The lesson I learned from that is that the editor was an idiot but I suppose every reviewer needs that kind of arrogance.Īnyway, I kept at it because it was something I could do, and that I enjoyed doing, and it gave me a (vanishingly small, in most cases) readership. I don’t think that was quite what I said, but I suppose it was close. Delany, which was never published, though in the next issue the editor of the fanzine said he’d received a review of Triton that said it was all about philosophy. My first was a review of Triton by Samuel R. I didn’t feel comfortable writing the sorts of things that were popular in fanzines at the time, except for the book reviews that did appear occasionally. I don’t know what it’s like now, because I’ve rather drifted away from all of that, but at the time there was a lot of peer pressure to write for fanzines. But I never thought about writing them until I started getting involved in fandom.

This goes back to a time when newspapers used to publish things like book reviews and film reviews. Paul Kincaid: Personally, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t read reviews. None of this counted in the long run, of course, although I still think for a beginning writer it was a good way to learn. Ball or Ken Bulmer than write a novel of my own. Overall, it was much easier and quicker to write an opinion piece on a new book by Brian N. By looking different it made me read it again and look at it with some objectivity.

It was a way of writing something and seeing it in print-or at least, typed out by someone else, which at the time felt almost as good because after the process of being retyped, with bits cut out or changed or just got wrong, it looked different. I was writing for fanzines published by Peter Weston and Charles Platt, and others.

I was young and inexperienced, unguided, learning slowly as I went along. In this conversation convened by Dan Hartland, they begin by talking about their first encounters with “reviews,” whatever those might be.Ĭhristoper Priest: Before I wrote and published my first novel I had already written several amateurish book reviews. His most recent book is a critical study of the novels of one Christopher Priest (2020). Paul is primarily a critic a prominent reviewer for many years at Strange Horizons, he has written for almost every SFF organ of note.

His most recent novel is The Evidence (2020). Chris is best known as a novelist, whose genre-defying work includes The Prestige (1995), The Affirmation (1981), and The Islanders (2011). In this, the first of our The Author and the Critic series in this special, Christopher Priest and Paul Kincaid discuss an involvement in fiction and reviewing that dates back to at least the early 1970s, as well as the present and possible futures of SFF criticism.

Iain M. Banks by Paul Kincaid