Watts Martin's Blog, page 4

What good are reviews, anyway?

A discussion-slash-debate broke out among friends and acquaintances on Twitter earlier this week relating to the value of reviewers—specifically with respect to furry writing (and by extension other subgenres), but also in a more general philosophical sense.

“Reviewers = haters” is not an attitude unique to fandom; I know a lot of people who express disdain for movie reviews—which also happen to be the media criticism we’re most familiar with. “If I listened to bad reviews, I’d have missed a lot of movies I liked,” the thought goes. “And reviewers never like escapist stuff. They only like artsy fartsy stuff.”

Believe what you will, but I believe that just doesn’t hold up. Most critics liked “The Dark Knight” and the Lord of the Rings movies and “Star Trek Into Darkness” and countless other popular flicks. And do not tell me that critics can’t appreciate escapist fluff when “Fast & Furious 6” is sitting there with 70% on Rotten Tomatoes as I write this, okay? Critics have different likes and dislikes (surprisingly similar to normal humans), but in aggregate they tend to be fairly reflective of movie audiences. Yes, the critics probably will all hate on “Transformers vs. GI Joe: Give Michael Bay All Your Money,” but let’s not pretend it’s because they’re all horrible people who hate fun.

I think it’s easy to be dismissive of film critics in particular because we often already know if we’re going to run to a theater—or stay far away from it—before the first reviews of a major studio release come out. We’ve been seeing ads for them for half a year before opening day. If you’ve been hyped since winter to see something, you probably don’t care what Peter Travers of Rolling Stone thinks of it.

But we’re not talking about major studio films here, we’re talking about books. If you pick up a newspaper or magazine that does book reviews, it’s almost certainly going to have a few titles you haven’t heard of. A lot of what’s reviewed on Flayrah, the web site that served as a catalyst for the Twitter debate, is stuff I’d never have heard of otherwise.1 And the reason many movie critics go out of their way to review weird stuff you’ve never heard of isn’t to show off their hipster cred—it’s because they want to let you know about stuff they think is awesome that you might otherwise miss. One of my favorite film discoveries some years back, “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” was something I only heard of because a reviewer put it on his “ten best” list.

I want to go back and underline that last bit. It’s important. Reviews can introduce us to terrific things we might otherwise miss. Many furry fans have no idea that there are dozens of furry books out there from a wide swath of publishers. Even in 2013 with all the Internets this stuff is hard to find when it’s neither from big-for-furry publishers nor from authors who are “plugged in” to the fandom community. And it’s even hard to find guidance on the discoverable stuff. I can point you to Sofawolf or FurPlanet’s web sites, but the majority of items there don’t have reviews or star ratings. (Including mine. Not that I’m bitter.) How do you know what’s good? Ask on Twitter? Is that really better than finding a source for well-written reviews?

The other thing reviews can do specifically for furrydom—stand back, as this may be a little controversial—is make our storytelling better.

We have some terrific writers producing work that’s absolutely the equal of anything “mainstream” publishers are. And we have a huge number of writers supporting Sturgeon’s Revelation.2 But we have a fair number who are somewhere in the middle, with a lot of promise but in desperate need of editing feedback and guidance. I’m reading a recent and moderately high-profile furry release with a lot of “first draft syndrome”: awkward phrasings, clunky dialogue, and numerous places where the prose would be made immeasurably more captivating by showing us through character action what we’re instead being merely told in omniscient narrative.

I recognize that nobody wants to hear that their work needed more work before releasing. Bad reviews can be crushing. (Indeed, if I get to the end of this particular book and don’t think I can give it at least an “interesting with reservations” you’ll probably not hear of it again from me.) But this isn’t about tearing down. It’s about building up. If we know where our problems are we can make things better. There’s terrific stuff that’s already out there that’s being missed, and there’s stuff from writers with the potential to be terrific if they’re given constructive feedback. This is what reviews can do.

Oh, c’mon, Watts, it’s not like a furry book is ever going to be nominated for a Nebula Award. Well, imaginary voice in my head I’m arguing with, first off: even if we’re writing just for ourselves, what’s wrong with writing as well as we can? Isn’t doing the best we’re capable of doing a worthy goal regardless of how wide our appeal is?

And second, how do you know one won’t?

There’s some criticisms I have with Flayrah’s reviews specifically, but that, as Alton Brown would say, is another show. Er, post.↩

Ted Sturgeon’s “90% of everything is crap” is widely misunderstood as cynical dismissiveness. It isn’t. Sturgeon wrote that it was “wrung out of me after twenty years of wearing defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc., are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other art forms.”↩

Ebook Hula

A couple minor updates: Why Coyotes Howl has been submitted to Bad Dog Books and should be available there in a couple days for $5.99 retail. And, the ebook version of “Indigo Rain” is now available at Amazon and Lulu (and should be on the iBookstore and Nook store soon).

I hate to say it, but…

…I may start writing a web serial sometime soon.

All right, I don’t really hate to say that, of course—I’ve been thinking about it off and on for years. It’s possible that a new story that I’ve started may be a good candidate. I’ll have to get several months’ worth of updates in the bag before feeling confident trying this, though, so it might not start until next year. We’ll see.

I still have to figure out where to serialize it, too. As much as “serialize it everywhere!” sounds like the right answer, it could quickly get exhausting given that posting to each archive site is multiple steps and difficult to automate. I may stick to just my blog (http://cprints.ranea.org) and probably the LiveJournal mirror (which I’ve almost but not quite automated), with links to the posts from my SoFurry and FA accounts. In some ways I’d prefer to keep the story a separate “stream” from the blog, but mixing the stream doesn’t seem to hurt the audience of other people who’ve done it, so.

If you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.

A digression on Cyberpunk

I was listening to Fangs and Fonts‘ most recent podcast on cyberpunk, and—

Okay, let me back up. “Fangs and Fonts” is a podcast about writing, hosted by four writers in (and out of) furry fandom: Roland Ferret, Yannarra, Tarl “Voice” Hoch and Ocean. So far the episodes have mostly come across as structure-free conversations about a given topic. There’s a lot of spontaneity and liveliness to it, although I suspect they’d benefit from spending an hour or so before recording making a list of Things To Cover.

Anyway. While it was fun listening in on the conversation, my impression was that none of the four hosts had read much of the genre past the Wikipedia entry. They’d seen movies with cyberpunk tropes to varying degrees, but… well. There’s no way to say this without an implied tsk tsk, but you guys, it’s a writing podcast!

So let me back up more. Specificially, to the early ’80s.

It’s pretty easy to discern the cyber of cyberpunk: ubiquitous networking that lets us always be “jacked in” to a sprawling virtual reality while also letting corporations and governments, which all too often seem to be one and the same, track us for a variety of purposes both nefarious and benign. But what about the punk? Well, it meant… punk. An anti-authoritarian, alienated and disaffected counterculture that neither fits in with the dominant culture nor has much interest in doing so. Heroes in cyberpunk weren’t necessarily punks—or necessarily heroic—but they tended to have a very edge-of-society vibe.

The problem with focusing almost exclusively on the cinematic aspect of cyberpunk is that you miss that the “punk” element wasn’t just in the relationship of the fictional characters to their settings. It was in the relationship of the writers to mainstream science fiction. William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker—they were very deliberately responding to the more utopian, and by then rather dated, science fiction of the 1950s and before, the Heinleins and Clarkes and Asimovs.

Thematically, cyberpunk had little in common with the “New Wave” of science fiction of the late 1960s and early 70s, the works of Michael Moorcock and Thomas Disch and J. G. Ballard—but stylistically, it’s pretty much a direct descendant. As Moorcock wrote rather snippishly, science fiction lacked “passion, subtlety, irony, original characterization, original and good style, a sense of involvement in human affairs.”

When we think about cyberpunk today, we mostly think about the visual trappings, the stuff that does look good on film—but those weren’t at all the point. A lot of these stories and novels were, in oft-bitter and backhanded fashion, deeply socially conscious. They had shit to say, and what’s more, they wanted to say it beautifully. The opening sentence of Neuromancer has become one of the most famous in science fiction:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Of course, the New Wave of science fiction doesn’t seem much less dated now than what it railed against, and the same is true of cyberpunk. (Bruce Sterling declared it dead as long ago as 1985.) Its aesthetics were assimilated into the mainstream long ago, and the very act of mainstreaming guts any legitimate claims to counterculture, rather like buying a Dead Kennedys tee at Hot Topic. But its treatment of technology, of dystopia, of the contentious relationship between individual freedom, corporate power and state control had a tremendous and lasting influence on science fiction. Yes, cyberpunk might have said “put on this black overcoat and these sunglasses and you’ll look awesome, trust me,” but it also said “science fiction is relevant not just as meditations on our possible long-term futures, but as a mirror to show us things about our here and now.

And that’s stuff that—mostly—didn’t come along for the ride when the glasses and overcoats went to Hollywood.

If you’re interested in reading more seminal cyberpunk stuff, here’s a few things to potentially investigate:

Cyberpunk: Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Evolution, and Revolution, an anthology that includes work by Sterling, Gibson, Cadigan, and others. Since Sterling’s original anthology Mirrorshades is long out of print, this is pretty much the collection to get for a broad overview of the important writers.
Neuromancer, William Gibson. Poetic and bleak, with memorable characters and a striking take on artificial intelligence, this was the first novel to win the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards, and has been cited as one of the most important novels—not just science fiction novels, but novels, period—of the twentieth century’s latter half.
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson. The main character is Hiro Protagonist, who delivers pizza for the Mafia in an armored supercar as his day job and is a warrior in the Metaverse by night. Either you already want to read it or I can’t help you. (The Metaverse as depicted here was a pretty direct influence on Second Life.)

For movies/TV, there are some interesting ones the Fangs & Fonts Folks touched on—especially Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix (the first one) and, of course, Blade Runner—but I’d also suggest the underrated Strange Days, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), and—if you can find it—the short-lived cult TV series “Max Headroom.”

Indigo Rain and the Ursa Majors

Nominations for the 2013 Ursa Major Awards are open through February 28th, and my novella “Indigo Rain” is eligible! This is the first time I’ve had something in the running since Why Coyotes Howl in 2005.

The nomination form is online; the process is a little clunky, but still fairly fast. This is for nominations only, not the the final voting; the top five stories will be on the final ballot.

You can read the first few thousand words of “Indigo Rain” in a two-part preview:

Part 1
Part 2

And, you can buy the whole shebang here:

FurPlanet (print)
Bad Dog Books (DRM-free ebook)

The ebook is also available from Amazon, Apple iBooks, the Nook Store, and Lulu.

And, last but not least, Sabretoothed Ermine’s cover art is also eligible for a separate Ursa Major nomination as a “published illustration.” Just, you know, saying.

A digression on cyberpunk

I was listening to Fangs and Fonts‘ most recent podcast on cyberpunk, and—

Okay, let me back up. “Fangs and Fonts” is a podcast about writing, hosted by four writers in (and out of) furry fandom: Roland Ferret, Yannarra, Tarl “Voice” Hoch and Ocean. So far the episodes have mostly come across as structure-free conversations about a given topic. There’s a lot of spontaneity and liveliness to it, although I suspect they’d benefit from spending an hour or so before recording making a list of Thi...

Why a raccoon? Who cares?

I’ve been watching and silently judging another flareup of a very old debate in anthropomorphic fandom, this time happening on Twitter and in the comments on Flayrah’s review of Roar #4. Does there need to be a justification for having characters in a story be animal people?

We can illustrate the divide with two comments. First, from “Crossaffliction,” in his usual diplomatic style:

For the record, the entire premise of “let’s make talking animals the main characters and leave that completel...