Why This Is Hell

I've long had trouble with the word "ethics" - if only from my work using Emmanuel Levinas on ethics as first philosophy preceding ontology, and being told by some that that isn't ethics. I have a work ethic (god, yes), and I try to behave ethically, although it bites me on the ass half the time.

So an ethic of writing only positive reviews?

There's a whatever dunks your biscuit moment - your gaff, your rules. If you choose to publish a magazine, webpage, anthology, newspaper, blog or whatever, which only includes raves and never put-downs, then it's your dollar. He who pays the piper ... tells him to shut up and go elsewhere.

There used to be free movie magazine, probably called Flicks, which had capsule reviews, and hey, all of them were positive, even for 8 mm. My betting is it was paid for by cinemas and film companies, if only via advertising. So it's a marketing tool. I'd turn to it for information, but I doubt it would make me see a film (unless it interested me) or avoid one.

But let's assume it's not for mercenary reasons, that you want to enthuse and to encourage, that you have an ethics of evangelising, or pushing, and that you want to sell - no, too mercantile, you want to push... Buy this book rather than that book.

Here you'd run into the ethics as I would more commonly use it. I am reading a book and I want to give it a positive review - it's not by someone I know, I'm not being paid, I'm not furthering my career or feathering my nest... So, it would help if the book was, yanno, actually good. That makes the job easy in terms of writing a positive review - although depending on one's ability to rave it might become a bad review in terms of quality. The most negative response I've ever had was to a review which was meant to be positive - but in summarising the content I left the author thinking I thought they omitted that material.

But if the book is, well, yanno, not very good? You could accentuate the positives, you could misunderstand the point of the curate's egg metaphor, you can be mealy mouthed about "promising"s and "inherently interesting"s, but there's a slippage from economics with the truth and spin to downright lying. If you think Attack of the Clowns is a steaming pile of doodoo then any candour demands you should say so.

There are reviewers who do tend to the positive - the late KVB never wrote a negative review that I read. I could never work out whether he had low standards, only reviewed books he liked or - and this is what I suspect - he had the ability to fillet a book for what interested him. It did worry me though.

So let's assume good faith, assume you're not a paid advert - indeed, you are paying for the space - and you only write honest positive reviews. Or, if you don't like it, you decide not to review it. Or review it elsewhere. You are an enthusiast. After all, there are more sf and fantasy books published every year than you can hope to read, money is tight, and you want to know what to pick up from Amazon. You need a guru, right?

Rog Peyton and Justin Ackroyd both behave like that, handselling a particular book, and not just to pay their shop rents. You don't like the book, you won't trust their next recommendation.

But that there's the point. The taste of the reviewer is something you take on trust - and if they only write positive reviews then you might assume that anything they don't review is crap. But that's to assume you share their tastes. Tastes differ. One book I reviewed early on in a British edition went on to be shortlisted for awards in its US version, and people I respect talk it up (I can only assume it was rewritten). Of course, I might have faulty taste. But from what I like and what I don't like - and I hope I am consistent even if tastes can develop - you can calibrate how that fits with your tastes.

Here's another point: I might not buy a book that you like, because you like it. Equally, I might buy it because you don't.

This isn't just the fascination of the car crash - the turkey shoot - or the perversion of being single and bloodyminded (one academic I know seems to make a point of loving films others hate). This is the sense of knowing that tastes can become opposites. Christopher Tookey in the Daily Hate Mail and Barry Norman when he reviewed on the BBC are cases in point. Save for sf and horror films - which they tend to hate on principle and are often right - I find that the more stars they give a film the more likely I am to like it, and Tookey's turkeys tend to be the release that I'm looking forward to most.

But Pollyannas don't convince me. We live in a fallen world.

Of course, there are various reasons to read a book or seeing beyond it being good or enjoying it - but I suspect that that is what normal people do. I mean, we all went to see the sixth Star Wars movie suspecting it was going to be as bad as the previous three. But it was significant and needed to be seen by anyone wanting to understand (that part of) the field. Let's assume we're talking about the case of having a ten pound book token, and you want to know what to spend it on that you will enjoy (but even that word begs so many questions...).

Equally, I'm not convinced we need a Manifesto for Motherfuckers - and I don't want to stop anyone to do what they want to do with their spare time. But at the risk of turning into the how many sf fans it takes to change a lightbulb joke, it strikes me that if some of us weren't so enthusiastic about sf and fantasy, we wouldn't criticise it so much.

There's been a lot of wibbling about how to turn women onto sf - inspired by this set of suggestions: http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/06/explaining_science_fiction_to.php But as I always say in situations like this - what about the men? It's like the pendulum's swung too far!! So thank you to julieandrews for this: http://julieandrews.livejournal.com/32942.html

The story so far: once upon a time sf was a despised genre loved by boys never read by girls, and it was looked down by on everybody with good taste. We would say, Canticle for Leibowitz isn't crap, and then they would say, no, but then it isn't sf. And we would say, what about Gulliver and Thomas More and Lucian of Samosa, lo even unto Plato's Republic and we saw that it was sf and that it was good. Because if we read it, it must be sf and it must be good.

Then Aldiss came unto us and spoke, and said, that's a bit silly really, given they didn't have the idea of science then, but how about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. And we looked and it was good and it was sf, although we didn't like the Branagh movie as much as the James Whale one and some of us had read the book.

And time came and time went, and Gary Westfahl spoke unto us and told us that fans could leave their books to academic libraries and that he was ever so humble, and that Shelley didn't know what she was doing but Gernsback did even if it was pants.

And we looked at sf and we saw it started in 1926 and we saw it was good.

And so to Gresham College, or rather the Royal College of Surgeons, to a half day symposium on Sf as a literary genre - although no one defined genre or literary.

Neal Stephenson was the keynote - after an after dinner style intro with a few odd statements. I missed part of his speech, which seemed fair enough stuff, as I had a sudden attack of tb and had to steal brisingamen's water to choke to death with. The sum of it was the bifurcated career - some actors like Weaving and Weaver can act smart - and we're all geeks now. He closed with some kind of sense of relief that the post-structuralists never got hold of sf - so I must have blinked throughout the careers of Gibson as topic and Delany as writer.

Andy Sawyer talked about the colesence of sf as a genre under Gernsback, with the proviso that it was done earlier but not in English, and done earlier but not in a magazine, and it was done in a magazine earlier but only as a one-off. As always the First turns out to be the third or fourth.

John Clute finished the first session with a talk on horror, and I fear I lost the thread, in part because he was apparently trying to do battle with working out if he had the right draft, a conversation that seemed to be going on in the room and, as always, with the microphone. I think he needs a lapel mic as desk ones are either hit or rebound from the thumped lectern.

Dr Martin Willis took up the second half, and well, treated us to manifest bollocks. Sf studies has neglected the nineteenth century. I have this rather strong feel that early SFS is full of much of this stuff - Art Evans is editing much now - and indeed early SFS endlessly reviewed editions of nineteenth century sf. Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction hardly get beyond 1900, and there's a book by him on Victorian sf, a good chunk of both Aldiss volumes, Seed's Anticipations, Alkon's Origins of Futuristic Fiction and SF before 1900, Stableford's Scientific Romance in Britain... In fact, as I pored through journals looking for sf crit back in 1990 I really craved some post-1926 stuff. Has Westfahl's championing of 1926 become so canonical?

(The Routledge Companion to SF will make a case for the long history argument, although I still feel as a genre 1926 works as Year Zero.)

Willis also had some odd views of what science is or how it is viewed, and I wondered how Latour and Kuhn would see it. I also wondered where in Frankenstein we are told the creature is animated with electricity' nowhere is my guess. I suspect he also misrepresented fjm's views.

My old colleague Roger Luckhurst finished the day with the twentieth century, and a distinction of modernity, modernism and modernising, a division I've heard him work through for nearly twenty years now. He was interesting on the James/Wells battles, and the snobbery of the modernist, and the attack on mass culture, but it was the end of a hot afternoon, and he needed to feed into a plenary.

I hope I noticed when I first saw the agenda but what was painfully clear was the papers were by white men. There is no woman anywhere in the world who can speak to sf as a literary genre. Of course, if you turn to the fourteen scholars in the directory on the SF-Hub, only two of them are female. Neither of them is fjm. Someone did raise this as a question - and of course it's Gresham College's screw up not the evidentally embarrassed panelists. Clute made some half-hearted attempt to say the history of sf can be told through texts by women, but I don't really think anyone really has. fjm gave us some figures to question the demographics of the audience. Some one asked what would get men to watch female superheroes; I feel the answer is too obvious to spell out.

I think the interesting drowned out the sound of my chin dropping, but next time I'd like to see Justina Robson as keynote, with fjm, Lucie Armit, brisingamen , Jenny Wolmark, Michelle Reid and Joan Gordon talking. They don't especially even need to talk about feminist sf. But it feel as if a pendulum had swung.

Thanks and apologies to brisingamen for the bottle (you know you mustn't cough but it makes it worse), apologies to anyone trampled on my way out (and I panicked because there were no visible doors in the room) and thanks to James for meeting for coffee before and finding us a pub afterwards. That's seventeen years of this now, give or take a summer. Bloody hell, we're old farts.