Peter Nicholls, “Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years” (2022)

This is very good: a collection of reviews and essays by the late Peter Nicholls, of SF Encyclopedia editing fame—he edited and co-wrote the first edition of the encyclopedia with John Clute, and the later editions with Clute and David Langford, whose ‘ansible editions’ are the publisher of this collection. Nicholls was also the editor of Foundation in the 1970s, and one of the first people to establish an academic base in Britain for the study of SF, out of the North-East London Polytechnic (now the University of East London). Several of the pieces assembled here are autobiographical and Nicholls, sad to say, really doesn't have happy memories of this decade. He also, several times, expresses his low opinion of academic SF criticism as a discipline: for him, the fannish is fitter. Eventually Nicholls returned to his native Australia where, his encroaching Parkinsonianism notwithstanding, he seems to have been much happier. He died in 2018.

I never knew Nicholls, although I know many of the people he mentions in his various memoir-essays—Clute, Langford, and others. Still: not being part of the UK SF ‘scene’ in the 70s and 80s, I read Nicholl’s energetic accounts of the fun-times he had at various cons with a sense of melancholy, actually. People partying-hearty in the dead depths of the last century, in-jokes and namechecks and strenuous assertions of how much fun it was. Reading accounts of a party to which one was not invited, and where many of the people partying are now dead, can’t help but evoke the vibe described in Browning’s ‘A Toccata of Galuppi's’:

Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?

…

“As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
“Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:
“What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.

Nicholl's con reports, and particularly his overlong and self-indulgent ‘The Great Seacon Freakout Seacon ’75, the 1975 UK Eastercon’, certainly left me feeling chilly and grown very old, and I wasn't even there. Parties can’t be memorialised in a way that captures their in-the-moment vibrancy and point, I think.

But most of the collection is not this, I'm glad to report: much more of it is reviews and essays from the 1970s through to the early 2000s, and these are very good indeed. Memorialising old books is a much more worthwhile business than memorialising old parties, and Nicholls is insightful in his judgments and often witty in his prose.

Both Tau Zero and Ringworld derive their intellectual force from grand scientific concepts, concepts of such massive scale that they both deserve their reputation as landmarks (spacemarks) in the history of hard science fiction—that surprisingly small but important branch of the genre in which the science is central and not simply decorative.

But there are two important differences. First, Tau Zero is based on a known scientific principle that has been in the public domain for 68 years, while Ringworld is based on a grandiose piece of engineering whimsy that has a vanishingly small chance of ever finding fruition in the real universe. Secondly, Tau Zero takes its initial conception and develops it with a satisfying logic; Ringworld takes its initial conception and treats it rather like the man who spends £300 on a Hi-Fi Stereo, and shows it off by playing stereophonic records of a ping-pong match.

He develops a number of interesting and resonant critical positions—‘the writers of hard sf are as a group probably more, not less, Romantic than their soft sf colleagues’ for instance—and is especially good on the crossovers between SF and theology, and the sublime. On this latter he is surely right with what he calls ‘a point that’s not often made: one thing about the sublime is that it is dehumanizing. It makes us feel small and unimportant and indeed hardly there at all. I think this feeling, of our vulnerability and littleness in the context of cosmic vastness and indifference, is one of the root feelings of space fiction, a sort of default feeling that almost all space fiction at some point approaches. When you hit science fiction’s “enter” key, that’s where the cursor goes.’ I don’t know if dehumanizing is quite le mot juste where the Sublime is concerned, but Nicholls is absolutely right about its centrality to space fiction, and actually to SF more generally, and how much of that depends upon the existential implications of scale as such.

You see Nicholls developing and improving as a critic as you read through. His earlier pieces are flatter, sometimes concerned with irrelevancies such as his personal rankings of writers (his 1973 review of The Farthest Shore includes this who-cares account of children’s literature: ‘I would put Ursula Le Guin in the first rank, along with Alan Garner, and perhaps T.H. White from an earlier generation. They are closely followed by William Mayne, Phillipa Pearce, John Gordon and J.R.R. Tolkien.’) But as he goes on, his pieces becomes sharper: more insightful and thought-provoking and also funnier. There’s a brilliant 1990 review/essay on Ian Watson, the great if now catastrophically underappreciated British writer—one day I hope to write a short monograph on Watson’s writing—and an excellent paean to Gene Wolfe (‘he is the metaphysical poet of science fiction; he has a great deal more in common with Donne or Marvell or Crashaw than he does with Heinlein. I’m being quite serious, while fully conscious of rendering myself liable to incarceration in Pseud’s Corner.’) He’s also nicely pointed about his friend and co-editor Clute:

Another celebrated critic represented [in this collection] is John Clute who, when in obscurantist mode, as he is in this analysis of the Hyperion novels of Dan Simmons, is magisterially opaque: “When history cannot be perceived with any clarity, the consequent absence of a firm past haunts as Hyde haunts Jekyll through doppelgänger erosions of public masks.” Well, yes. Or no. I think.

Clute supplies the introduction to this volume, proceeds from which will go towards maintaining the SF Encyclopedia, currently in its 4th edition. It’s a worthwhile cause and the book is very much worth its purchase price. I might add that I read the ebook version, which contains various typos and slips, presumably from where the text has been scanned to make the file (James Blish becomes ‘Jina Blish’ at one point [update: this has now been corrected]). But that’s a small nitpick. Overall this is an often brilliant and always entertaining collection.