At her blog, Reader of Else, Roseanna Pendlebury has a really thoughtful discussion-post about reviewing via my collection All These Worlds, Abigail Nussbaum’s Track Changes, and Maureen Kincaid Speller’s A Traveller in Time. First and foremost, it’s a delight to see someone putting the three books into conversation:
There’s a spectrum here, [from A Traveller in Time] whose interest is in emotional response, individual quality and perhaps the macro in the sense of a particular author, through Track Changes and its awareness of the discourses various, into ATW and its musings about genre qua genre. Which I found fascinating. Who doesn’t love spending much too long thinking abstractly about what this whole thing means (no, I’m genuinely not being sarcastic… oh, some people don’t love that? Well, sucks to be them, I suppose).
At least from my point of view, it’s a fair cop: I recognise the book I wrote, and science, or at least ebook text searching, does indeed confirm that I use the word “megatext” more than Abigail or Maureen. Most importantly: this larger conversation, this sense that Roseanna conveys of overlapping perspectives on the same thing, is exactly the sort of conversation I was hoping to contribute to when I put together All These Worlds, and it’s rather wonderful to see it actually happening.
I was also very struck (and this is something Abigail discusses in the introduction to Track Changes) by Roseanna’s perspective on the history of that conversation:
The review scene, and even the internet review scene, that I grew up on is clearly different from the one that was five or ten years previous to it. I started reviewing in 2012 [and] I missed out on what I come to hear about through other people’s work, the heyday of reviews being well… a conversation. For me, reviewing has almost always been an exercise in yelling into the void. Even when posting on social media, I’ll far more often get a chat message from a friend to argue a point than an actual, visible, online response. It’s a closed loop, and that’s fine, because it’s always been that for me. But then I hear about a time when it wasn’t, and see the echoes of it here, in people talking about the work of others working around them, and I feel like I missed out. There is something richer, in all three works, for the obvious way they exist in a context full of opinions – whether from the time they were written or the authors’ inclination, these are reviews conscious of the reviews of others, and all the more interesting for it. I’m sure there’s a long German word for nostalgia for a thing you never personally experienced, and this is that. I didn’t expect reading review collections to feel bittersweet.
Speaking for All These Worlds, providing a snapshot of a time and a community is very much one of the things I hoped the book might achieve. Entire essays would be needed to explore how the larger shifts in internet culture have played out within sf’s discursive spaces over the last ten to fifteen years, but I agree it was a different time, and there certainly are things I miss about it. But I would make two points in response. To introduce the first, here’s some quotes from an essay by Rob Latham, “A Young Man’s Journey to Ladbroke Grove”, published in the extremely useful Parietal Games: Critical Writings by and on M. John Harrison:
While critics at times acknowledge the role played by Moorcock’s contentious editorials in articulating a fresh vision for the field, they largely ignore the many other forms of commentary — book reviews, scientific articles, literary and cultural criticism, artist profiles and more — that increasingly came to balance the New Wave fiction …
… remained notoriously casual — as Harrison’s account of how he acquired his post testifies: ‘[…] He dragged me round to Mike Moorcock’s house one night at about three o’clock and said: “This chap should be Books Editor.” So Mike said something like: “Oh, all right” — and I was’ …
… In his own reviews and review-articles — and in those he commissioned from the likes of Brian Aldiss, John Brunner, Norman Spinrad and that future powerhouse of sf criticism, John Clute — Harrison pursued several broad, overlapping agendas with vigour and panache …
… The overall sense conveyed was of a restless intelligence searching down every scrap of speculative imagination available in the sprawling landscape of modern literature…
Parietal Games was published in 2005, a couple of years after I graduated from university and just as I myself was starting out in reviewing. I had read about the New Wave, obviously, and was starting to read other sf criticism, but Latham’s essay brought the two together for me in a startling way. There had been a criticism scene in the New Wave! There had been debates and arguments. There had been a project, and it had achieved things, things worth writing about in essays decades later. Like Roseanna, I didn’t expect reading a review collection to be bittersweet, but well, there I was. I’m not claiming and don’t think that the work in All These Worlds is as significant as the New Worlds critical work that Latham discusses. (Track Changes, maybe.) My point here is that it was an inspiration to know that such things were possible, and a spur to look out for other people who felt similarly — people like Maureen and Abigail — and see where the conversation would take us.
Which leads to the second point. I think one word that partially captures that feeling, of missing something you weren’t there for, is the famously not-quite-translatable Portuguese word saudade. But the thing about that is, at least according to Dictionary.com, there’s a key difference with nostalgia: “Nostalgia is a longing for something that is gone forever, but saudade is much more open-ended: the longing is for something that may—or may not—return.” And while I don’t think the blogosphere is coming back in its old form any time soon (he wrote, in a blogpost), that doesn’t mean the public conversation can’t or won’t find a new form. Personally speaking, I’ve been enjoying Bluesky a lot recently, which is currently at that sweet spot of having enough people who care about a topic to get some in-depth good-faith discussions, in the case of sf helped along by the platform’s “starter packs” feature, including this one for SFF criticism and discussion put together by Ziv W, and the networking efforts of sites like the Ancillary Review of Books (particularly their Wow! Signal posts) and people like Dan Hartland. But if not that, I think we’ll probably find some way of keeping the conversation going, and in fifteen years’ time it will be someone else’s turn to feel a pang of saudade.
Leave a Reply