I recently had the opportunity to review Michael A. Allen and Justin S. Vaughn’s edited volume, Poli Sci Fi: An Introduction to Political Science through Science Fiction, for a special issue of The Forum on science fiction. This is most notable in that Poli Sci Fi was released in 2016, making it nearly a decade old when I was first asked to review it.

Book reviews are more typically solicited within the first few years of a book’s publication, but I came away from the process convinced that we should more frequently review books a decade or more after publication. Such retrospective book reviews (as I will call them) have merits I will outline below.

First, a caveat—this should not replace the standard book review written shortly after publication to inform those in the field of a book’s content and merits. Retrospective book reviews could instead serve as a complement to this more established kind of review.

I see at least a few benefits of retrospective book reviews. First, it shifts the reviewer’s focus in a productive way. In reviewing Poli Sci Fi, I was able to focus less on the merits of the volume and more on its place in a literature that has continued to develop. I do note that the volume is oriented toward classroom use and that I think it succeeds in providing ample, engaging fodder for discussion in such spaces, but I was able to spend more time writing about how the volume relates to other scholarship that preceded and that has since succeeded it.

Continuing on this first point, writing a decade rather than a year after a book’s publication allows one to see how others built on that book, and the reviewer can thus identify the book’s place in the trajectory of a given literature. Within scholarship on popular culture in Political Science, for example, Poli Sci Fi follows much work from the 2000s and early 2010s in focusing on film, television, and popular book series. This literature has increasingly broadened to include media such as video games—indeed, Allen has since written a book using video games for pedagogical purposes similar to those of Poli Sci Fi.

Second, although others will have engaged with a book being reviewed a decade or more after its publication, gaps in the literature will surely persist. Standard book reviews often offer recommendations for future research, but not all such recommendations will be acted upon. A retrospective book review can identify those paths not yet taken. As I note in my review, for example, comics rarely appear in such work on popular culture in Political Science despite their prevalence and the popularity of television shows, films, and video games based on comics.

Third, a retrospective book review can raise new questions that changing conditions might produce. Poli Sci Fi appeared in print before the streaming boom of the late 2010s, for example, and long-running shifts in the video game industry have resulted in sales, consolidations, and eliminations of major companies and studios in the industry, ownership of which is becoming increasingly globalized. Such changes in the media landscape may open new lines of inquiry for future research.

Finally, a book’s reception may change over time. There are trends in Political Science as there are in any field, and giving scholars some distance between a book’s publication and a review might allow for a more informed or dispassionate view of how a book contributed to the field. A retrospective book review may be able to capture shifting disciplinary assessments of a work in ways that a standard book review would not be able to do.

In short, my takeaway from reviewing a decade-old book was that we should do more that more often. This need not be limited to the occasional special issue.