I have, in my sweaty little palms, my contributor copy of A Traveller in Time – The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan. The book is officially launching on the 12th of September and is available to pre-order from the website of Luna Press Publishing.

My little piece about Maureen is included alongside pieces by Nina Allan, her husband Paul Kincaid, and her collaborators at Strange Horizons Aisha Subramanian and Dan Hartland. As a passing note, you can heard Dan and Aisha chatting to Paul about his own critical practice in the latest edition of their podcast.

When I first heard that this book was going to be a thing, I was intrigued to see what form the project might eventually take: Was it going to be an overview of Maureen’s entire critical career? Was it going to be one of those academic-style Festschrift things like the one they did for John and Judith Clute back in the day? Would it include the older stuff that Maureen wrote for Vector? Would it include any of her traditional fan-writing?

The answer is that A Traveller in Time draws mostly from Maureen’s later work including pieces written for Vector, Strange Horizons, and her blog Paper Knife. Aside from the fact that I think that Maureen would have approved, I also think this was quite a canny editorial decision as a lot of Maureen’s critical charm lay in her voice and that voice was often most evident when Maureen was writing for her blog and allowing her guard to slip on the assumption that nobody was paying attention, though of course some of us were. Nina Allan really has done an amazing job with this collection and it deserves to be read and remembered.