Whither Criticism?

[alecaustin]

So there's been a lot of nattering about reviews and people being demanding of authors on the nerdier end of the internets lately (and by lately I mean in the last N months, not yesterday). And I think that some important things are getting lost amidst the declarations that George R. R. Martin is not your bitch (PS: he's not, nor is any other

Comments

[moiread]

Definitely not incoherent to me, but that may be because I feel the same way. Or at least I do from my understanding of what you've said. ;)

When I post about a book I've read, it's usually either because it's really fantastic and I want my friends to read it, in which case I tell them my favourite elements of what it's about, or really terrible, in which case I talk about all the reasons it didn't work. I don't tend to do anything in-between, which I should probably fix. But with the really terrible ones, when I say that X and Y and Z made me cringe and were offensive and that I was confused when the plot structure suddenly jumped tracks without resolving anything from the first track, etc, I am definitely writing it to tell my friends who write what was terrible about this book, so that they will hopefully not do it

[swan_tower]

Yeah, I pretty much agree.

Also, this:

but sometimes it seems like it's out of bounds to note that he's clearly had other priorities than working on A Song of Ice and Fire

It bugs me that this point kind of got lost in the furore over the (completely inexcusable) way some fans were treating Martin. If you've been waiting six years for a book you were promised was almost done and would be out any day now, and then in the interim the author has been talking enthusiastically about everything under the sun but the book you've been waiting for, then it shouldn't be out of bounds to say, hey, this ain't right. But a lot of the defense on his behalf seemed to say that readers should just shut up and be grateful for what they get, however delayed it may be. And that, I don't agree with.

[alecaustin]

Yeah, that getting elided was one of the things that incited me to write this.

Martin certainly has the right to work on whatever he wants. But when there's as big a disjoint between the expectations he's set up and his actual behavior as that... it's kind of a thing. (Especially for someone like me, who wrote his thesis on audience expectations and did a bunch of branding/customer relations research in Grad school.)

[swan_tower]

Martin indeed has that right (though the elephant in the room, of course, is what Bantam thinks of his choices, given that they have a very explicit and legally binding contract with him). But I also believe his audience has the right to be upset when he doesn't deliver what he promised in anything resembling a timely manner, and they have the right to express it, too -- which is the part that seemed to get lost in the shuffle.

[alecaustin]

I do tend to forget about the contract end of things, especially since deadlines end up being so incredibly flexible for authors like Martin (and Jordan before him). But that's definitely another thing - the fact that "professionalism" appears to be a standard that only gets applied from a certain level of the industry down. (c.f. the Hines post and the major market referenced above.)

I do get that Martin wants to give back with Wild Cards and the like, and there's even someone on my friendslist who benefited from that. That said, I think we're in complete agreement on the audience end of things.

[timprov]

Critical discourse - and I don't mean individual pieces of criticism, but the process of criticism, the development of frameworks and terminology and consensus by readers and critics reading texts, interpreting them, and disagreeing with one another - is how we learn to avoid falling into traps we've seen in the works of others. It's what allows us to recognize choices made by authors we admire as problematic, and to pick out threads of gold from work we might otherwise dismiss as dross. It makes for better and more sensitive authors, and better and more sensitive books.

This isn't a benefit of discourse. I'm quite capable of doing this by myself, and I'm pretty sure that you are too. Discourse may make some people better at it, but discourse isn't some sort of shining light between us and nonevolutionary fiction. And it does undoubtedly make a lot of people worse at it.

[alecaustin]

I suspect I may be operating off of a somewhat more sweeping sense of what's involved in critical discourse than you are here - and I'm probably overstating things even then - but let's dig into that.

For starters, I'm not trying to devalue personal critical reactions to works in any way. You don't have to be engaged in a widely broadcast conversation to get the benefits of discourse - you can get the benefits just by reading, say, several fantasy novels (or whatever - Chivalric novels, perhaps, pace Don Quixote) and noticing that one of them is taking the piss out of the others by screwing with their conventions. Or just noticing the blind replication of conventions in a book and thinking, "That's stupid

[timprov]

You're still going a long way to find benefits and not enumerating costs at all. There's a phenomenal amount of effort and time that goes into the critical conversation, not to mention that it's damned annoying most of the time, and drives some people to think they're much better off spending their time playing computer games than writing books that are just going to be more ammunition for people fighting each other. Not that I was thinking of anyone in specific.

I suspect we've reached the point where there's so much negativity in the critical conversation that writing SF/F is inherently pro-entropic.

[alecaustin]

I'll freely admit that in some areas the signal to noise ratio approaches zero, but I tend to ignore those conversations and individuals as best I can.

There is a definite cost to that filtering, though, and I definitely tend to take that for granted. And sometimes the trolls come to you... which, yeah. Hard problem, no easy solution, I fear.