Asking the Wrong Questions

At long last, my series on defining the Strange Horizons reviews policy has started up again at the magazine's blog.   This time , I try to explain why the reviewing vs. criticism discussion and the question of spoiler warnings are fundamentally about the same thing. Note also that, thanks to the magazine's intrepid webmaster Shane, the blog now displays full posts on the main page and syndicates full posts.  It's like living in the future.

The story thus far: On January 28th, Bitch Magazine posted a list of "100 YA Novels for the Feminist Reader."   The list is affiliated with Bitch Magazine 's lending library , and was posted by Ashley McAllister, who is listed on Bitch 's staff page as library coordinator.  Predictably, commenters began suggesting additions to the list and, in smaller numbers, objecting to the books on it.  On January 29th, commenter Pandora objected to the inclusion of Jackson Pearce's Sisters Red , a retelling of Red Riding Hood in which two sisters hunt werewolves, citing objections raised against the book in a post made last July on the blog The Book Smugglers .  In that post, the bloggers highlighted a scene in which one of the sisters scornfully watches dressed-up girls waiting to enter a night club and muses that they are inviting attack.  Both reviewers felt that Sisters Red didn't do enough to complicate or counteract this victim-blaming perspective.  That s...

In the second post in my series about reviewing at the Strange Horizons blog, I discuss the question that occurs long before the editor gets down to editing: which books (and films and TV shows) to commission reviews of? As seems to happen quite often in discussions of genre or reviewing, the question of what to review boils down to a choice between prescriptive and descriptive. Is a reviews department a paper of record, reporting on the state of the genre and on the important names at its core, or is it a partisan platform, evangelizing for little-known writers and works and reflecting an inevitable editorial bias? Is its purpose to report on tastes, or to make them? Follow the link and add your thoughts.

I've been the Strange Horizons reviews editor for just over two months, and in that time two things have become crystal clear.  One, the zombie novel thing has gotten completely out of hand, and two, I need to articulate what I want from the department's reviews, and what I think a review should or shouldn't do.  As I say in my post at the Strange Horizons blog: It's easy, when you're writing your own stuff, to get by on gut instinct—something feels right or it doesn't, and if you've got a good editor (like Niall) they can often help you articulate what isn't working, what you're trying to accomplish, and how to fix it. ... since I've started editing other people's writing, I've found myself struggling for words, for the tools with which to explain what I want for the review department, and how specific reviews are failing to bring their point across, or sometimes just muddling it.  I've felt a keen awareness of the need for some...

Farah Mendlesohn pours out her wrath on Michael Weingrad's article "Why There is No Jewish Narnia" in the inaugural issue of Jewish Review of Books , and its assertion that Weingard "cannot think of a single major fantasy writer who is Jewish, and there are only a handful of minor ones of any note. To no other field of modern literature have Jews contributed so little."  Allegedly a review of Lev Grossman's The Magicians and Hagar Yanai's HaMaim SheBeyn HaOlamot ( The Water Between the Worlds ), the second volume in an Israeli YA fantasy trilogy, Weingard treats only briefly with his two subjects and mostly uses them as a backdrop to his theory of Judaism being a far less hospitable environment than Christianity for the development of a fantastic tradition, of "all the elements necessary for classic fantasy—magic, myth, dualism, demonic forces, strange worlds, and so forth."  Farah responds by listing a dozen Jewish fantasy authors off the ...

This post was inspired by Matt, who in the comments to my post about why I wouldn't be watching Quentin Tarantino's Holocaust action film, Inglourious Basterds , wondered what the Israeli critical and popular response to the film would be.  Which struck me as an interesting question, and hence this post.  All quotes are my translation from the Hebrew originals, and all links go to Hebrew sites. The Tel Aviv weekly entertainment guide Achbar HaIr ( City Mouse ) publishes the Reviewers' Table, which ranks all films screening in the city according to the average star rating they received from nine different sources, including the three Hebrew language daily papers ( Yediot Acharonot , Maariv , and Haaretz ), the two Tel Aviv guides ( Achbar HaIr and Time Out Tel Aviv ), the two national TV and film guides ( Pnai Plus and Rating ), the free daily paper Israel Today and the military radio station Galei Tzahal.  English and Russian daily papers are not represented (thoug...

If you've visited io9 any time in the last week, you'll have noticed banners, sidebar ads, and the revamped title bar all bearing the by-now familiar images of an alien spaceship and an alien-shaped gun range target, which are only part of the gargantuan promotional effort for Neill Blomkamp's upcoming film District 9 . The advertising blitz was directly tied to io9's coverage of Comic Con, with most of its con-related articles accompanied by an individual banner reading 'San Diego Comic Con - Presented by District 9 ' (you can still see the individual banners if you go back a page or two on io9's history, and though the main site's title bar has returned to normal, it's still in its District 9 version on the individual pages of several of the Comic Con-related articles). If you've visited io9 any time in the last week, you may also have noticed that on July 24th, site editor Annalee Newitz gave District 9 , which she saw in an advance press s...

Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics is a new group blog founded by author Andy Remic with the aim, up until yesterday, of "celebrating all that is positive in genre fiction." If that sounds rather vague to you, you're not alone--the good folks at SF Signal invited Remic and his cohorts to a Mind Meld about their new venture, but were so unclear about its purpose that they mistakenly assumed that the blog had arisen as a response to "an imbalance towards a negative futuristic outlook" in the genre. Responses to the Mind Meld make it clear that even SFFE's contributors aren't entirely clear what the new blog stands for. Though Remic himself was on hand, his attempts to shed some light on the issue only succeeded in further muddying the waters: I believe there's a lot of people out there sick of the constant whining and moaning and tearing down - after all, it's much easier to destroy than create. That's why myself, and so many other brilli...

There are many ways in which I've changed as a reader over the last few years, and one of them is that I've become more political. If even a few years ago I read with only a vague awareness of issues of race and gender, nowadays I find that I apply clearly-defined yardsticks to most of the fiction I read--for example, the Bechdel Test . Now, all the Bechdel Test does is give us an indicator--if a writer is capable of envisioning women interacting with each other for reasons not related to a man, then it's more likely that they see women as people in their own right. It isn't a yardstick for feminism, and it's certainly not a yardstick for quality, nor was it intended as either one. In fact, I'd say that the test probably has less to do with individual works and more to do with with the entertainment industry as a whole, and the fact that so few works produced by it actually pass this simple, seemingly obvious test. Nevertheless, once your eyes have been opened t...

The inimitable Adam Roberts hits on the perfect approach to reviewing Anathem : it is surely beside the point to object to the tell-don't-show styless, or to the myriad annoylogisms, which are amongst the showiest elements in S.’s worldbling. My problem with the tekst can be boiled down to one focus: its monstrous and inflated infodumping. Of course I appreciate that for some ridders, and perhaps for many ridders, this 'problem' will be the whole point of the book. The entirety of the tekst is one gigantic Infodump, and that’s that. The review itself, however, is merely a backdrop to a glossary that simultaneously parodies Stephenson and, for people like myself who found the wordplay in Anathem surprisingly enjoyable, gives him a run for his money, all while supplying genre reviewers with a wealth of apt and much needed terms such as 'worldbling', 'narractor', and  HARI-PARTER . Committing a form of tekstual suicide by increasingly expanding the parts of ...

It's always funny to see what does and does not gain traction online. When I posted my review of the October/November issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction , I expected that responses to it would revolve mostly around the general negativity of my reaction to the issue. Instead, it was my response to the magazine's nonfiction content, and specifically to Lucius Shepard's review of Iron Man , that's got some folks talking. Early yesterday someone on the Night Shade Books bulletin board, where Shepard is a participant, posted a link to the review, sparking a discussion which has, in turn, led to a, shall we say energetic, post by Shepard on The Inferior 4 , the LJ he shares with Elizabeth Hand, Paul Witcover, and Paul Di Fillippo. I seem to have raised Shepard's ire firstly by calling the Iron Man review mean-spirited, which he has taken as a personal insult. I'm frankly puzzled as to how the trip from point A to point B was achieved, but obviously I'...

Reviews of The Dark Knight are cropping up all over, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Rick Norwood's at SF Site is, by far, the weirdest. It starts out normally enough, commenting on the film and praising, in particular, Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker. Then, at about the halfway point, we get this: Is The Joker on drugs? Heath Ledger died from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs. Was he taking drugs when he played The Joker? I don't know, but I hope not. Good as The Dark Knight is, it is not a film worth dying for. Believe it or not, it gets even more mind-boggling. The review proceeds in what can only be called a stream of free associations, as Norwood muses on drug-addled artists of the past, America's hypocritical attitude towards drug use, George W. Bush's drug history, and racism. Each thought is only tangentially related to the one before (or indeed to the sentences preceding and following it), and has absolutely noth...

The story thus far: last year Niall Harrison published a LJ post in which he commented on the cover of Eclipse 1 , an anthology of original genre shorts and the first in a series edited by Jonathan Strahan and published by Night Shade Books. In spite of the fact that the volume's table of contents was split evenly between male and female writers, Niall noted, only male names were chosen to grace the front cover. There followed a lively and civil debate--with participants arguing on the one hand that the five names chosen represented the top five bestselling authors in the table of contents, all of whom just happened to be male, and on the other hand that this argument was self-perpetuating, and that Night Shade Books were making the perennial mistake of ignoring the existence of women as a buying demographic by pitching their product only at the traditional (white, male, middle-aged) SF-reading market--which unfortunately turned sour the minute representatives of Night Shade Bo...

There's been a slew of blog posts just recently discussing what makes a good or bad book review, and obliquely touching on the phenomenon of online book reviewing and the question of professionalism, its meaning and existence, in that field. Niall has a roundup at Torque Control , but the most interesting entries to my mind are these two by Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen , which attempt to dissect reviews he considers poorly written to determine just at which points they fail, and this post by Jeff VanderMeer, in which he spells out some guidelines for writing a good review (or rather, for not writing a bad one). In both cases, I can't help but feel that the writers' personal preferences are being restated as objective truths. Larry thinks reviewers shouldn't reference other works when discussing a novel. I often appreciate a review which places a book in its context or provides me with a frame of reference for it. And, as Cheryl Morgan says , most of the prohi...