Some lengthy, rambling thoughts on reviewing:I don't have the pretention of being a particularly good book reviewer. I would like to think that I don't suck, but that's for you guys to decide. The Hotlist will receive its 500,000th visitor this week, and its 1,000,000th page will be viewed later this spring. So I guess I must be doing something ( Read more... )

James and Kathryn Morrow have made a very civilised response to my review of their recent European SF anthology. In fact it is mostly about John Clute's review, not mine.

In a print publication this would be a letter to the editor but in the world of the internet it is appended to my original review.

Poll
Inspired by this article on the decline of reviewing.

Poll PC Thug

Bad critics always conceive of similarities that owe nothing to the works themselves and everything to the paucity of examples they have to draw on; their ignorance insists on them.
The Book Of Shadows, Don Paterson ( Read more... )

Well, since for some ludicrous reason Horizon does not allow you to copy and paste I have switched back to XColibur. In honour of this, here are a few bits of copy and pasting. One of these is not like the others...

r_urell on hatchet jobs:Reviewers are obliged to read books they would prefer to burn. This doesn't happen only on occasion, this is fairly ( Read more... )

A new issue of SF Site, including my review of The Scarifyers: The Nazad Conspiracy, a new audio drama. A trailer is available here

Stuff about reviewing here and here.

A little while ago communicator posted her ten favourite SF short stories. It included 'Settling The World' by M John Harrison. As it happens I had just started Harrison's collection Things That Never Happen, which opens with this story. It's not a story that had any real effect on me. It is told in a voice unlike that used in most of Harrison's work - a ( Read more... )

The current issue of the New York Review of Science Fiction carries a review by Brian Stableford of The Space Opera Renaissance, edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. Hartwell is also the editor of NYRSF. Stableford describes the argument set out in the book as "balderdash" and notes that Hartwell invited him to write this review despite ( Read more... )

That old classic about whether you should write bad review crops up again here (with additional commentary here.) Obviously a blog is a personal thing and, of course, you should write about whatever you fancy on it. Lots of the stuff that I write on here is first draft initial impressions, as much for my own use as anyone elses. However this is a ( Read more... )