project of science fiction and fantasy. Who are those conversations with, though? Between the authors, certainly, but many of these pieces were published individually, by only one of them, in another place not intended for collection in this book. Who were they addressing, in those pieces then? And to what extent was it a true conversation, with the understanding of a response, possible disagreement, the collective development of an evolving understanding? I find this important too, when considering the tone of the piece. The majority of the essays are written in a declarative, definitive tone of voice, and convey a sense of certainty about the subject matter. The author(s) have the answer, and they'll tell it to you. There is very little hedging to be found here, not much doubt, and rarely a pause to talk through assumptions as though they are personal ones, things which could be matters of opinion, or only one of a variety of options on how to look at things. This is a common tone to find in pop non-fiction, so I'm not surprised to find it here, but I do think, when collecting your work under the label of conversation, it is something that ought to be questioned. Some of these posts were in venues that had open comment sections, but some were not. The new pieces, crafted only for a book, have no such openness. The other half of the conversation has been removed (unlike Walton's previous work drawn from her posts, in which some of the comments in response are retained, preserving that sense of back and forth), or never opened in the first place. What is a conversation without its other half? A lecture. But a lecture can still leave an open space for an imagined interlocutor, someone to ask the right questions, know and not know the right pieces of information, and for whom the premises must be clarified or grappled with, but no such interlocutor lives here either.
If this is a conversation, then, it's a conversation with oneself, in a quiet room. With an imagined audience whose agreement is certain. They hold the right premises, they occupy the same position, in the SFFnal ecosphere, but lack the knowledge that the authors can provide. That's a very specific audience indeed.
This is, for me, exemplified by the use nearly-universally in the book of "we". Not "I", and certainly not a pseudo-academic passive (something that Palmer gets into in one of the personal essays in fact, talking about the absence of the first person in academic writing). Now, this is a book by two authors, so naturally any appeal to personal experiences will default to the plural. But it seems, at times, more than that. There's the we of the personal, yes, but the pieces often, to my mind, strayed into the we of the crowd, the group that draws the reader in and says, you are with us on this point, we are a community of one mind. It's a perfectly normal writing tactic for creating that kind of shared sense of understanding. But it is a flawed one when the reader doesn't agree, and doesn't occupy that same position (as I often did not). Any tool that crafts community in that way naturally imposes a border that excludes everyone else. And, lest you think I'm pinning an awful lot on a pronoun that could simply be a reflection of a multi-authored book, I did go hunt down some of the original blog posts that fed into it and did, indeed, find the plural-of-community lurking there too. For example, this piece from 2010 in Reactor by Jo Walton, from which the following while talking about techniques for worldbuilding (which is included in the book reworked somewhat, though still with the crowd-we):
Because there’s a lot of information to get across and you don’t want to stop the story more than you can help, we have techniques for doing it. We have signals for what you can take for granted, we have signals for what’s important. We’re used to seeing people’s names and placenames and product-names as information. We know what needs to be explained and what doesn’t. In exactly the same way as Trollope didn’t explain that a hansom cab was a horse-drawn vehicle for hire on the streets of London that would take you about the city but not out into the countryside, and Byatt doesn’t explain that the Northern Line is an underground railroad running north south through London and dug in the early twentieth century, SF characters casually hail pedicabs and ornithopters and tip when they get out.
She slips between I and we (and occasional third person) throughout the essay, but when the plural comes up there are conclusions to be drawn from it who the audience is expected to be, and how they interact with fiction - "we" here are frequent SFF readers who have the genre-reading protocols she expects of them. Which is fine, singly. That is probably a very reasonable assumption. But those reasonable assumptions keep on piling up, until eventually there is a quite specific intersection of the person who fits into all of those "we". They have a specific background of reading, a specific history with genre, a specific set of touchstone books they have read, and a specific set of opinions about genre more broadly. Every slice of that cuts out another chunk of the potential audience from that community of we. I say this, of course, because I certainly felt myself not a part of it.
It doesn't help, structurally, that the opening essays (new for the volume) are by far the most didactic and positional, the ones most likely to include or exclude on opinion. The authors lay down some groundwork in "Integral to the Plot: the Author-Reader Contract" and "The Science Fiction Conversation: Imprint SF" which set the scene for what they envision genre to be, which is then bolstered by "Genre Pacing and Protocols, or What Is Genre?" which draws from Walton's linked essay above and 2018 Goodreads posts. These opening, generalising sections were where, predominantly, they lost me. It became clear that the SFF they envisaged was from a certain place (majority US), a certain time (a fairly wide span that peters out slightly before I came into the majority of my adult reading) and a certain opinion ("imprint SFF" is a distinct thing with a singular identity, whose authors' relationship with the existing corpus of work can be intuited by the reader and their relationship with it judged accordingly), none of which I occupy. And it's not that I need to see myself in this kind of work, but that the work speaks as if I am, throwing up a distorted mirror when I'd have been perfectly happy with a window into somewhere else. It's those assumptions again.
But not just assumptions. There are moments where the text comes out and does, in fact, dismiss positions outside of its own. One example stood out most to me, when discussing the history of SF publishing, and the difference between the markets in different countries. They write:
Canny British writers who understood the realities of the US market wrote short books, but less savvy ones wrote books at whatever length and had them published in Britain, but they could not break the US market. Christopher Priest and Keith Roberts had US hardcover releases of their 1970s science fiction books, but not paperbacks.
Now, I never met Christopher Priest, but my understanding of his character from those who have, from his writing and the stories about him... does not, let us say, particularly support this dismissal of his awareness of the field. There's no sense, in this little aside, that perhaps there might exist authors who, for whatever their own reasons, could value something more than breaking the US market. Maybe they felt the length they published at was more critical than the sales they might garner in another market. Maybe they just didn't care. I don't know. But I'm open to the possibility that people can have approached something in different ways, with their opinions shaped by their own particular perspectives. They may well have been just as savvy as anyone trying to break the US market, but with entirely different priorities. The writing here, as throughout the book, excludes such possibilities. Alternative approaches are simply "less savvy".
When the authors progress of out the general and into the specific, things do improve. The highpoint, for me, of the volume are Ada Palmer's essays about writing with chronic pain, and the following section "Writing/Realizing Disability + Power". These essays are deeply personal, bedded into her own experience of her work and her life, and are incredibly moving for that intimacy. They acknowledge throughout the uniqueness of the perspective being given, and that uniqueness is its value. No one else could write about this as Palmer does. Likewise, Walton's piece on how her first book was published. They both shine because they are so intensely from and about the perspective of their authors.
There are also chapters that delve into specific topics, though I found flaws that rhymed with my overarching concerns in these too. It is difficult, in a single chapter, to capture the whole of, for instance, Japanese fiction norms post WW2, or the scope of genre romance or the history of publishing across the whole of time. Generalisations naturally arise. Those generalisations are given mixed treatment, sometimes highlighted (though only briefly, in the main) and sometimes skimmed over as authoritative. The one I found most frustrating is a chapter that begins in broad terms about translated fiction that talks about the difference between Japanese SFF and horror and western perspectives and assumptions. Both "western" and "Anglophone" are used as terms in the opening, but the essay proceeds to limit itself only to comparisons with the US, and to talking about fiction in terms of US, Christian-influenced ideas about Providence. The comparison is still interesting, still useful, and I still learnt plenty from it. But by conflating Anglophone/Western and the US, it tells on itself. Had Palmer written "US" throughout, I would not have batted an eye. But she did not. She speaks in authoritative, general tones and I, in reading, have my mind caught on "but this isn't general". And that knowledge when I do spot the holes and issues makes me wary of the chapters where my knowledge is insufficient to do likewise. I don't know enough about genre romance to judge whether the piece by Jo Walton is 100% accurate in its sweeping claims or not, but because I can spot holes and assumptions elsewhere, I cannot help but think there must be some lurking here too. And so those skips over complexity undermine the whole. I find I cannot trust the casual authority of the authors, because they seem unable to acknowledge specificity when needed.
There is a sense, throughout the whole piece, that there are clear answers available in all things genre. We can make a single story out of the history of anime, we can make a single truth in how to read genre, in who writes it and how. Leaving aside my own feelings on this ("bollocks" is the word I used frequently in my notes), this is undermined even by the text itself. Walton and Palmer at various points cite authors as examples of people who do and do not write from within genre or knowing genre (Ishiguro was the one who stands out), only to later put the same author in a different pot. Of course, these essays are drawn from two authors writing across a wide span of time, maybe they changed their minds? Or differed in opinion? But I don't know. No notice is ever drawn to these discrepencies, and, well... they collected all this for a single work. People are going to sit down and read it cover to cover. They're going to spot them. The text marks out that the pieces have been edited and changed to become this single work... I feel like that effort needed to continue into taking about of things like this. Individually small, but with large implications when taken into account alongside the sweeping claims about genre.
And then, as my final criticism, because I have made such a focus on highlighting the specific and the personal - my own specific and personal. I was, when this book was announced, very excited to read it. I have come to find I really enjoy non-fiction on speculative subjects, and this seemed a potentially substantial entry into the genre, not least because of its enthusiastic marketing which declared:
Now, in Trace Elements, Walton and Palmer have come together to write a book-length and supremely entertaining look at modern science fiction and fantasy, at how our genre is written and how it is read, that will join nonfiction works like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night, Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, and Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud on the short shelf of titles essential to all readers of our genre.
While one can never hold an author to account for effulgent marketing copy over which they have no control, it is the context through which I came to this book, that was to be "essential to all readers of our genre". And I am disappointed by how very small that "all" seems to be understood to be, how specific is "our", throughout the work. I am not in them. I don't have the right opinions (and the possibility of alternative takes seems to be consistently precluded by the way the authors discuss their topics); I haven't read the right things; I am not in the right place. I find the book, for the most part, to be casually, unthinkingly exclusionary of people who do not fit into a rather traditionally-shaped mould of what an SFF reader might be - updated to move past the limitations of gender, race and sexuality of the truly old-school, but preserving a certain sort of understanding of the shape of the genre that I do not think holds true any longer, nor has for much of my own lifetime.
For a work which includes a chapter - taken from a 2021 essay by Palmer in Uncanny magazine - on the necessity of expanding our empathy sphere, I find it strangely lacking in awareness of quite how far that sphere needs to be extended.
My experience with the book was predominantly one of argument. I took eleven pages of notes as I read, wanting to mark my disagreement with this or that statement, this or that assumption. There was no space assumed for conversation, but I made my own one anyway, because it made me cross. Had there been a comment section, I would undoubtedly be in it with questions.
And so, my conclusion is that this work is interesting in conception, but flawed in execution. Through lack of interrogation of assumptions and position, Walton and Palmer make sweeping statements that snag on the complexity of reality, that represent only a single view of the many that make up SFF today while never quite acknowledging that truth. If it is a conversation on the project of science fiction and fantasy, the project has its tightly drawn boundaries, and the conversation assumes only a certain sort of interlocutor.
I am, of course, not asking for the authors to step away from their selves, the space and place they occupy in the genre ecosystem. No one can. But I think it is critical, when talking in the sort of general, authoritative tones that they take in this volume to be ever conscious of it. To know that your own view is a shimmering, ephemeral thing, intangible to anyone else who seeks to grasp it, but also a vital one. Work like this is intensely valuable when it acknowledges its vantage point, and ties itself to its own specifics and positionality. There is nothing more useful than being able to see the world - whatever world - through the eyes of someone standing somewhere you have not, and cannot. But its value is severely undermined when universality is assumed, and specificity is never interrogated. No single one of us can say we have a clear grasp of the whole of the thing, when it comes to genre, because I firmly believe there is no single whole of the thing.
The unquestioned universality to which both authors speak throughout this volume dooms it to incompleteness. In a time of ever-blurring genre boundaries, ever-shifting sub-genres and a growing scope of what it might mean to be a fan of SFF, it is vital to grapple with what science fiction, and whose, you are talking about, and to remember that there are always others out there, across the porous, increasingly traversible borders into the wider vista.
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The Math
Highlights:
Nerd Coefficient: 4/10
Reference: Ada Palmer, Jo Walton, Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy, [Tor Books, 2026].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
