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For anyone who grows up
passionately involved with reading, it can be oddly liberating to discover
that you have no particular talent for writing fiction. If
one devotes part of one’s professional career to being a critic, of course,
such an admission invites all sorts of canards and snowballs, ranging from
the familiar accusations of simple parasitism to darker scenarios of
Iago-like malignity. Criticism, in this view,
may be cavalierly divided into two categories: sniping, malicious
reviews on the one hand, and cluelessly arcane academic theorizing on the
other. Both are more plentiful than they ought to be, but neither
has much to do with the real politics of engagement that has long made responsible
criticism an interesting and provocative part of the literary game.
To be sure, such attitudes are heard less often these days (outside of the
occasional fan convention, where they’re still good for cheap applause lines),
and a measure of the maturation of genre fiction may well be the extent
to which it’s become possible to talk about it without the risk of betraying
the home team, or of driving away tourists by noting that it’s raining,
or of violating the corporate mission statement by acknowledging that some
products lack nutritional value. Mentioning in a public venue that
a particular SF novel is problematical is no longer necessarily taken
to imply that SF itself is a bad idea, nor does praising a particular novel
imply that SF is somehow therefore a superior breed of fiction. For
SF—or more properly, the reading of SF—to mature, it isn’t necessary
to adopt Theodore Sturgeon’s overquoted dictum that ninety percent of everything
is “crud,” but it might be necessary to accept that mediocrity will always
far outweigh either the crud or the diamonds.
The problem, for both the reviewer and the academic
critic, is that mediocrity is not very interesting to write about.
Books that are truly, spectacularly dire—what we might call the literature
of emesis (as opposed to mimesis)—are perhaps too easy to write
about, and are among the critic’s most unsavory temptations; the sharper
the barb, the wittier the riposte, the better. But with endless piles
of books staring balefully from the desk, and with only a handful that can
be carefully read before deadline, the question arises as to why the critic
would even finish such a book, much less take the time to write
about it. A certain sign of a facile critic is one who habitually
takes on such books merely as a preening display of weaponry; such reviews
are seldom more useful than those of the hungry puppy reviewer who praises
everything out of a desire for acceptance or for blurbs on the paperback
edition. Usually, though, if favorable or mixed reviews outnumber
bad reviews, it’s because many of the bad reviews never get written because
the book never gets completely read. Far more interesting to me are
the books that set out honorably to express or shape a particular vision,
and which at times succeed astonishingly well, but more often generate mixed
results, or raise more questions than they answer. For such books,
context may often be as important as content, and even a book which isn’t
quite firing on all cylinders may nevertheless move the vehicle forward
into interesting new territory.
This, I think, is where that lack of a particular
fiction-writing gene might almost become an asset. It helps to retain
a certain measure of awe at the entire enterprise of fiction, to remain
free of the temptation to think one might have done it better oneself, and
to recognize that even the most undistinguished book will have its appreciative
readers. This last point is a significant one, since another temptation
the reviewer sometimes faces is the temptation to review a book’s readership
rather than the book itself, especially when that readership seems singularly
undemanding. I’ve been a teacher for far longer than I’ve been a reviewer,
and it’s led me to believe that the most serious hazard facing fiction is
not a degradation of taste—can one seriously argue that the readers of Varney
the Vampire are significantly more sophisticated than readers of Anne
Rice?—but rather the wholesale abandonment of reading altogether.
University teachers who regularly assign novels to their classes, if they
are honest with themselves, will recognize that the last novel assigned in
the last class will, for a fair number of students, be the last novel they
will ever read. This is a reality not always evident within the relatively
sheltered provinces of literature and academia, but it’s an important perspective
to maintain. As a critic, I can afford to show little patience for
the formulaic sentimentality of a Danielle Steele; as a teacher, I have
to try to understand what power such novels wield, since the student reading
a Steele novel may be the only member of the class who is voluntarily reading
anything. The mysterious alchemy that may
exist between a particular reader and a particular novel is something we
critics have little access to, and in some important sense it’s none of
our business.
What are we good for, then? For
many years before I began writing book reviews in a monthly column, I published
a good deal academic criticism in a variety of venues. During these
decades—essentially the 1970s and 1980s—the scholarly enterprise about SF
and popular fiction in general grew from a relative handful of books, articles,
and conventions to a vigorous, polyphonic dialogue informed by resources
ranging from textual and bibliographical scholarship to various postmodern
theories, feminism, Marxism, and multicultural and postcolonial sensibilities.
While this dialogue often remains stimulating, it’s also remarkably insular,
with major journals in the field numbering their circulation in the hundreds
and the attendance at academic conventions often even lower than that.
In a disturbingly large measure, the production of academic literary scholarship
is driven less by its readership than by the demands of tenure committees,
and in a real sense there is almost no market demand at all. Nor,
at least in the United States (though the situation seems somewhat more
salutary in the U.K.), is there much overlap between this academic dialogue
and the parallel dialogues about SF among the readers, writers, editors,
and publishers in the field. When I began to find myself involved
in these other dialogues, first through the occasional fan convention and
later through such mixed-use developments as the International Association
for the Fantastic in the Arts, I discovered there a kind of passionate immediacy,
a sense that the literature was constantly reforming itself in the light
of its own critical discourse, and that this discourse was often only tangential
to what we academics were doing. I thus drifted into reviewing,
first in the academic journals and in the now-defunct Fantasy Review,
and eventually in Locus. It was over a lunch at ICFA
in 1991 that Charles Brown invited me to submit a couple of test reviews,
and at the end of that year I became a monthly contributor.
Still, many academic colleagues have never ceased
to wonder why I do this, and more than a few times I’ve been given earnest
career advice suggesting I’d be better off spending my time on “real” work.
But for someone who remains intrigued with what science fiction and fantasy
can be and who has no intention of becoming a fiction writer, the question
of finding the most rewarding level of engagement can be a very personal
one. I never agreed with the “real work” argument, and I do still
write academic pieces now and then, and even less can I countenance the
cliché that critics are all failed artists (which, among other things,
demeans those quite successful novelists who also write reviews).
The notion that a review written under a deadline necessarily involves
less engagement and rigor than a critical essay is demonstrably foolish,
and a repeated flaw in much academic criticism of SF has been the failure
of many scholars to cite reviews as critical sources in cases where they
would be appropriate. While serving on the editorial boards of a number
of academic journals, I’ve seen entire essays constructed around some revelatory
insight about a novel or writer, carefully marshalling the usual endnotes
and works cited, but with the author blissfully unaware that his or her
central insight is essentially a recapitulation of what the reviews said
in the first place. The failure to regard the central reviewers of
the last few decades—Damon Knight, James Blish, Algis
Budrys, John Clute, and many others—as legitimate scholarly resources is
in many cases a simple failure of scholarship, particularly when these reviewers
have assembled selections of their reviews in book form.
Furthermore, I’d long admired the stylistic freedom
of reviewers both in and out of the field, ranging from Pauline Kael and
Edmund Wilson to Budrys and Clute. Not only were such writers simply
enjoyable to read, but they demonstrated a fierce engagement with their
subjects in a manner that frankly is hard to bring off in the constrained
formalities of academic writing. And a constantly churning field
such as SF seemed to invite such engagement. Charles Brown,
the editor of Locus, seemed to feel the same way, and wanted his
magazine, in the most literal way, to become a locus of discourse on what
he persistently terms the “philosophy” of the field. He often challenged
and cajoled his reviewers to connect with the field as it is lived,
month by month, by those who write it. Many of the reviews which
follow are the direct result of arguments or discussions or general-purpose
bitch sessions with the editor of Locus.
And it’s that engagement with the living substance
of the field that keeps alive the surprises of monthly reviewing, even after
more than a decade, even after repeated encounters with The Thousand Page
Novel That Arrives A Week Before Deadline, The Kindly Author Who You Love
To Drink With But Would Rather Not Engage In Print, The Author Who Of Course
Never Reads Reviews But Somehow Writes Two-Thousand Word Rebuttals To Every
One, The Writer Whose Novels You Admire But Whom You Would Cross The Street
To Avoid Talking With, The Experimental Novel That You Find Thoroughly Opaque
But Have To Say Something About Anyway, The Angry Fans Convinced You Are
Biased Against Their Favorite Subgenre, The Angry Publisher Convinced You
Are Hopelessly Out Of Touch With Popular Taste, The Condescending Fellow
Professor Convinced You Are Hopelessly In Thrall Of Popular Taste, and so
on. One doesn’t take up reviewing with the expectation to be lionized,
and one ought not to take up reviewing out of an illusory sense of power
or influence. One writes reviews because reviews are what one writes:
they are essays about literature, and literature is worth writing essays
about. They are generally essays written for a somewhat wider audience
than academic and theoretical pieces, and under far more oppressive deadlines,
but they may collectively provide a kind of chronicle of an evolving literature
in a way that the academic pieces are never intended to. Put in more
crudely metaphorical terms, the academic critic considers a passing train,
often long after it’s passed; the reviewer must try to leap on. Sometimes
we miss the train entirely, but that risk is part of the exhilaration.
Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we make sense.
What follows consists of most, but not all, of the reviews
written for Locus magazine during the five years between 1992,
my first full year as a reviewer, and 1996. (The reviews since 1996 would
fill two additional volumes of this size.) For the most part,
I have omitted reviews of specialized interest--academic, nonfiction, or
art books--although a few of these are included when they seemed to contribute
significantly to ongoing dialogues developing in the field or in the culture
at large (hence, for example, a discussion of a few spectacularly ephemeral
Star Trek memoirs). Observant readers will
no doubt note that some important books are not covered, while works by
authors already almost forgotten are included. Part of this has to
do with the vagaries of monthly reviewing, and which books crossed or did
not cross my desk, but the intent here is not to provide “best” or “recommended
reading” lists (though a bit of that goes on in the overviews that preface
each year’s chapter) so much as to offer a chronicle of fairly consistent
reading in SF and related fields over a half-decade during which the field
began to shape itself into something like what it is today. Context
seems to me to be a crucial feature of any act of criticism, and the extent
to which these pieces are worth revisiting today largely derives from their
possible value in suggesting a history of emerging contexts, of exploring
issues not yet fully resolved, questions not yet answered, books not yet
written.
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