Reviewing Reviews
Posted by Niall Harrison
6 January 2012
To mark ten years of writing sf reviews, Martin Lewis takes another look at his first review, a piece on James Blish's A Case of Conscience for the SF Site, and goes through it paragraph-by-paragraph:
As an atheist interpreting an agnostic’s depiction of Catholic theology several decades after the fact, I don’t find this entirely persuasive but this does not really matter. James Blish notes in his foreword that it was his intention to write “about a man, not a body of doctrine.” He largely succeeds in this; his portrayal of the deeply conflicted Father Ruiz-Sanchez is the core of this section.The first sentence situates the novel in the context of my own experience and worldview. Quite often reviewers run shy of introducing themselves into a review (or go to the opposite extreme and write solely from their personal reaction to the text) but I think it is a natural part of the process and one that is ultimately to the benefit of the reader. Having contextualised my reaction, I then analyse it by suggesting that this reaction does not stand in the way of what the book is trying to achieve.
In support of this, I quote Blish. I’m pleased to see that I was using evidence but this is the only quote in the review, it is very brief and it isn’t even for the body of the text. Again, as a comparison, my most recent review for Strange Horizons contained sixteen, several of substantial length. That level of quotation wouldn’t be appropriate in a review of this length but there is a balance to be struck.
Having identified Blish’s aim, I judge it a success but using weasel words. What does it mean that he largely succeeds? In what ways doesn’t he succeed? Is describing Ruiz-Sanchez as “the core of this section” actually descriptive? I think there is more to unpack here.
Depending how you measure it, my own ten-year anniversary was last March, or is coming up in August 2013. The first ever review I wrote was of the Angel season two episode "Happy Anniversary", for posting to uk.media.tv.angel; you can read it here. Its most obvious failure now as a piece of writing is that it almost completely lacks context. It was clearly written for an audience assumed to be familiar with the detail of the episode's events, and those of the rest of the season, because it offers almost no context of any kind. By the time of the series finale "Not Fade Away", three years later, I was doing a little better on that front -- and including some dialogue quotes! -- but I'm still not sure I'd say it works as an independent piece of writing. The most interesting, or possibly depressing, thing I notice is just how early I started leaning on certain stylistic crutches, in particular the dreaded, pseudo-authoritative "of course." (At least I usually manage to avoid things like "genuinely funny" these days.)
In between those two episodes, I started writing a few reviews for sf venues, i.e. places with at least a nominal editorial filter between my keyboard and the reader. The first of those was a piece for the now-defunct website Diverse Books on Charles Stross' Singularity Sky, which thanks to the magic of the Wayback Machine you can find here. This time there's synopsis and context -- in fact if anything I'm a little too eager to contextualise, especially given that I get one key fact wrong (although I did correct it in a review for Vector following year) -- but as with Martin's review the analysis is weak and largely unsupported, a problem compounded in my case by how gushingly enthusiastic I am about Stross' potential as a writer. Still, I did get a Bluetones reference in there.
