Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years

At last: the collection of Peter Nicholls’s science fiction essays and reviews that he first planned way back in the 1970s, and reconsidered late in life but never completed. All proceeds from sales go to support the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, of which he was the founding editor in 1979 – writing much of the text himself – and co-editor for the second (1993) and third (2011 online) editions. Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years comprises 60 witty and insightful pieces by Peter Nicholls, including a long, previously unpublished speech and the new introduction he wrote in 2012. His long-time SF Encyclopedia colleague John Clute contributes a foreword. The collection was compiled by David Langford with the support and assistance of Peter’s family, and runs to more than 220,000 words of vintage Nicholls. Neil Gaiman: “Peter Nicholls was a unique voice in science fiction and fantasy criticism, able to speak as easily and fluently to an audience inside the genre as to the world at large and to academia. He loved fiction and words and used them in a way that was all his own, splurging on the joy and the wit and, where necessary, the snark, but always with an evangelical determination to make SF and Fantasy (and thus the world) a better place.” Malcolm Edwards, former Deputy CEO and Group Publisher at Orion Books: “I think that at his best Peter was the most brilliant writer about sf I ever knew (and I’ve known John Clute for 50 years or so). This will be an essential volume.”