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Paul Kincaid offers up thirty-three essays and lengthy reviews in What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction. These essays are divided by Kincaid into several different topics, ranging from a look at British author Christopher Priest (4 essays) to a look at the genre in whole or part.

Table of Contents:

INTRODUCTION

iii - Acknowledgements

v - Introducing Paul Kincaid - by David Langford

I : THEORY

3 - What it is we do when we read Science Fiction

13 - On the Origins of Genre

II : PRACTICE

25 - Anatomising Science Fiction

29 - How Hard is SF?

41 - The New Hard Men of SF

49 - Mistah Kurtz, He Dead

61 - The North-South Continuum

75 - A Year at its Best?

III : CHRISTOPHER PRIEST

89 - Blank pages: Islands and Identity in the Fiction of Christopher Priest

107 - Mirrors, Doubles, Twins

129 - "The Discharge"

133 - 10/10 May/May: Singling Out the Duplication in The Separation

IV : BRITAIN ...

141 - Islomania? Insularity?: The Myth of the Island in British Science Fiction

149 - Apres moi...

153 - Elegy

157 - Touching the Earth

165 - Inside Chris Evans

173 - The Furies

189 - Maps of a Curious Sort: Landscape in the Fiction of Keith Roberts

197 - In the Pickle Jar: Appleseed or Mimesis

V : ...AND THE WORLD

207 - Secret Maps

237 - Exhibits

255 - Entering the Labyrinth

267 - Emptiness Gets Into You

273 - Forever Haldeman

277 - A Mode of Head-on Collision: George Turner's Critical Relationship with Science Fiction

291 - Heterotopic Borders

VI : GENE WOLFE

297 - Images of the Fall

307 - We Joke for Gods

321 - False Dog

325 - Attending Daedalus

VII : 1 APRIL 1984

331 - By-ways of the Shining Path

VIII : NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

335 - Notes

339 - Sources

343 - Bibliography

IX : INDEX

351 - Index - compiled by Leigh Kennedy Priest

Finalist for Hugo Award for Best Related Work

The 1987 publication of Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas helped trigger the British renaissance of radical hard science fiction and influenced a generation of New Space Opera masters. The thirteen SF novels that followed inspired an avid fandom and intense intellectual engagement while Banks's mainstream books vaulted him to the top of the Scottish literary scene.

Paul Kincaid has written the first study of Iain M. Banks to explore the confluence of his SF and literary techniques and sensibilities. As Kincaid shows, the two powerful aspects of Banks's work flowed into each other, blurring a line that critics too often treat as clear-cut. Banks's gift for black humor and a honed skepticism regarding politics and religion found expression even as he orchestrated the vast, galaxy-spanning vistas in his novels of The Culture.

In examining Banks's entire SF oeuvre, Kincaid unlocks the set of ideas Banks drew upon, ideas that spoke to an unusually varied readership that praised him as a visionary and reveled in the distinctive character of his works. Entertaining and broad in scope, Iain M. Banks offers new insights on one of the most admired figures in contemporary science fiction.

Brian W. Aldiss wrote classic science fiction novels like Report on Probability A and Hothouse. Billion Year Spree, his groundbreaking study of the field, defined the very meaning of SF and delineated its history. Yet Aldiss's discomfort with being a guiding spirit of the British New Wave and his pursuit of mainstream success characterized a lifelong ambivalence toward the genre.

Paul Kincaid explores the many contradictions that underlay the distinctive qualities of Aldiss's writing. Wartime experiences in Asia and the alienation that arose upon his return to the cold austerity of postwar Britain inspired themes and imagery that Aldiss drew upon throughout his career. He wrote of prolific nature overwhelming humanity, believed war was madness even though it provided him with the happiest period of his life, and found parallels in the static lives of Indian peasants and hidebound English society. As Kincaid shows, contradictions created tensions that fueled the metaphorical underpinnings of Aldiss's work and shaped not only his long career but the evolution of postwar British science fiction.