A Reviewer's Lot is Not a Happy One (a Happy One)

Not so much soul-searching as sleep-searching as I've been reading David Marusek's excellent Counting Heads and I don't think I could sleep if I tried.  So I've decided instead to answer a couple of remarks made about genre reviewing in different places.  I agree with one comment and disagree with another but I felt like drawing attention to some of the issues contained within said comments.

First off, the estimable Jonathan Strahan points out (via Miss Whitney Houston Mr. Paul Raven) that:

A quick one: all reviewers of science fiction should be banned from using the phrase ‘what it means to be human’. If they were, then they might explain what it is they think they see in an SF novel without dropping into safe cliche.  I’ll never forget when I was maybe fifteen years old, an English teacher of mine said it wasn’t enough to say that something in a book was evocative, you had to say what it evoked and what that meant. This phrase, which I’ve used often myself, is SF’s equivalent of ‘the imagery is evocative’.  Surely we can be smarter than that?

Now, I'm sure this comment is well meaning and I kind of agree.  It's easy as a critic to fall into patterns of speech and glib sound bites and nowhere is this more toxic when it comes to earnest attempts at intelligent commentary.  Fiction writers have their cliches, we have ours.  Slap on wrist duly registered, won't do it again miss.

However, with regards to the line "what it means to be human", I can't help but think that this cliche wouldn't pop up half as often if maybe people stopped writing so many books about the topic.  It's like US Indie cinema, which seems to have entirely swallowed the therapist's lexicon for talking about the self.  This was touched upon by Adam Curtis in his recent documentary and the end result is endless films about mid-life crisis and bourgeois ennui that end with people "coming to terms with themselves".

The thing I dislike the most about this kind of essentialist writing is the fact that it inevitably reduces something as complex and barely understood as the self or the nature of humanity to a blend of pop-psychology, Freudian pseudo-science and spiritual nonsense.  This was one of the things I adored about Peter Watts' Blindsight (and yes, I do realise that Watts is becoming to me what Gene Wolfe is to John Clute... but I really liked Blindsight) was the fact that Watts asked the similarly introverted question "what is it to be intelligent?" but then proceeded to answer it by drawing from the philosophy of mind and cognitive neuropsychology, which are areas of knowledge devoted to answering those kinds of questions properly.

So the best way to stop critics using cliches is probably for writers to stop writing cliches themselves.  That way us critics have to come up with new critical vocabularies to talk about your books.  This isn't so much an excuse than it is an explanation though.

 

 

Secondly, I wanted to draw attention to some remarks made by George Zebrowski.  David Soyka reviewed two collections of short fiction, one of which contained Zebrowski's story "Settlements".  In a short comment, Soyka claimed that Zebrowski's story strived for complexity but delivered only heavy-handedness.  This prompted Zebrowski to make the following extraordinary comment:

I doubt that this reviewer bothers to confront himself with views contrary to his own. For example, Nick Gevers' comment on "Settlements" ---"intelligence crackles on the page," or the dozens of other praising comments. Along with Kipling's comment to treat favorable or unfavorable views of one's work as "imposters," I am baffled by the certainty of all commenting camps, which stand on foundations of water. These are commentators of much opinion but little truth, which is much harder to come by and requires the kind of work that few are willing to undertake. A review does not help the author--it's too late--and it does not help a reader who is not a sheep and makes of his own mind; so it only helps the reviewer, whose name is famed. Reviewers, as opposed to social historians who are the true literary critics, come on the battlefield when the war is over and shoot the wounded. As a reviewer in my early career, I wrote pages that I have come to regret, and wonder how it all came to me with such revelation. Some of the most famous reviewers of this field have said as much, but when asked to take it back in later years they fell silent. SF without thought is worthless, but thought always seems too "heavy" to the lazy.

As you can see, my response prompted three attempted rebuttals by Zebrowski over a period of about forty five minutes.

I haven't read "Settlements", so for all I know, it's the greatest Science Fiction story ever told.  However, I do take exception to an author who disagrees with a negative review comparing reviewers to people who shoot the wounded on battlefields (especially when he then tries to enlist the comments of other, more positive, critics in an attempt to prove Soyka wrong).  In terms of the world of literature, SF critics are pretty much the lowest of the low, but I do think that we should be able to express our opinions without being be-littled and insulted.

Comments

[Paul Raven]

Whitney Houston? WTF?

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Heehee :-)

I initially wrote it simply as "Mr. Paul Raven" and then I read it out loud in that voice they use to introduce diva-style singers.

"And now... Miss... Whitney... Houston!"

It amused me.