Towards a Strange Horizons Reviews Policy: What to Review
Posted by Abigail Nussbaum
16 January 2011
Strange Horizons publishes three reviews every week. That's at least a dozen reviews every month. More than a hundred and fifty a year. This, as far as I can tell, makes Strange Horizons the most prolific speculative fiction reviewing organ in existence, and competitive with a lot of professional, mainstream book reviews. It's still nowhere near enough space to cover all the books that are submitted for review, much less all of the books published in the field (whatever that means) each year. The editor's job, long before they start editing the reviews they do decide to publish, is deciding which books to cover and which reviews to commission, so it seems right that this should be the first question we discuss in this series.
As seems to happen quite often in discussions of genre or reviewing, the question of what to review boils down to a choice between prescriptive and descriptive. Is a reviews department a paper of record, reporting on the state of the genre and on the important names at its core, or is it a partisan platform, evangelizing for little-known writers and works and reflecting an inevitable editorial bias? Is its purpose to report on tastes, or to make them?
This is a huge, unwieldy question to which the answer, inevitably, is "yes." The reviews department should cover both the core of the field (again that fuzzy term) and its outskirts. It should take part in the conversation that surrounds the books that everyone is talking about (and hopefully contribute something new to it), and draw attention to the books that no one has noticed. This is all as obviously true as it is unhelpful. So let's break the question down to smaller components:
- Subgenres - Speculative fiction is an increasingly fragmented field, and different people mean entirely different things when they point to it. The popularity of various subgenres, such as urban fantasy and steampunk, has skyrocketed, and to cover them with anything resembling comprehensiveness would be to dedicate the department to them almost exclusively. On the other hand, to ignore these subgenres would also limit the magazine's definition of genre. So how do you choose which steampunk novel, which vampire romance—if any—to cover?
- Mainstream works - Genre elements have been gaining popularity outside of the field for the better part of a decade. These days it seems that a lot of writers are dipping their toes in the fantastic, or using the future to discuss the present. How many of these novels should be covered by Strange Horizons?
- Non-fiction - Strange Horizons has covered criticism and biography related to the speculative genres and that's something I hope to continue doing. Today's review, by Karen Burnham, is of a work of popular science, which I think is a first for the magazine. Should there be more such reviews?
- Older and Classic Works - How close to the contemporary should the department hew? Covering classic reprints is one thing, but what about older, but not yet classic, works?
- The Popular vs. the Obscure - How important is it for Strange Horizons to be yet another review venue covering the latest Brandon Sanderson, or the latest China Mieville? On the other hand, if a book is available in a limited print run, or is prohibitively expensive, is it worth covering? What about works in translation, which almost inevitably draw a smaller audience among English-language readers?
- Film, TV, and Comics - I think that the magazine's film and TV coverage manages to represent these mediums without allowing them to distract from the department's focus on written fiction. Meanwhile comics and graphic novels are hardly represented, mainly because I'm nowhere near literate enough in that medium to find the works worth covering.
It's tempting to answer all of these questions, once again, with "yes." The reviews department should cover the popular and the obscure, focus on books while giving other mediums their space, highlight works in translation and non-fiction. But leaving aside the practical issues that prevent this, I'm not sure that such a wide-ranging department would even be desirable. It's a good thing, I think, for the department to have its own voice, its own priorities, and its own tastes—and if the 2010 reviewers' roundup, in which Ian McDonald's The Dervish House was the hands-down favorite, and Inception received a resounding "meh," is any indication, those tastes are nowhere near the center of the genre. But of course, now it's my job to influence and direct the department's emphasis—hence the questions above. What are your thoughts? What questions am I missing?
Comments (4)
Posted by Jonathan M on January 17, 2011 9:35 AM
Around the end of last year there was a bit of discussion about the idea of reviewing entire series using the model provided by mainstream NYRB/LRB-style publications who habitually review an author's entire back catalogue.
That is one area that Strange Horizons could branch into.
Posted by Nathaniel Katz on January 17, 2011 3:00 PM
I think that a lot of what's covered can be determined by the reviews written. A large part of why I love Strange Horizon's reviews is that they're a pretty open process. Yes, there are regular contributors, but there's no fixed review staff. As such, the magazine's tastes are extremely eclectic. If reviewers can come up with interesting, relatively original things to say about The Way of Kings, the more power to them - that's something worth reading. If they can intelligently cover a niche or mainstream work in a way that the review's comprehensible and useful for a general audience, then that, too, is something worth reading and publishing. And so on. The huge volume of Strange Horizons reviews prevents it from falling into ruts or purely detailing one facet of the genre; as long as there are varied and intelligent contributors, the magazine's content will likely also be varied and intelligent.
Posted by Ben on January 19, 2011 11:25 AM
SH should cover more horror fiction- there isn't enough quality coverage of this genre.
Posted by Matt Denault on January 25, 2011 7:45 AM
The very name "Strange Horizons" suggests something about coverage: that it isn't going to focus on the centers of any particular subgenre but on the outskirts, the uncertain areas of contact and change. And, when coverage does occasionally address the centers, it will not be embedded within them, but will come from the perspective of those outskirts.
But I go back to your previous post here, Abigail. Reviews should be interesting. That means, in terms of my preferences as a reader, that SH should assign and publish reviews based on whether the reviewer is able to generate a review that will be interesting to readers--whether the readers read (or watch or listen) in the subgenre or not, whether they've read the particular work under review or not. That's more important than just coverage for coverage's sake. Uninsightful or uninteresting reviews of works deemed important to cover don't just read like missed opportunities, they bring down the overall level of discourse. Better nothing is said.
What publications get covered will thus tend to follow from who you recruit to write reviews. Because, of course, these same questions are ones that individual reviewers must answer for themselves as well. Am I reviewing enough of this, or that? (I don't think you can choose between prescriptive and descriptive, because prescription will be implicit if it is not explicit: description by selection is inherently political.) Am I capturing something worth capturing, making an argument worth making, when my reviews over a period of time are considered? Am I contributing anything new, or am I contributing by amplifying what others are saying--and which do I want to do? These are individual decisions for reviewers, and I think they must be for reviews editors as well.