Valiant Attempts

[faustus]

The Google Alert I have keeping an eye out for me usually just spots things listing the Pocket Essentials Cyberpunk, but today it found a review of The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction.

On the whole it is liked, but obviously the only sentence that interests me is:

The writing style overall was pleasantly approachable, with only a few essays that bogged down in their academic language (Helen Merrick's disappointing essay on gender and Andrew M. Butler's valiant attempt at explaining postmodernism are the two failures that stand out in memory).

With one hand they give...

I guess I was doomed to failure.

Comments

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Well, I reviewed one book of Matrix crit, and the most honest thing I could say was that ANY effort in that line was doomed to failure, but as failures go it was pretty spiffy.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Never mind. Try again, fail again. Fail better.

[nwhyte]

Well, the reviewer liked Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's piece, so obviously has no taste!

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Like Istvan, disliked mine... Thinking about it, how could I disagree with this judgement? Matches mine, more or less.