Val Nolan - Interzone 302, June 2025
“This is a keenly observed volume at pains to balance context and analysis. Its short, readable chapters evoke the feeling of chatting over lunch with your favourite professor about a book they are fascinated by. It does what the best critical writing ought to always do: it makes you want to return to the fiction it is discussing with your eyes open to a range of new interpretations. … Crucially, it is all written in Kincaid’s usual accessible style. Which is to say there is no impenetrable academese in this book, just a palpable fascination with its subject matter and a love of the critical process. The result deserves a place not just on the shelves of university libraries but, dare it be said, beside Pavane itself in the catalogues of local libraries all across England.”
Adam Roberts - Strange Horizons, 7 April 2025
Kincaid “foregrounds the importance and merit of Roberts’s novel in the teeth of its neglect. … [A] fine example of contemporary SF criticism.”
Gary K. Wolfe - Locus, 25 March 2025
”Paul Kincaid, [is] one of the most consistently illuminating and clear-headed of SF critics. … Kincaid makes a persuasive case for Pavane not only as Roberts’s masterwork, but as an essential text in SF history–particularly British SF … for those who have long known about the reputation of Pavane without fully grasping what makes it a classic, this is as persuasive an answer as you’re likely to get.”