The Looming Battle of the Critics.

It's an interesting time to be a genre critic.

As some may know, I'm a regular poster at the Urban Drift forums. Set up by Gabe Chouinard as a result of floating a manifesto for better SF reviewing a number of months ago, the forums have since grown into a small community of reviewers, writers and even the editor of the BSFA's critical journal Vector. As is perhaps inevitable in such conditions, we've taken a rather hard line on bad reviewing and bad editorial practice. In short, if I've been systematically alienating established critics, it's because I'm not alone in thinking that SF criticism can and must do better.

As was pointed out a while ago, this kind of thing also happened with the birth of the New Wave and, as might be expected given this fact, the reactions to us have been more or less tolerant and friendly.

However...

Jetse de Vries is a genre writer and is also on the editorial staff at Interzone, arguably one of the most influential and respected SF magazines in Britain and the world. A while back, Interzone changed editorial team and one of the most notable changes is the move away from featuring fewer and longer reviews in columns that allowed the likes of John Clute to become known not only for their style but also for their insight as they got more room in which to dissect books. At the moment, Interzone features quite a number of reviews but limits them to 350 words each.

A little while ago, Interzone brushed up against the opinions of the reviewers at Urban Drift and, unsurprisingly, people seemed to think that their reviews section would be improved by fewer but more substantial reviews, as used to be the case in the old days. Jetse has decided to take issue with this assessment. However, what is interesting is that he is using the traditional tactics of the dumbing down editor and pleading either space or economics as a reason for shifting to shorter and less substantial reviews, he actually tries to defend the 350 word limit on aesthetic grounds (they're less bloated, harder to write and are more generic) as well as on the grounds that they are the industry standard ("But mum... everyone else is jumping off bridges!") and links to a particularly weak review of Peter Watt's Blindsight in an attempt to prove his point.

Niall Harrison, the editor of Vector and reviews editor of Strange Horizons has responded to Jetse's post not only by taking issue with some of the factual claims he makes but also his aesthetic judgments. Needless to say, I think Niall is quite correct. 350 words is the standard at SFX and SFX's standards are as low as you can get on the paid review circuit (though it is worth noting, Interzone apparently do not pay their reviewers) so to try and defend the practice on aesthetic grounds is a lost cause from the start.

I would like to draw attention to two particular claims that Jetse makes:

Firstly, that it is harder to write a short review than it is to write a long review.

This is something of a revealed truth in the reviewing world partly because you hear it so often and partly because, like most articles of faith, it rarely gets questioned. On one level it is certainly true that it is harder to write a detailed analysis of a 100,000 word novel in 350 words than it is in 1000 or 2000 words. However, I am not sure how it follows that this makes a 350 word review more worthy of inclusion in a magazine. It is practically impossible to write a good 10 word review of a novel, does this mean that Interzone should start publishing 10 word reviews?

In truth, this aesthetic principle has little to do with actual word counts and everything to do with discipline. If you are going to make ten points about a novel in a clear and interesting manner then it is harder to do this the lower your limit of words go. However, this does not mean that it follows that a 350 word review is therefore better as most reviewers would simply spend their 350 words writing about less than they would if they had a longer word count. Consider my review of Blindsight and compare it to the one cited by Jetse. My review might be a trifle over-long and could probably do with an edit but it simply could not be written in 350 words. Jetse's cited review does not engage with the ideas that Watts writes about, it does not tackle the subtext or analyze Watts' clever subversion of the first person narrative, it doesn't even use the word "consciousness", which is a bit like reviewing the Star Wars films without using the word "Jedi". Simply put, a 350 word limit does not encourage discipline, it encourages shallow reviewing and a shallow review is always a bad review. It makes actual criticism impossible.

Secondly, that Interzone is aimed at the casual reader.

It is interesting to note that Jetse considers people who care enough about genre fiction to track down magazines largely composed of short stories written by up-and-coming rather than established authors to be "casual" readers. I would have thought that this constituted the hard core of SF fandom and that this was why the likes of Clute were once allowed to be more expansive in their thinking. Setting that issue aside, if "casual readers" are the new demographic of Interzone then it makes perfect sense for IZ to copy the characteristics of the market-leader SFX. But SFX does run hagiographic interviews with whichever SF starlet most recently got her baps out in a photoshoot but doesn't run short fiction... and yet Interzone still has its short fiction.

Let us not be coy, Jetse nails his colours to the wall when he says this:

Or, to quote a colleague: "the online reading experience is facilitated by terseness". So in order to snare those rapid surfers, one needs to display brief and succinct reviews, not prolonged protractions from a geeky pedestal.

Isn't that inspiring? It's a wonder why they bother with SF at all, they should just have pictures of naked women in Spock ears, give away free whoopee cushions and have Richard Littlejohn as a columnist. Heaven forfend that they might want to pay someone to produce more thoughtful pieces in order to encourage people to think a little bit about their SF and maybe educate a few palates in the process. All of this from the editorial staff of the magazine that once introduced Clute to the British public.

The reason why I mention all of this is because, as Niall pointed out, Eastercon is at hand and Jetse and Niall are due to appear on the same panel with Paul Raven moderating (Paul is one of the Urban Drift mob and a reviewer for Interzone). In the world of SF criticism, this is what you call a "keeps them off the streets" event and might well prove to be the first instance of the Urban Drift mob making their presence felt in the wider fan community. Niall's a very polite chap by all accounts and I'm sure the exchange will be passionate and fascinating.

Paul Raven's also going to be liveblogging the event so keep an eye on VCTB.

Comments

[gabe]

wait... we aren't disagreeing here, Jonathan. I agree with you whole-heartedly.

Maybe my comment at Torque Control explains my stance a little more clearly. Forcefully, anyway.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I saw that, I think Kev's being defeatist but IZ's history of having longer and more critical pieces is one that's definitely worth preserving.

Not because it's what fandom demands.

But because 350 word limits on reviews tend to guarantee poor reviews.

Which is where we came in and where the debate is.

[trollface]

Is it just me, or does the longer length of the second review of "Light" linked by Martin merely allow the author to waffle on aimlessly for three paragraphs before even mentioning the book? It's a further two until he actually starts *discussing* the book. And, when I say "discussing", I mean explaining the plot and quoting large sections of the book for the next eight paragraphs.

It's actually the 14th paragraph before we actually get into any analysis, and that analysis is rather shallow in and of itself and, again, relies heavily on large quotes. The actual review itself only runs to 454 words.

So, I'm sure there is an argument for longer reviews having more depth and allowing the author to explore things in more depth (in fact, I think it's hard to deny that they can), but these examples really aren't it.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

You're right Trollface, it's not a particularly tight review and for all the length he's been given to play with he wastes a lot of it waffling and summarising the plot.

In truth, that review of Light is probably a good example of a review that could have been written in 500 words by a disciplined reviewer.

In Martin's defence, he was responding to the idea that it's "newspaper standard" to have 350 word reviews. Clearly it's not the case that newspapers stick to short reviews and that Banks piece is a good example of a newspaper publishing a longer piece.

Even if it is... well... a bit pish really.