Electronic OtherRealms #23 Winter, 1989 Part 2 Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved. OtherRealms may not be reproduced without written permission from Chuq Von Rospach. The electronic edition may be distributed only if the return address, copyrights and author credits remain intact. No article may be reprinted or re-used in any way without the permission of the author. All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the original author. Reviewing The Reviewers A Survey of Science Fiction Critics Chuq Von Rospach Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach Why review the reviewers? It is impossible for any reviewer or publication to completely cover the field. I want to help readers find reviews that can help them make their purchasing decisions. Different reviewers have different preferences and I feel it is important that people find reviewers they are comfortable and compatible with. Finally, I think it important that the people who are doing a good job get some recognition and the people who aren't get constructive criticism. I differentiate between a reviewer and a critic. A reviewer is a consumer advocate--they help people make purchasing decisions. OtherRealms is a reviewzine--it gets information to the buying public to help them find the books that are right for them. Critics try to put a book into context, to look at the deeper meanings and help us get a better understanding of the work and how it relates to us and to the field. This requires a good literary background and a deep knowledge of the genre and its history. A.J. Budrys of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the New York Review of Science Fiction are two examples. Reviews should be considered "pre-sales" writing. They're written to help a reader make a purchasing decision. Criticism, on the other hand, is best studied after you have finished the work, when you can consider the writing and the criticism together to gain a better understanding. I've broken the publications discussed into three categories: the major magazines, semi-professional magazines and everyone else. Remember that size isn't an indicator that the reviewer is better. The major magazines are Analog, Amazing, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Twilight Zone and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Amazing doesn't publish reviews, but it has been running a series of essays that I've found fascinating. In the January, 1988 issue, they published a piece by Greg Benford that basically said that fantasy wasn't as good as real science fiction, and that people who wrote fantasy did so because they weren't able to write good SF. Any reader of fantasy knows these arguments are (1) patently false, and (2) guaranteed to create a Controversy. It did--in the January, 1989 issue a group of fantasy writers (Judith Tarr, Susan Shwartz, Lillian Stewart Carl and Katharine Kerr) wrote a strong, well- reasoned rebuttal. In the same issue, Poul Anderson used the same article as a starting point in his essay "Science Fiction and History," where he discussed the societal structures used in science fiction and their analogs in Earth history. Analog is the largest magazine and Tom Easton, its reviewer, is the best in the field. He has a strong bias towards hard SF, which isn't surprising considering the magazine he writes for. He has the ability to put a book into perspective without wasting words, although occasionally, like his review of Full Spectrum, he gets so succinct he never says much of anything. If he has a weakness, it is fantasy, and when he does cover fantasy books he sometimes seems to be rating them down because they're fantasy rather than their having any specific flaw. Hot on Easton's heels is Baird Searles at Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine. I'd call it a dead heat except for a couple of structural problems in Searles' column. His reviews are started with column headlines that tend to fall somewhere between cute and irritating, and I've talked to a couple of authors who have found the titles demeaning--even if it's a positive review. Another thing Searles does is mention books being published by people associated with IASFM. I think the column would be better served by either reviewing them, or ignoring them. Currently, they get an implicit nod of the head without ever really being discussed. Beyond that, Searles is witty and lots of fun to read. He has a strong knowledge of the field and he covers both SF and fantasy with enthusiasm. While Easton is slightly better technically, Searles covers a wider range of material. Also writing for IASFM on a quarterly basis in a critical mode is Norman Spinrad. I'm not a big fan of Spinrad's writing, and the first few columns he wrote for IASFM were nasty, mean-spirited attacks in the guise of criticism. In the last few columns he's dropped the Harlanesque angry-young-man pose and started doing some serious criticism. I don't always agree with him but he's makes me think. He might yet turn into a powerful voice in the field of criticism. I don't recommend him as a reason to get IASFM, but he makes a good addition to Searles' work. Fantasy & Science Fiction is the home of A,J. Budrys,who is considered by many to be the premier active critic in the field. In the last year and a half, they have also added Orson Scott Card as a reviewer to free Budrys to do more criticism in his column. I think, in retrospect, that this was a mistake. Card's column is interesting and he is determined to review good but obscure books you're likely to miss. He does a competent column, although it's somewhat lifeless and dry at times. The problem at F&SF is Budrys. Freed of the need to structure his criticism around books, there are times when he seems to be groping for Something Important To Say, he sometimes overemphasizes something trivial or unimportant in an attempt to be Critic At Large. Another problem is tone. Budrys used to write about important things in the field. Now he writes about things that Budrys feels should be important. Sometimes they are, but not always. Budrys' column no longer revolves around science fiction. In the column, SF revolves around Budrys. A major problem I have is that Budrys has shilled, on more than one occasion, the Writers of the Future Contest (he is chief administrator) or a book by one of its winners. Notwithstanding that I agreed with him on it. He is using the column to push something that he has a financial commitment with. This creates a conflict of interest and kills his credibility. I have a lot of respect for Budrys. In obscure ways, he was one of the catalysts to the founding of OtherRealms. I now find myself doing little more than skimming his column--I don't trust his judgment anymore, and he isn't saying much I find interesting to read. James Blish, in The Issue at Hand by William Atheling Jr. (A pseudonym for Blish; Advent Press) talks about some of the problems he had with his criticism because of his decision to choose a pseudonym to write under, and the problems of conflicts of interest in criticism. I see parallels to that here. Budrys has, for what I believe he sees are the best of intentions, dug himself a credibility hole and jumped into it head first. Unless he can extricate himself, he's going to put himself in a position where he'll be useless as a critic. The last of the large magazines is Twilight Zone, which runs a review column by Ed Bryant. Bryant is the only reviewer covering Horror. Bryant's good, and he does a good job of looking at a book in-depth without wasting precious column space. If you read horror and aren't reading Twilight Zone, you're missing an important resource. The next category is the semi-professional magazine. These are smaller, generally under 10,000 circulation. Two of the magazines, Locus and SF Chronicle are trade journals. The third, Aboriginal SF is a large semi-pro or small professional fiction magazine, depending on how you define it. Aboriginal uses two reviewers: Darrell Schweitzer and Janice Eisen. Schweitzer has been around the field for a while and knows his stuff. Eisen is the former editor of the fanzine Twilight Zine and looks at more fantasy. Both are good, solid reviewers who are assets to the magazine. Locus is the major trade publication for the science fiction field. While officially considered a semi-pro for Hugo purposes, it is a large, professional magazine. Editor Charlie Brown has four different review columns, dedicating more space to reviews than any non-fanzine. The reviewers are Faren Miller, Tom Whitmore, Carolyn Cushman and Dan Chow. It's hard to choose a favorite. I read both Miller and Whitmore closely each issue, Cushman has a strong background in fantasy that she uses to good effect, and Chow has turned himself into an good columnist (in a previous version of this article, I ripped Chow to little pieces. I now happily recant that position). Cushman and Miller both do a mixture of reviewing and criticism, while Chow and Whitmore stick primarily with reviews. There are some voids in their coverage (no horror, and there are some authors who don't seem to get as much coverage as their stature in the industry would imply), but they also make a good attempt to read and report on first novels and the lesser publicized, smaller works. I read Locus' reviews carefully every month, and usually find an interesting booksI would have otherwise missed. Science Fiction Chronicle is the smaller competitor to Locus. While in many areas Locus and SF Chronicle cover the same material, SF Chronicle is weaker as a review resource. There is a single reviewer, Don D'Ammassa, who is limited in what he can do by the format--SF Chronicle publishes as many reviews as it can fit in (typically 40 or more per monthly issue) with a paragraph or so for each book. This means D'Ammassa can't talk about anything in detail--there's little more than a quick overview or plot summary and a few simple comments. I find the reviews to be of very limited value. There simply isn't enough information in them for me. Fans of OtherRealms' Pico Review section may well prefer SF Chronicle's reviews to other sources, but I can't recommend it. The last category are fanzines and small magazines. They're defined as having very small print-runs (under most circumstances, less than 1,000) and are usually hobbies or personal publications rather than commercial publications. In some cases, all they discuss is criticism or reviews. In other's that's only part of their material. Fosfax is a fun fanzine, and is the fanzine I feel is closest to OtherRealms. It's almost exclusively reviews and has an letter column that covers a wide range of subjects. It reminds me of OtherRealms when it was monthly. It's monthly, and unlike most fanzines keeps to its schedule, and is a magazine I look forward to every month. Lan's Lantern is a Hugo winner. It's a large (typically more than 100 pages) fanzine that is published about three times a year. While a good portion of is dedicated to reviews, it has a very strong letter column and publishes a range of articles about many different topics. Lan's is always fun to read and has a wide range of opinions. One of the newer kids on the block is SF Eye. Four issues have been published so far. SF Eye is a review/criticism semi-pro, but doesn't seem to have decided what it wants to be when it grows up--issue #3 was fiction. SF Eye is marginal right now. If they get their act together, it can turn into a fascinating publication. Unfortunately, the administrative end seems to be somewhat chaotic--they had a major hassle with their Post Office Box a while back, their publication schedule is erratic, and their subscription system has some glitches--I was notified that my subscription, which started with issue #3, was expiring with issue #4. When I contacted them, they promptly fixed it. There's some good stuff here: an interview of Clive Barker by Dick Lupoff; an interview of Ellen Datlow (of Omni magazine) by Ed Bryant. Much of the rest is pedestrian material, although there's nothing really bad. The range is from about average to pretty good. The design of the magazine needs work. Many of the photos they publish (especially in the Datlow interview and the covers in the review section) are so badly reproduced they would have been better off with white space. SF Eye did a couple of things that pushed my buttons While they claim to have a no-pseudonym policy, they broke the policy to allow various people to attack Bridge publications and the Hubbard people. For whatever reason, they've allowed people to publicly attack another organization from a privileged, private bunker. If they made the exception here, where are they going to make the next exception? When someone wants to write an 'objective' review of something they were involved in? When someone wants to make sure their own book gets reviewed? Credibility is the only thing a magazine of reviews and criticism has to offer its readers. James Blish discusses it in The Issue At Hand. SF Eye has severely damaged their credibility with me. For the best of intentions, they've followed Budrys into the credibility swamp. Another thing they did was an attack against fantasy in their editorial: "...with your letters we can become invincible, we can banish all levels and unicorns forever, why we can even... Well, maybe we won't get that serious." (emphasis theirs) Yes, they're being flippant, but the attitude is obvious--fantasy is not real fiction. This kind of holier-than-thou attitude from within the SF community bothers me, especially when you realize it's nothing more than the same kind of bullshit that frosts us when the mainstream does it to science fiction. Fantasy is a legitimate fiction form, and the folks who insist on thinking of it as bastardized SF are playing the same kind of power-games that the mainstream tries to play on SF to "keep us in our place." It's time we all realize there's room enough for all of us out there. If we can't keep from building our own Ghetto within a Ghetto, do we have any hope at all that we'll get the walls around science fiction broken down? New York Review of Science Fiction is the newest magazine on the block, having published (as I write this) two issues. It has a strong, well qualified group working with it--Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, David Hartwell, Samuel R. Delany, Susan Palwick and Debbie Notkin. They're attempting a 24 page monthly magazine that does primarily criticism. The first two issues have been interesting, and once it settles in and finds its direction, this could be a top-flight magazine. Right now, it's uneven, but worth looking at. Thrust is one of the older criticism semi-pro magazines. I have sincere doubts about its survival. It has skipped issues completely and when it does publish the material is boring. It has been abandoned by much of its staff and advertising. It's marking time before it dies. I can't recommend it--there isn't anything to it any more. Weird Tales has brought on John Betancourt to do book reviews. He reviewed for Amazing in the past and it's good to see him with a column again. My recommendations? Locus is the best resource for a person interested in science fiction reviews. I also recommend Tom Easton and Baird Searles. People interested in criticism should locate a copy of the New York Review of Science Fiction.