Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years by Peter Nicholls:
Reviews/Comments
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Sketch of Peter Nicholls by Andrew Stephenson, February 1974
Steven Doran in BSFA Review #19, Winter 2022-2023: “The Roaring Years is a history told by an insider, observed both from the ‘salaried haven’ of academia and the ‘grubby frontline’ of publishing. He’s informed, incisive and honest, making a charming guide through the years when Wolfe, Dick, Aldiss and Herbert were bright young things, with many of their best-loved works yet to be written. There’s plenty more: essays on the state of the industry and the meaning of genre, lists of his 100 favourite writers (and 88 second favourites), and his own telling of The Great Tradition of Proto Science Fiction, covering Gilgamesh, Gawain, Rasselas and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.”
Andy Sawyer in Strange Horizons, 30 January 2023: “The Roaring Years is a long-awaited and welcome collection of material from the early days of Foundation up to ‘Big Dumb Objects and Cosmic Enigmas: The Love Affair between Space Fiction and the Transcendental’, originally a 1997 Science Fiction Research Association Conference speech [...] [T]his is a collection which demands to be read, perhaps browsed at random repeatedly, but kept and referred to. Some might dismiss it as a collection of ‘historical’ documents. Perhaps it is, but in browsing through these documents we see the territory of science fiction scholarship opened up and explored for us.”
Michael Dirda in The Washington Post, 10 November 2022: “It makes for irresistible reading and a reminder of the sheer zest that Nicholls brought to everything he wrote. [...] Nicholls’s literary journalism is often hilarious, with Hunter S. Thompson-like reports about drunken weekends at science fiction conventions, but it also features meticulous analyses of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore and Gene Wolfe’s The Urth of the New Sun. Befitting an admirer of the ultraserious F.R. Leavis, he holds the genre to high standards. At an exhibition of science fiction art, Nicholls observes ‘serried ranks of fantasy pictures, nearly unbelievably imaginative in exactly the same kitschy way as each other.’ Criticizing Larry Niven’s Ringworld, he rightly insists that ‘if a technical concept is not given meaning in a human context it simply does not matter.’ Literature, after all, is about why it matters to be alive.”
John Jarrold on Twitter, 2 September 2022: “It’s wonderful... and you can hear Peter’s voice so clearly... one of my oldest SF chums, and I miss him.”
Adam Roberts at Sibilant Fricative, 2 September 2022: “This is very good: a collection of reviews and essays by the late Peter Nicholls, of SF Encyclopedia editing fame [...] 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 [...] 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.’) [...] Overall this is an often brilliant and always entertaining collection.”
