I am honoured to share with you all A Traveller in Time: the critical practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan.
The untimely passing of Maureen Kincaid Speller has been deeply felt by the SFF community. This book, born of a collaboration between Nina, Maureen and her husband Paul, is a way of remembering Maureen and her extraordinary contribution to the SF field of criticism and fandom.
MAUREEN KINCAID SPELLER [1959-2022] was a reviewer, critic and lifelong science fiction fan. Active in SF fandom from the early 1980s, Maureen started reviewing for the BSFA magazine Vector in 1986. She served on the jury of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, chaired the Tiptree Award and taught the SF Foundation Critical Masterclass in 2016. Her criticism has appeared in a wide variety of venues, and her extended critical analysis of the 2012 BSFA and Clarke Awards was shortlisted for the BSFA Award for Best Related Work. In 1999 she was nominated for a Hugo in the Best Fan Writer category. Her passionate advocacy of new critical voices saw her appointed Senior Reviews Editor of the groundbreaking speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons in 2015.
Award winning Scottish artist Iain Clark will be providing the cover art for the book.
As we welcome Nina Allan into the Luna family, we asked her to tell us more about the book:
"WHEN Maureen fell ill in the spring of 2022, my first reaction, like that of many, was one of profound shock. Her untimely death has robbed us all, not only of her presence, but of the work she was yet to do. Maureen had long spoken of her desire to put together a collection of her criticism, and the original intention for this volume was that she would personally be involved in the selection and curation of her favourite pieces. Time was sadly against us, but the desire to preserve Maureen's work, to have it readily available to audiences old and new, has never felt more urgent. A Traveller in Time is by no means a complete collection - there is lots more out there to discover - but my hope is that it presents a faithful snapshot of Maureen as she was in life: spirited, passionate, knowledgeable and endlessly curious."
NINA ALLAN is a novelist and critic. Her work has been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award and the Hugo Award. Her novel The Rift won the BSFA Award for best novel and the Kitschies Red Tentacle. Her reviews and criticism have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, The Quietus and The Guardian. Nina's love of science fiction began early. A fan of Doctor Who from the age of six, her SF reading memories begin with the work of John Wyndham, Ursula Le Guin and H. G. Wells. Her new novel Conquest, a story of conspiracy theories, alien invasion and the music of J. S. Bach, is forthcoming from riverrun/Quercus in May 2023.
A Traveller in Time will be released in 2023. More news in the coming months.
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