Thoughts on SF Criticism, Technology and Accessibility

An interesting thought just occurred to me and seeing as I'm procrastinating fiercely, I thought I'd share it with all and sundry.

One thing that I thought was particularly interesting about the discussion regarding the British Science Fiction Association's Award for Non-Fiction was that a number of established critics seemed to have quite an elitist view of the nature of professional SF criticism (namely the production of critical pieces for which you are paid).  For many, it appears that the field of debate is the dead and processed tree.

By this I mean that "serious criticism" isn't something that occurs on blogs or websites but in books of collected criticism, critical journals and maybe dead tree magazines.  If you spend a bit of time immersing yourself in this world (as I have in an attempt to improve the quality of my output) you'll find that a lot of the same names keep popping up.  As one participant in the thread put it, they all know each other to have a been with.

In and of itself, this very top-down structure is not a problem.  By and large the "usual suspects" are excellent insightful writers who frequently earned their reputations after decades of work pumping out book reviews and editing journals, magazines and websites.  My problem is not that there IS an elite (because every discipline needs one) but rather the distinct lack of permeability to the upper echelons of critical discourse.  The reason for this is not a lack of quality writers (because a look at any decent SF review site will show you how good some writers can be) but rather barriers to access that are becoming increasingly absurd with every passing year.

One of the more interesting links on the British Science Fiction Association's website leads you to Rob Hansen's potted histories of British SF fandom and the BSFA.  One of the more interesting historical notes buried in the avalanche of names, dates and acronyms is the initial reaction to the concept of the SF fan.  Quite a recent invention, the implications of populism and uncritical love that seemed to accompany the term initially repulsed many of the more established fans.  The result seems to have been a polarisation of interest in SF.  On the one hand you have fandom, a once geeky cult that has now turned into a billion dollar industry and on the other you had the critics who infiltrated academia and tried to carve themselves out a niche there, combatting the indifference and scorn of mainstream litgeeks.

The result of this schism was the appearance of peer-reviewed "critical journals" such as today's Foundation and New York Review of Science Fiction.  A look at both websites will reveal something quite interesting.  Both publications are quite expensive and exist solely in dead tree form.  This is not because they are particularly well made publications (the NYRSF, much like its website, looks amazingly unprofessional) but because they use the academic publication model.  This model publishes for a niche market and relies largely upon volunteers for content and peer review but, because it produces for such a small market, the costs are high despite the seemingly low overheads.

One thing you'll notice about both of these publications is that they pretty much both ignore the internet.  Their business model unchanged they produce dead tree journals that they pay to ship around the world to their subscribers who all pay by cheque.  Not only can you not pay online for anything (except through third party re-sellers) but you can't access the articles online.

This is a real physical boundary as it means that in order to even gain access to high quality critical content, you have to subscribe to some expensive magazine that will take ages to get to you OR you have to buy the frequently ruinously expensive non-fiction genre publications.  This boundary is so real that many in the discussion over at Torque Control even see it as reason for not having a non-fiction award.  In fact, I think that many like that boundary being there... keeps the "fans" out.

The problem with this model is that not only is it needlessly exclusive seeing as online publications such as Strange Horizons and The Internet Review of Science Fiction (with all of its administrative difficulties) can and do publish really top level criticism but it's also actively behind the times in academic terms.  Many academics such as Nick Bostrom (who I interview here) put their articles online for free download.  The reason for this is that research and discourse only ever benefit from having more people look at it and engage with it.  By locking itself away behind the walls of an anachronistic business plan, SF criticism is not only making itself less accessible to people who might have something to contribute to it, it's also making itself less and less relevant to the experience of reading SF.

To say that it is ironic that SCIENCE FICTION criticism is reliant upon anachronistic business models is something of an understatement.  My only hope is that such needless barriers to discourse are merely a reflection of carelessness and laziness rather than any concerted effort to keep non-academics out.

Comments

[Niall]

Interesting post; I might respond more later. A few brief comments for now.

1. NYRSF isn't peer-reviewed, though it is thoroughly edited.

2. The print-vs-online debate has actually been raging on a mailing list I'm on this past week -- http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/iafa-l -- with some detail on the business models for things like Foundation. Might be worth joining and skimming the archives; look for emails from Gabe Chouinard in the first instance.

3. Some of the stuff in V250, which should be dropping through your door later this week, is also not entirely irrelevant.

4. Locus, for one, is starting to put a lot more content online -- see the Gary Wolfe review that went up last week, for instance. This is a good thing.

5. I personally am not comfortable considering myself a "critic", for reasons that are complex and hard to articulate.

6. I'm trying to avoid coming down too hard on one side or the other of the whole non-fic award debate, but to be fair to the proponents of a juried award, I think they make some valid points that have nothing to do with keeping fans out.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Niall -

Thanks for tipping me off about iafa-l. Interesting stuff and I'm glad to hear that there's movement on the accessibility issue. Even if it is still early days.

Locus are an interesting case as I'm sure they used to do more online stuff than they do now. I remember a period when they'd put up loads of one off reviews and I think they were really trying to make the website work as a magazine in its own right, but that impression faded and now they just do news. It is good to see Wolfe's review up though.

I have complete sympathy for the people who think a popular non-fiction award is impossible as well as those who think it's inadvisable and I don't really think that they're elitist. However, SF criticism has been a closed niche for a LONG time and a lot of the usual suspects have been doing this kind of thing for ages. With all the best will in the world, you get set in your ways and sudden talk of access and throwing the whole thing open might well be understandably jarring.

...and I shall look forward to V250. Hurrah!

[Paul Kincaid]

I have a real problem with the model you are suggesting, because it doesn't tie in with reality as I know it.

For a start, I am perhaps one of the professional critics you refer to, in that I am a critic and I do get paid. Though it has to be said that if I added together every penny my criticism has earned over the last 30 years it might almost match one month's salary (after tax) in the day job. Where critics are concerned, professionalism is an attitude not a bank statement. I write, like every leading critic I know in the field, for books, for print magazines and for websites - the only people I've ever heard suggest that there is any distinction made between the various media are the people who comment upon them, not the people who write for them. And I came into the field like an awful lot of critics have done, through fandom. I have no academic standing (I have no degree other than a BA), but I have never had any problem writing for academic journals or presenting papers at academic conferences. The impermeability you speak of is not something I have encountered.

I don't think the magazines foster an elite, since most of them seem to be permanently desperate to find new contributors. The only block to getting into these places is whether or not you can do the job. And as for being any sort of a closed shop - I for one had never even heard of Graham Sleight before his reviews started to crop up in that bastion of elitism, NYRSF.

And castigating print magazines for not having a very good web presence is rather meaningless, isn't it? Why should a magazine good at producing something on paper be expected to be equally good at producing something on the web? By that light, at least they are trying. Where are the print versions of Strange Horizons or SF Site or SciFi Weekly?

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Paul -

Thanks for your comments, they are much appreciated.

Firstly, I'm not really accusing anyone of elitism (though some of the comments on Niall's blog come dangerously close to it), as elitism implies an active desire to keep the great unwashed out. As you say, journals love contributors and I even have a hazy memory of dealing, as an undergraduate, with someone running a Babylon 5 conference who invited me to submit something.

My problem is that, from where I am sitting, the likes of NYRSF, Foundation and SFS seem forbidding in a way that is not the case with places like Strange Horizons or IROSF. To me that means that there's an access problem.

Maybe my perceptions are coloured by my own insecurities or the fact that I do have a heavily academic background and so see SFS as being on a par with getting into Analysis or International Security (where they don't so much reject you as laugh at you). Maybe I am perceiving barriers where none exist but I can only talk about the view from where I'm sitting and all I can say is that the reason why I haven't submitted anything to NYRSF, Foundation or SFS is because they seem less accessible than something like Strange Horizons.

Conversely, as someone who has been in the biz since before the net was a glimmer in Al Gore's eye, maybe you are not aware of a psychological divide between electrons and dead trees because 30 years ago you either got published in dead tree or you didn't get published.

The talk about the net and the need to make stuff available online is about making these journals seem more accessible both to critics who are coming up now (such as myself) and to fans of SF in general who might stumble across an old Foundation article and... I don't know... feel inspired to do the same thing.

The point of my post was that it is to EVERYONE's benefit for SF criticism to be as open and as accessible as possible. By denying that I "fit with reality" you seem to be saying that everything's fine. Well, from where I'm sitting they could be improved... things can ALWAYS be improved and today's technology seems to provide a fairly obvious way forward.

[Paul Kincaid]

You know, the Times Literary Supplement has always seemed to me like the epitome of what you are talking about: the wall between poor little me and the serious big boys out there. I never imagined I could be published in the TLS. Then I wrote two reviews for a fanzine, which were butchered by the fanzine (cut down from around 1,000 words apiece to one paragraph). In a fit of god knows what, hubris or pique or something, I sent those reviews off to the TLS. They were accepted, published, they were the very first pieces of paid writing I ever did.

When you're on the outside, everything looks forbidding in some way. That's partly because, whatever they do, there is no way for publications to avoid appearing like that. When websites like Strange Horizons started up I would look at them and I could not imagine myself ever writing for them, because I could not imagine a way into that charmed circle. Even after 20-odd years of building a reputation as a critic, I felt about Strange Horizons exactly the same way you feel about NYRSF. Then I got into Strange Horizons and almost at the same moment into SF Site and I cannot now imagine why it seemed so forbidding.

This is not to say that everything is hunky-dory. It never is and it never will be. But actually sf criticism probably is just about as open and accessible as it's possible to be - and it is still going to seem forbidding and inaccessible to people.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Well there's always that desire to stay within your comfort zone and stick to the people and places you know, so you could be right that this is all in my head but the point remains that these journals LOOK forbidding even if they're not.

Firstly, there's the fact that unless you're interested and motivated enough to subscribe, you can't find out what the house style and quality threshold is. That's forbidding.

Secondly, there's the fact that NYRSF has a dead tree only submission process, that seems to say "only try and get into this journal if you're serious... we don't even READ our email".

Thirdly, there's the turn around time and the copyright issue. In order to get published you're essentially embargoing your work until they can put it online and even if you're accepted there's the inevitable dead tree time scale where you wait ages. So you can get a book, write the review and send it off and then wait ages before being turned down meaning that the book has aged, other people are more likely to have written it and even if you self publish on a blog it'll generate less hits as its old.

If you say to me that it's all in my head and that really I should just send some stuff off because they're always looking for contributors then I believe you but I've only learned this from you now and the thread over on Niall's blog. Everything about the journals and their web presence says "keep out".

To me, that's a problem.

[Paul Kincaid]

Two points: 'unless you're interested and motivated enough to subscribe, you can't find out what the house style and quality threshold is'. Unless you're interested and motivated enough to find out about a journal - any journal - you shouldn't be considering submitting to it.

Secondly, everything I've ever done with NYRSF - including my initial on spec submission - has been by email. I have no idea where you get the idea that they don't read it.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

1 - It's one thing to "find out about a journal" but another to commit to a subscription. In the case of NYRSF you can buy one offs (though they were a number of months old when I did so, despite ordering the latest the site had) but I'm not sure about Foundation. Either way, you could make this process so much easier by allowing you to pay through paypal.

2 - From their writer's guidelines :

" Do not send us unsolicited reviews through e-mail, especially not binary files."

[Kathryn Cramer]

I confess to being the designer of the NYRSF web site which was designed in the mid-1990s. The main problem with having a website for NYRSF is that we publish monthly using a volunteer staff. And to date we have published about 4.3 million words of criticism and reviews. So the index and listing of back issues poses major technical problems. There's no real point in a major design overhaul without solving the index problem. I now work for Wolfram Research and have some vague notions that I might at some time in the future solve these problems with WebMathematica.

There are solutions to this kind of problem that cost money. In around 1999, I had extensive discussions with an ISP about our exact technical needs to get our whole index up and make it possible to buy individual issues. The figure he quoted me? Over $4,000 a year. A bit out of our range, given that we publish on a shoe string.

At one point, many years ago, an academic thought he might be able to get together a group of grad students to put out a version of the website that was searchable in fulltext. I gave him a bunch of files, but the grad student labor never materialized.

ISFDB has maintained a pretty good index, but by this point they are running 2 years behind. We have an index maintained by a volunteer, which I have just made a rudimentary site for as part of my personal site: http://www.kathryncramer.com/indexes_nyrsf/. (I haven't made a link from the main NYRSF site to it yet.)

Regarding the issue of why we don't just put all this online: (a) we sell back issues -- back issues for a magazine with 221 issues takes up a lot of space, which we have to pay for; (b) for the same reason that we don't have a whiz-bang online index.

Regarding the design of the mag itself, it is optimized for getting the magazine out no matter what on a monthly basis. Many years ago, Patrick Nielsen Hayden did the design (yes, it does have that late-80s I-did-it-on-a-Mac look). After the 100th issue we kicked around some ideas for a redesign, but decided against it. In the 150s, we considered having some pages with a 3 column layout, but agin reverted for practicality to Patrick's original.

Regarding the NYRSF submission process, well perhaps it does say somewhere in our site that you have to send words on paper (URL please so we can fix it!), but we long ago started accepting email submissions and these days most submissions come by email.

[Kathryn Cramer]

Oh, and meanwhile, I have just had a fight with one of the Wikipedia Secret Police over whether my essays in NYRSF were self- (i.e. vanity-) published. *rolls eyes*

[Farah Mendlesohn]

Just a few comments: please bear in mind that I haven't read everything in the comments list because--and you might want to consider this since you are worried about elitism--flickering white text on a black background as I scroll is murder on my migraine and my dyslexia. I read this site because of a link, I could never be a regular reader until you choose something more accessible.

But on to points:

Foundation only became peer reviewed about a decade ago when the situation among UK academics changed. Either we became peer reviewed or they coudn't afford to send us articles because they would receive no academic credit. As it happened, the spread of the internet increased the number of US contributors and they need peer review for tenure. However, we do take articles from authors and fans that we do not always peer review. We distinguish to the contributors but not in the journal because we trust our own judgement.

What Foundation does *not* have is an editorial advisory board. This is deliberate as I looked at the editorial advisory boards of other academic journals, then looked at the contents page, and was not happy at what I saw. Whether deliberately or not, it seems to close down the circle of contributors, quite possibly by creating a feedback loop in which people assume they can't get in, so they don't send anything. However, I am standing down this year, so policy may change.I don't know.

Re obtaining Foundation: as our web site clearly states, you can obtain single issues and back issues very easily from our mailing address in Liverpool. Large runs of back issues are very cheap.

Re going on line: we've been talking about this for some time. For Foundation the limit is staff. The current plan is that a year after myself and the production editor, Edward James, have retired and had a much needed rest, we are going to tackle the issue, but currently we just don't have the resources to do this. Furthermore, the last time we mooted going *entirely* on line to the membership (which would be feasible) many objected, so we are in a very win-some, lose-some situation.

Finally: small number of names. In the UK we all seem to know each other because the pool is small, not because we aren't welcoming to outsiders. Rather, should you put your head above the parapet and cry out in a strong critical voice, you are likely to find yourself hauled out of the trenches to lead the charge, as the likes of Niall Harrison and the rest of Third Row Fandom found out. It's easy to lose sight of how *young* some of the new names are (most are in their mid-twenties). But they were the first injection of a substantial number of new critics for about six years in the UK. And the *last* big injection of new voices in the UK is also still fairly young. Andrew Butler, Mark Bould, myself, Adam Roberts--none of us are yet 40. We, are, on average, ten years younger than the next cluster up. In academia in the US and the UK, this is because of the hiring freeze in the 1970s. I have no idea why it is also true when I sit on panels at US conventions.

Hi Kathryn :-)

Don't get me started on Wikipedia. I'm not surprised that they consider the NYRSF vanity publishing, they put Solaris Books (the Black Library's new SF imprint) up for removal because it was non-notable.

Thanks for the comments on the difficulties of putting stuff online. I, of course, realise these difficulties as well as the business justification for not putting things up online.

One thing that does occur to me though is that you're treating the NYRSF's online presence as one problem when in fact, it's a series of problems. For example, you're not putting old out of print issues online because of the sheer number of back issues and the cost of hosting all of them. But the problem with that approach is that essentially the problem gets larger with each and every issue you put out. Every issue means MORE stuff to host, MORE issues to make available for download and so on.

Might it not be worth drawing a line under the back catalog and starting afresh from one particular issue, then returning to the older issues once you get the cash?

Weirdly enough, the indie roleplaying game scene might be a good model to work from here. Lots of game companies run with little more than a website, an email address, a paypal account and their stock in PDF form. Someone makes a payment requesting an issue, then they get it by email.

Just an idea and there's loads of ways of doing this and one can debate business models all day but I'm very glad to hear that there is a real desire from people like yourself to move the whole thing online.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Farah :-)

Thanks for the feedback regarding colours. You're right that grey on black is not particularly dyslexia-friendly. I chose the colour scheme because in my experience pale on dark is less tiring for the eyes but I think I'm due a redesign anyway so hopefully once that's done you will find the site a bit less painful.

I completely understand the need for Foundation to be peer reviewed. My problem with the academic model is not one of rigour but rather one of access, if only from the point of view of a consumer. The jealous protection of copyright that the academic journal model of publication demands (as Kathryn points out, because of back issues that need selling) is difficult for those who do not have the resources of a university behind them. Hence my view that online publication is ultimately the way to go.

The size of the critical pool is a self-fulfilling prophecy though. When a critical collection gets commissioned clearly the editors reach for their rolodexes and pull out the same few names partly because they're known quantities who will produce top quality stuff in a timely fashion. But also because... well... they're in people's rolodexes. The more the same names get picked out of the hat, the less new people get to prove themselves and that means that the pool struggles to get any bigger. At the moment the gap between where I am and where people who get into actual books are feels huge and impassable.

My original post was an attempt to express that feeling of distance and suggest that maybe, if I feel intimidated, maybe I'm not the only one.

[Kathryn Cramer]

Regarding the longterm prospects for release of material from NYRSF on the web, it will probably not be on an issue by issue basis, but rather thematically or collecting material related to specific authors. (There are some permissions issues here, but they should not be all that hard.) Not everthing we publish is equally notable, nor is the issue by issue format the most useful in the long run.

Underlying the index problem is a serious problem with archiving. We don't even have electronic files for the first 20-odd issues because I once threw a bunch of stuff off a full hard drive, not realizing we didn't have copies. Then there are the file format problems. We started in a very early version of Pagemaker. Adobe eventually forced us to switch from Pagemaker to InDesign. InDesign's importing from Pagemaker does not work very well. For example, it does not preserve italics.

We thought of the Pagemaker docs as the archival form of the mag, but Adobe has made that obsolete without providing us with a better alternative.

One reason for your feeling of distance and that we might be unapproachable is that you don't see us at the many conventions we attend because they are mostly in the US. We used to show up more in the UK back before airfares went up. Also, I had kids hand haven't managed to get to Europe since, though not for lack of trying. In terms of approaching me personally, I am frighteningly easy to find on the Internet.

[Kathryn Cramer]

Regarding whether we ignore the Internet: we would love to have a team of eager volunteers to rush in and solve all of the above described technological issues. But that's not what people who tend to volunteer with NYRSF tend to want to do. Rather, they want the opportunity to learn our editorial process.

Don't think we don't try, but since the web became an issue of magazines in the early 90s, I have been trying to seduce someone into coming in and dealing with this patch of quicksand so I don't have to. So far my wiles have not been convincing.

[Kathryn Cramer]

I have forgotten to say the obvious: OF COURSE you can send us stuff at NYRSF. By email even.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi again Kathryn :-)

I've heard the permission question before, most notably from Farah on the IAFA-L list but I'm reminded (and I'm going to be of no help whatsoever here) that when eBooks first appeared a company sprung up and approached loads of big names about buying the digital rights to their novels. Predictably, the publishing houses took said company to court and won because apparently, pre-digital copyright is considered to be bundled in with traditional copyrights when dealing with pre-digital manuscripts. So on the basis of that, I'd say that long-running SF journals have tacit permission to republish old articles in digital form. I assume that it's this legal convention that allows things such as the academic journal store.

Archiving is a tricky issue and I admit that I'm no expert here. Obviously, using proprietary formats (such as the ones you list) is a disaster waiting to happen. You need an open source format that keeps italics and bolds and accents and things. I agree, that's an issue... but then, so is having yellowing hard copies. But you are right, it is a technological problem that needs appropriate expertise to solve.

However, I do think that you're letting the huge forest obscure the view of the trees. Stuff like accepting paypal payments and updating the submission guidelines on the website require little work and would make things easier. You could even charge a little more for the paypal stuff (to cover admin and paypal's percentage) and that would still make for less journeys to the bank and might even get you more custom as lots of people have money sitting in their paypal accounts. I only joined the BSFA when they started taking paypal.

The distance I feel between me and A) dead tree publications and B) books might well be fueled by lack of conventions seeing as I have yet to go to a proper SF convention but let me put the matter on its head... is it not interesting that you need to attend conventions to be a part of the community? One of my motivations for writing the original post was my dismay at Andrew Butler's "Everyone who knows about SF criticism knows everyone else". Initially I felt this reeked of elitism and a closed-shop mentality but even if you strip out the sinister "you're not a part of the club" subtext, there's still a sense in which SF criticism seems to require you to jump through social hoops. Something that, interestingly, is less the case with academia.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Also, thanks for the invitation. I do plan on submitting to the NYRSF once I have something juicy :-)

[A.R.Yngve]

Really, there is no ill will at work here -- just technological problems messing with our lives, as usual.

(Though SF fans could perhaps be mildly scolded for not properly foreseeing how digitizing of text might become an issue in the near future... ;-))

Imagine if a new form of media, along the lines of Geoff Ryman's AIR -- or even more exotic -- replaced the Internet? Can you picture the mess of trying to convert the humungous amount of digital documents on the WWW to The Next Big Thing?
;)

[Kathryn Cramer]

"Predictably, the publishing houses took said company to court and won because apparently, pre-digital copyright is considered to be bundled in with traditional copyrights when dealing with pre-digital manuscripts."

This is another subject, but what happened was a major land grab by publishers, Hollywood, the music industry, etc. (The same crowd that whines about needing DRM to protect their digital "rights"; these are not "rights" they had in 1990; they took them essential by force.) Part of the issue was that publishing had to grab before Hollywood got there first.

I was there in the thick of it. I coached mystery writer Sarah Smith, in her negotiations with Random House. She was the first writer to have success negotiating Random House's amazingly inclusive horrifying digital rights clause when it first reared its ugly head.

This is, however, another story to be told at another time.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Yes, those kind of copyright cases invariably are land grabs. It's the IP equivalent of manifest destiny.

Sounds as though Sarah Smith was lucky to have you in her corner.

[Russell Letson]

I come to this conversation late (just empty coffe cups and a Danish with a bite out of it left), but feel the need to address the empty room. What exactly is the kvetching about? At the home page I see a blogful of coherent writing, a bully e-pulpit if ever there was one. I see addressed a range of works and some rather ambitious topics that indicate a lively, engaged mind. I see responses and give and take and intelligent discourse. So why all the anxiety about access and dead trees? In what way is anyone with this much material, posted where god and everybody can read and respond to it, cut off from critical, um, intercourse? Do you think there's a star chamber full of Secret Masters of Crit somewhere? I've been doing this stuff for thirty-plus years, man and geezer, and haven't found it--and I'm pretty much exclusively a dead-tree guy, so that's clearly not the way in. (Or, the thought belatedly occurs, is this some artifact of UK SF culture that I'm too Amurc'n to see?)

Come to think of it, what was my way in? Tracing backward, I think Charles Brown hired me on at Locus on the strength of reviews I'd done for SFRA publications. But David Hartwell gave me some Gregg Press intros before I had much of anything in print--maybe because we had mutual acquaintances in fandom (I think I met him at a Worldcon party). And my first paying gig came from a grad-school friend who was a few years ahead of me on the career path (later I wound up in the ditch), editing a volume of essays on Heinlein, and knew I knew something about the Old Man's work. So networking is part of the system. So what else is new? Running a blog seems to offer a lot more visibility than writing reviews for 300-circulation academic newsletters--and look at the heights to which that has brought me.

But seriously (and topic-shiftingly), as useful as the internet has been to me as researcher and writer, I have yet to see it provide me with a market for my wares, and as much as I might scribble--I mean, keyboard--to amuse myself on blogs and boards, I do need to get paid once in a while, and so far the dead-tree guys are the ones who have figured out how to do that. Of course, many of them have also claimed ownership of my work in perpetuity (even the ones for whom I didn't sign a work-for-hire contract) and locked it up in pay-for-access sites that even I can't get into without putting a nickel in the slot, but that's a different set of owies.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Russell --

Thanks for dropping by :-)

I think, to a certain extent you answer your own question at the end there. In criticism, "first you get the dead tree, then you get the women, then you get the power, then you get the teasmade" my post was an attempt at articulating the perception (which had freshly been encouraged by the goings on the Vector blog) that there's a small number of established critics who get the dead tree work (where the money lies) and then there's a BIG step down to the likes of me.

I think Farah and Kathryn corrected me by both saying "actually, we NEED more content" so what I was actually seeing was a system based on networking and "oh that guy's a pretty decent chap... I'm sure he'd write something for you" but when you're still finding your feet it can look like a bit of a closed shop.

As for the blog stuff... I think that if I hadn't started developing my blog in addition to writing the various articles (I actually started posting regularly because my ability to produce outstrips my ability to place things on websites) then I think I would have found the scene far more forbidding. Niall and Gabe have made me feel really quite welcome by linking here and talking to me but if you're just writing and posting off reviews, you can feel cut-off from a wider community and getting cool gigs like an article n a book can seem like a LONG way away if you aren't brought into the fold.

So my complaint was largely a matter of falsely seeing a glass ceiling when in fact there is none (this perception admittedly not helped by the NYRSF site having out of date submission guidelines) but I think, as a matter of principle and practicality making it as easy as possible for new writers to get into the scene is a practice really worth contributing real thought and energy towards.

[Russell Letson]

Women? Power? Tea? We are talking about SF criticism here, aren't we? It's a world where the joke about the academy also applies: the fights are so nasty because the stakes are so small. (The other line that nearly applies is Arlo Guthrie's: "I didn't *get* anything--I had to pay $100 and pick up the garbage.")

The high-visibility SF commentators I know got there by way of high productivity and considerable hustle--in fact, every professional writer I know followed the same path. There will always be more candidates than gigs, period. That's why there once were fanzines and why there are now blogs--to soak up the excess productivity. And despite the enormous benefits of speed and sponteneity, I still think the internet encourages clutter and under-edited writing, but then I was formed by dead-tree culture. (I even know what leading is, and sometimes think in column inches.)

Not only is there no glass ceiling, there's no penthouse or executive suite--just a bunch of pop-lit-nerds gathered around a new version of the mimeograph machine.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Russell --

I happily agree with everything you've said here. I was being facetious as regards to the women and power obviously but as with any system into which one places a degree of emotional involvement, one wants to do well. Even if there is no pot of gold (though that's a matter of frame of reference... if you look at reviewers in the RPG scene you'll find people aspiring to some day getting free stuff).

You're also right about online publication encouraging quick publication rather than proper editing. I'm actually terrible for properly proof reading my own work.

Thanks for dropping by, it's most appreciated.