Snap! Criticism: Trace Elements and The Mulai

Dan Hartland What’s a conversation for? It’s an important question for this column, since its whole schtick is putting two things next to each other and listening to what they say. So let’s try and think it through a bit. One obvious—and for that reason, though bear with me, maybe insufficient—answer is “the exchange of information”: data, stories, points of view. In the best kinds of conversation, maybe each party learns something—about the other conversant, the topic under consideration, even about themselves. Criticism itself, not just this column, is regularly posited as a conversation; but so, too, are genres themselves: “different literary conversations, ones that stretch back in time and include not just authors but critics, publishers, and readers,” Lincoln Michel suggested recently. Science fiction in particular has often enthused about the idea of the works within it being in conversation with each other—although, as Kelly Link noted in her introduction to a 2023 reissue of…