From: eliz@ai.mit.edu (Elizabeth Willey)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Conspiracy among Book Reviewers?
Date: 17 Aug 92 21:55:07 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

W. H. Watt (ciar04@vaxa.strath.ac.uk) inquires:

   A couple of months ago, there was an article in The Times on
   a 'cartel' among reviewers of literature.  Apparently, as the story
   goes, there exist 'families' (in the Mafia sense) of authors.  If
   an author belongs to a particular 'family', it is highly likely that
   his/her book will receive favourble reviews.

   Does this occur in SF and Fantasy literature as well?

It's summer; the heat ferments conspiracy theories in all of us, and
we foam yeastily with plots and paranoia.

I don't think this is true.  I read a lot of reviews, not just of
F&SF, and what is important to remember when reading a review is that
the reviewer is a human being, more or less like oneself, with tastes
that are set and ideas that are underlying and prejudices conscious or
not, and the reviewer (probably) cannot just dump these things when
writing a review.

Thus the same book will get very different responses from reviewers
writing from different perspectives.  However, it does not take the
perceptive reader of reviews very long, all in all, to crack the
reviewer's "code" and extract useful information: what the reviewer's
filters are and what the work reviewed is like/about/"worth".

I don't think that MOST F&SF authors are lionized to the extent that a
genuinely bad book will get respectful reviews from all quarters.  In
some cases, the book may be ignored, which is an insult of sorts if
you are a Grand Old Author who has been around since the dawn of the
Typewriter Age (or thereabouts).  In some cases the review may take a
guarded or qualifying tone, and the sensitive reader, again, will pick
up these nuances and translate them accurately.

In most cases books get reviewed by mortal human beings who may or may
not like or understand them, but who have been assigned to review the
damn book.  These reviews can be frustrating, but again if one has
cracked the reviewer's "code" and realizes that he or she always
likes, say, Anne McCaffreys, Mercedes Lackeys, and Katherine Kurtzes,
and gives a pan to a book like _Unquenchable Fire_ by Rachel Pollack,
one will understand that somebody goofed and gave the reviewer who
cannot "read past" his or her taste a book that was *not* to his or her
taste, and therefore that the reviewer didn't like the book...  This
kind of reviewer is not engaging in any kind of literary sedition or
middlebrowification or (in the other case, let us say a fond Gene
Wolfe/E. R. Eddison/John Crowley reviewer giving a Barbara Hambly book
a bomb review) snobbery.  This reviewer is reading to taste and
reviewing to taste, and if your taste matches, you're set.

The best reviewers, of whom there are a few in F&SF, are capable of
reviewing an Anne McCaffrey, a Steven Brust, and an Ursula LeGuin in
the same review and treating each evenhandedly.  This is very
difficult and it requires that the reviewer be able to approach a
romance, an adventure, and a philosophical argument with the same
degree of interest and respect.  There are good and bad examples of
all, and the best reviewers are willing to admit that there is room
for everything.

But as for an industry agenda---no, not really.  Somewhat, but not
really.


Elizabeth Willey
From: ddb@tdkt.kksys.com (David Dyer-Bennet)
Sender: FredGate@tdkt.kksys.com