Monday... er, Tuesday roundup: SF&F focus issue!

Monday Tuesday roundup, as today is kind of a do-over Monday for me (and apparently lots of other people as well).

This week's issue of PW is our annual fantasy & science fiction focus issue, so we've got a boatload of interesting stuff. My fellow editor Peter Cannon has an article on the history of alternate history, Scott Connors discusses the politics of military SF, and Cherie Priest finds that Baen Books is recovering well from Jim Baen's death. Over in reviews section, we have reviews of Marie Brennan's Midnight Never Come (starred), Judith Tarr's Bring Down the Sun, Fiona McIntosh's Goddess, Paul L. Bates's Dreamer, and Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Mercy, as well as Patti O'Shea's In Twilight's Shadow in the mass market section. Finally, over in blog-land, I have a post following up last week's discussion of series with a taxonomy of series readers. Whew! Good times.

Do let me know what you think of the articles in particular; it's not too soon to start planning next year's focus issue. I've already got a mental note to see about adding horror to the genre list.

Words not to use

this list of the "seven deadly words of book reviewing" is entertaining (though I do use "eschew" in conversation, thank you very much) but the real gold is in the comments. "The 'much-anticipated debut.' By whom? The author’s landlord?" Wha-pow! And indeed, many of the offending terms mentioned there are frequent victims of my red pen. Fortunately all my reviewers know better than to use "limn".

Monday roundup

Monday roundup, a bit late because I am moving very slowly today due to not much sleep.

On Notes from the Bookroom, I grouse about the cover for Charles Stross's Saturn's Children. I try to maintain a professional demeanor over there, so I deleted the paragraph in which I suggested the art had been done in a couple of hours with ray-tracing software and then turned in without the all-important final pass to add detail. Also, the legs of the woman "femmebot" on the cover are about three times the length of her torso and each thigh is about the same diameter as her waist. I have absurdly long legs for my height--Josh and I both wear a 30" inseam, but he's 5'8" and I'm 5'4"--so I know what long-legs-and-short-torso proportions look like. They do not look like that. Not even on futuristic indestructible sex robots.

This week's reviews include Lawrence Watt-Evans's The Summer Palace, Laura Anne Gilman's Free Fall (starred, and you can see her response here), Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two (I wish publishers would put the actual year in the titles of their YBs, rather than the volume number), and Jeff Somers's The Digital Plague.

I really will write up some books here soon; I even have them set aside to write about. I just haven't had the spare time or energy. Speaking of which, I'm off to bed early tonight. (For me, 11:30 p.m. is a good three and a half hours earlier than usual.)

A book with an orchid on the cover

Sometimes reviewing can seem a little stuffy and boring. Sometimes poetry can seem a little stuffy and boring. Sometimes poetry reviewing can seem, well, really stuffy and boring.

Other times you get to label John Updike's homage to fellatio "perhaps the worst poem ever written on any subject" and "bad by cosmic design", or describe W.H. Auden's pseudo-anonymous rhyming ode to picking strangers up for a quick blowjob as "Like a Penthouse Forum letter, except in lively verse, and with no women. It's sort of great, and also sort of cheesy and awful, and also occasionally hilarious."

The entire Auden poem is at that second link. It is not safe for work, and it is really really not safe for brain. It is some of the worst poetry--and the worst porn--I have ever read. I couldn't stop laughing. Enjoy.

Monday roundup

I've got a new post up at Notes from the Bookroom, wherein I assert that not all publicists are a bunch of idiots.

Reviewed in this week's PW: Robert Silverberg's Something Wild is Loose, Eric Brown's Kethani, Alan Campbell's Iron Angel, John Farris's Avenging Fury, and Lois McMaster Bujold's Passage, as well as Graham Masterton's The 5th Witch in the mass market section.

First post!

Now that I have delivered a strict smackdown to PW's blogging software (which, among other things, appears to timestamp in some other time zone), my first post on Notes from the Bookroom is up.

While I'm on the topic, this week's PW includes reviews of Tim Lebbon's Fallen, C.E. Murphy's The Queen's Bastard, Catherynne M. Valente's A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects, Allen Steele's Galaxy Blues, Pamela Freeman's Blood Ties, and Jack Ketchum's Only Child, as well as notes on the Subterranean special edition of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Douglas A. Anderson's Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Back from the dead

Now that everything is official, I can reveal the reason I needed to briefly cocoon this blog: I'm now blogging for Publishers Weekly, contributing a weekly post to Notes from the Bookroom. Keep an eye out for my pontifications, which I will post every Monday afternoon starting February 25th. Those of you on LiveJournal can befriend the RSS feed here; the rest of you can get it through Feedburner here.

Since most of my PW-related content will be appearing over there, this blog will focus more on my literary adventures: judging awards, attending conventions and readings, pondering about reading and writing, and discussing the few books I actually manage to read.

I will also keep pimping my PW work, of course. This week, check out Paul Allen's great interview with Paolo Bacigalupi. It got trimmed from the magazine at the last minute, so I'm delighted to see it up on the site (and currently the "top story" on the front page!). Still in the magazine: reviews of Orson Scott Card's Keeper of Dreams, Jim Butcher's Small Favor, Ellen Datlow's The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Robert Asprin's Dragons Wild, and David Zindell's Lord of Lies in the SF/F/H section. I didn't spot anything SFnal in the Fiction or Mass Market sections this week, but if I missed something, let me know.

Whee!

A little something extra

Spec fic fans, this week's PW is for you. On top of eight SF/F/H reviews (scroll two thirds of the way down) and the usual notes, I managed to wedge in a signature review (scroll all the way down) by Jeff VanderMeer of Ekaterina Sedia's anthology Paper Cities--the first SF/F/H signature review in PW ever, as far as I can tell--and a Q&A with Iain M. Banks. I got so enthusiastic that the Powers That Be had to tell me to calm down a little and leave room for contributions from other sections, so this is probably the last time you'll see two such SF/F/H-related items in a single issue of the magazine (other than our annual SF/F/H issue, of course). Don't miss it! Run, don't walk, to your bookstore or newsstand and grab a copy, or follow those links and read it all on our website for free.

No sir, I don't like it

Janni Lee Simmer, kindly linking to my "how I do PW stuff" series, noted: "I often hear writers wondering why anyone would take the time to give negative reviews, save out of meanness--but I think there are other reasons not all reviews should be positive, too, and it's good to hear someone being articulate about the fact."

As I commented to her, I don't think I've ever heard anyone question the need for negative reviews. I have certainly heard specific instances of them questioned--and not always by the person whose work is being reviewed--but I'm surprised by her suggestion that some have issues with the entire class. (If you're one of those people, whence comes your broad dislike of negative reviews? Please do explain in comments; I'm curious.)

There are plenty of ways to justify the writing of negative reviews (other than "It's fun!", which is often true but also insufficient). From the perspective of the reviewer and the reviewing publication, it lends credibility: much as I can trust that my husband really loves the second scarf I knitted him because he was honest about not liking the first one, readers who know that a publication is willing to give negative reviews will trust that when that publication does give a positive review, it's for good reason. From the perspective of the reader, it's helpful: the market is glutted with beautifully packaged, well-blurbed books, and readers need to know what to avoid as well as what to seek out. From the perspective of the writer and the publisher, it's educational: they may be too deeply involved with a book to really be able to predict how readers will react to it, and an honest review gives them valuable information about how to improve the writing and marketing of future books.

Any one of those reasons would be sufficient to justify the practice, I think, and the sum of the three makes it imperative. No one gains when a publication or reviewer only gives positive reviews.

It should (but probably does not) go without saying that none of this is a justification for a cruel review. As with any communication--and it's important to remember that reviews are fundamentally a form of communication--criticism should be delivered with at least as much tact as honesty. It's kinder to the author and publisher, without whom the reviewing profession would not exist; they have taken the leap of submitting a book for review, and that bold move deserves to be met with kindness as well as frankness. (If we bring self-interest into it, in the inbred world of genre publishing it's entirely plausible that a given reviewer might end up working for that author or publisher someday, so that alone is probably a good idea to refrain from getting too snarktastic.)

It's also not a justification for nonspecific complaining. I recall something about Graham Sleight and John Clute agreeing to avoid certain terms in their reviews--"disappointing", maybe, or "unsuccessful"? Graham, please jog my memory here--because they just don't convey enough useful information. "This was disappointing" is just a nicer way of saying "This sucks", and "This sucks" is not a review. A measured, detailed negative review, on the other hand, is a service to the readers and lets them make up their own minds. If you say "The focus is on the complex characters at the expense of the worldbuilding" some readers will immediately run as far from the book as possible, while others, who couldn't care less about worldbuilding but love well-developed characters, will run to pick it up.

I've seen some reviewers approach reviewing as an exercise in getting readers to agree with them. That seems to me more like an exercise in egotism. I believe the reviewer's job is to inform without manipulating, insofar as that can be managed; all the more reason to avoid harsh words that manipulate readers' emotions rather than helping them to make informed decisions.

Having hopefully conveyed my opinion in an informative but non-manipulative fashion, I'm off for the next week. I have a great deal of work to do tomorr--er, today (how did it get to be past midnight?) and Wednesday, and then we're off to Arisia. I hope those of you who also plan to be there will introduce yourselves! Josh and I are running the green room, so I have no doubt we'll see many of you at least in passing. We come back the night of Monday the 21st; blogging resumes Tuesday. I hope the week treats you all well.

Coming out of the kitchen

My fellow Strange Horizons reviewer Martin Lewis points out this astoundingly blinkered not-really-a-review of A.L. Kennedy's Day:

When, as happens occasionally nowadays, one hears over the PA system the traditional "This is your captain speaking", and it's a woman's voice, you feel testicles shrivel. OK for the gals to enquire nicely about chicken or lasagne ("sir") - but "we're cruising at 39,000, and anticipating a smooth flight"?

...Statistics record that only 4% of USAF and RAF pilots now are women - and these are the highest figures ever. Can a class of writer so institutionally and historically disengaged from a subject write a classic (or even a good) novel on it?

...nor, for the record, do I think a woman writing about what is historically a man's world is any more objectionable than, say, DH Lawrence rhapsodising on the female orgasm in Lady Chatterley. But it raises interesting issues.

The only issues I see on display here are Mr. Sutherland's. In 522 words, he manages to say essentially nothing about the novel other than that it's written by a woman, set in wartime, and not very similar to Len Deighton's books. Instead, he focuses on the shriveling of his "whatdoyoucallems"--which, if he were really concerned about the delicacy of the fairer sex, I suspect he would not be discussing in a major newspaper read by thousands of women--and asks with some bewilderment, "Why, with all those 'women's subjects' at her disposal, did Kennedy venture into this most exclusive of manly enclaves?"

I imagine she did it because she wanted to. For any writer, male or female, that is really the only necessary and sufficient reason to choose a topic for a novel. Fantasy and science fiction writers aren't the only ones who venture in fiction to places they have never seen in real life; it's just more obvious that they probably don't have personal experience with unicorns or alien abduction*. I have no doubt that many authors of murder mysteries have never killed anyone, many authors of romance novels have never had sex, and at least a couple of authors who sell short stories to The New Yorker have happy relationships with people who frequently say more than one sentence at a time. I know this may come as a shock to some of you, but fiction is made up stories.

* Whitley Strieber may disagree.

I'm reminded very much of this Russell Banks quote I posted a couple of weeks ago, which got a lot of scornful comments when I posted it to my personal journal. Most cogent was Marissa Lingen's response:

"I can only write within my own self-concept," seems like a far, far more limiting belief than, "I am a white American male," to me.

It seems that Ms. Kennedy is willing to write outside her self-concept, which I wholeheartedly applaud. It's too bad that this adventuresome spirit causes such distress for people like Mr. Sutherland, who believe that women should not only stay within their own self-concepts but within the even more restrictive concepts that have been thrown at them by men. I sincerely hope that authors of all stripes will continue to take these chances, and the testicular reactions of antediluvian readers be damned.

I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said

I have six reviews to edit in the next three hours. I've already done three today. It's making me a bit punchy.

Best sentence so far:

"[The author] discusses the characters that separate our species from other extinct hominids"

It's going to be a long day.

Come one, come all

Publishers Weekly needs people to help judge a manuscript contest. The task is to read 10 manuscripts (which I suspect will be straight out of a slushpile) and write a 150-word PW-style review of each. (I'm happy to supply some info on what "PW-style" means, but it would be best for you to pick up a copy of the magazine and read the reviews.) Most of the mss are F&SF, mystery, thriller, or romance; you would get a random selection. Pay is $400 and deadline is December 14th. If you're interested, have some vaguely relevant experience, and can realistically make that deadline, send a letter of interest/resume/clips to rose.fox@reedbusiness.com. We need 100 reviewers total and only have about 25 right now, so please spread the word around!

EDIT, 1/29/08: Looks like this post is getting very popular all of a sudden. Before I write further, let me reiterate that I am not a PW spokesperson, and this is not an official PW blog. I speak only from my own knowledge and experience, which in this case is very much not the whole story. My involvement with this contest was entirely peripheral, and there's still a lot I don't know about how it was run. All I can tell you about is the extent to which I participated in finding reviewers.

My criteria for recommending reviewers for the contest were not the same as the criteria used for approving those reviewers. Many of the reviewers I recommended (and I didn't recommend everyone who asked) were turned down due to not having sufficient reviewing experience. I wasn't in charge of that and don't know the full details; I was just asked to recruit applications as widely as possible.

The top 16% of 5000 entries is far more manuscripts than all our regular reviewers could possibly review in the time allotted, which is why we went looking for other reviewers to participate.

As for the uneven quality of reviews, I can only assure you that I recommended reviewers who I know to be good writers and thoughtful readers, and they had to pass a fairly stringent application in addition to my recommendation. In any situation where you have 80 people writing reviews, there's going to be some variation. This is why I frequently mention the need to choose the right reviewer for a book, something that simply wasn't possible in the setting of the contest.

A final summary:

1) The screening process for PW reviewers, in general, is that PW editors think they'll be good reviewers. We look at their clips and ask them to write a sample review, and if they look good, they're hired. This is exactly what I did for the prospective reviewers who emailed me after I made this post.

2) I passed on the names of all the people who passed the above requirements to the folks running the contest. They then put the prospective reviewers through a second screening process, about which I don't know anything except that one of the criteria was a lot of reviewing experience (something I don't demand from my reviewers if they can demonstrate sufficient skill right off the bat).

So the people who passed both those tests and reviewed the manuscripts were actually more thoroughly screened for experience and skill than many of the people who regularly review for PW. I certainly apologize for any concern caused by the cavalier tone of the post, but I can assure you that the contest submissions were indeed reviewed by experienced processionals, any of whom we'd be happy to use as a regular PW reviewer if we had room on our reviewing staff (and in fact, I hired a couple of people based on the clips they sent when applying for the contest reviewing gig, and have many more applications squirreled away for future hiring needs).

I'm happy to discuss this with anyone who leaves a signed comment. Anonymous comments will be ignored, and if I get enough of them, I will disable anonymous commenting.