Trashing books and book bloggers

Via James Nicoll, I saw Anne Rice sent her rabid fan base over to an obscure blogger’s web site after the blogger posted a not very kind review of Pandora, one of Ms. Rice’s books.

Book on Garbage Can
(CC By – A.M. Kuchling)

On the one hand, I’m of the opinion that posting one’s thoughts on the public internet makes them fair game for criticism. I provide a comment section here and only rarely do I ever censor comments. And I never do so simply because someone calls me names. I’m always amused when I get called names on the internet, though I don’t really encourage the practice.

But on the other hand, boy are Ms. Rice’s fans as a whole a bunch of rabid assholes. Ms. Rice sending them to swarm on a blogger makes her an asshole as well.

I haven’t yet received that kind of treatment from an author, though I do get the occasional drive-by comment jerk. Makes me think I haven’t been working hard enough. (Yes, that’s kind of obvious given the lack of posting for a nearly a year.)

To be fair, I haven’t cut up any books, the blogger “Miss Articulate” did with Pandora. That tends to make book lovers cringe, no matter what book it is. I did recently recycle all of my Orson Scott Card books though. And by recycle, I don’t mean give them away to be read by others. They went into my condominium complex’s recycle bin. Those books were boxed up for years before I got up the gumption to just toss them.

Coverage of Women on SF/F Blogs (2012) ➚

Project thesis: when looking at a sample of bloggers reviewing SF/F, a majority of men will skew toward reviewing more men. A majority of women will skew toward a more equal gender parity, or the opposite in which they review a majority of women. There will be a handful of outliers.

Authors Review By Blog, Sorted By Gender Of Bloggers
Authors reviewed by blog, sorted by gender of blogger

Probability Moon / Nancy Kress

Cover of Probability Moon
The second audiobook I listened to on my massive road trip earlier this year was Probability Moon by Nancy Kress. Ms. Kress generally writes well within the bounds of traditional science fiction. I was worried that this would be tough to listen to because of the complexity of the story and character interaction where I would be able to read on the page and retain the flow. I did have some difficulty with that toward the beginning, but by the one-third point, I could keep the characters straight while listening. The natives on World, an extra-solar planet, experience shared reality. Basically, everyone agrees on what things are, or they experience…

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Filter House / Nisi Shawl

Cover of Filter House
Filter House won the Tiptree award a few years ago. I attended the Wiscon where the award was presented, purchased a copy, and got Nisi Shawl’s autograph in it. As it turns out, Nisi lives in Seattle and we had mutual friends. I’ve since made her acquaintance. I mention all this because I put off reading Filter House for almost three years because of that friendship. I feared I would hate the book even though I like Nisi, and then what would I do? Thankfully, I don’t have to write a negative review about something by someone I like. I finally faced my fear and read Filter House on my…

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Linking Irresponsibly: Predatory Pricing and Amazon ➚

R.L. Copple does a really cogent job of explaining why Amazon isn’t engaging in predatory pricing under legal definitions. He links this to a statement from the Authors Guild which essentially uses the term predatory pricing to mean hey, we don’t think Amazon is fair in a justification for why publishers should be allowed to fix prices.

The Green Glass Sea / Ellen Klages

Cover of The Green Glass Sea
So I went on a two month road trip in January and February. Which meant I was going to need an alternate method to read books. I subscribed to Audible and started looking for titles. As has been normal for the last couple of years, I looked for science fiction by women. It’s much harder to find interesting audio science fiction by women (at least on Audible) than with read-with-your-eyes books. Based on a suggestion by Debbie Notkin, I started by looking for WisCon guests of honor and Tiptree winners, and found Ellen Klages’ The Green Glass Sea. If you have ever met Ellen Klages, she is a riot. And…

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Wiscon 36 – Day 3

Space Babe
Day 3 started off not particularly well, though no fault of Wiscon. I headed out to catch the bus earlier than Saturday, but I still missed the bus I needed. Consequently, I ended up arriving 15 minutes into the first panel. That first panel was Geek Girls and the Problem of Self-Objectification. The panel was meant to start with the article with the same title at geekfeminism.org. Specifically, the author was careful to point out that geek cosplayers who go for the sexy aren’t the problem. The geek (and wider) culture is what rewards skin-showing. To be clear as to my background, I’m a straight dude. I pick that word…

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[The whiteness of the New York Times Book Review] is the product of a busy editor’s mental pathway, which must flip quickly through its virtual Rolodex to find the first acceptable writer to turn a piece around by deadline. When that Rolodex is stocked with whites — and most of the time, it is — the byline count perpetuates itself. White editors grow comfortable in their relationships with white writers. They read books written by white people.

— Amanda Hess - Why 88% of books reviewed by The New York Times are written by white authors

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Link: Where Things Stand ➚

Remember the furor over the breakdown of reviews by gender at major review venues that VIDA published last year and earlier this year? Roxane Gay did a similar count that broke down reviews by race of the authors being reviewed at the New York Times Book Review. The numbers are ugly:

We looked at 742 books reviewed, across all genres. Of those 742, 655 were written by Caucasian authors (1 transgender writer, 437 men, and 217 women). Thirty-one were written by Africans or African Americans (21 men, 10 women), 9 were written by Hispanic authors (8 men, 1 woman), 33 by Asian, Asian-American or South Asian writers (19 men, 14 women), 8 by Middle Eastern writers (5 men, 3 women) and 6 were books written by writers whose racial background we were simply unable to identify.

Click the title to read the article in full.

Wiscon 36 – Day 2

I stayed out at the edge of Madison for WisCon. Before coming into town, I had checked that there was bus service between the Super 8 and the Concourse Hotel. Unfortunately, I failed to note that bus service clustered around the top of the hour on weekends. That meant I needed to head over to the bus stop at 8:45 a.m. in order to make the 10 a.m. set of panels. I caught the next arrival for the bus and arrived around 10:20, but first got coffee at Michelangelos, as coffee is a necessity. I rolled into the last half of the Designing a Magic System panel around 10:30, found…

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