Reading, Reviewing, and ‘Rithmatic

I’ve been bad about updating this blog with new and exciting news about myself. So here’s some news.

Last week my review of the new Octavia E Butler eBook Unexpected Stories went up at NPR Books. I really enjoyed the book and my only sadness is that there aren’t more new stories to read. Go read the review and then go buy the book.

This week I am back on io9 posting roundups of my favorite short stories. Now it’s weekly instead of monthly, so I can talk about more stories I love.

Now that I’m reviewing for NPR and doing the story thing on io9 folks have been asking me about sending review copies and such. I have a policy! I’ll also post this on my About page, but here it is in case you’re curious:

NPR has pretty strict conflict of interest rules, so if we’re friends or I know you well or if you have published me I can’t review your book or an anthology/collection you’re in or you edited. It’s sadface sadness, I know. I can suggest books to my editor who will then pass them on to a reviewer without conflicts and that is okay. If you do not know me, you can certainly ask if I’d like a review copy of your book/anthology/collection. If I’m interested, I’ll pitch it to my editor. I cannot make the final decision on whether I can review something for NPR, so I may have to say no.

The io9 posts are not strictly reviews and I’m not claiming complete objectivity. The stories I mention are the ones I personally like, and that may include stories by people I know. I pick stories from the magazines (and sometimes anthologies) I read and that mostly includes free online ones. But if you have a print mag, or an eBook version of your zine with extra content, or an anthology you’d like me to read in case I like a story enough to mention it, please do let me know! Me agreeing to read does not guarantee you’ll get a mention, just so you know.

All that business aside, I’m very much enjoying reading more again and highlighting excellent fiction where I can. I’m still looking for a place to write about other media, especially when the Fall TV season starts up again.

A Review of My Electric Velocipede Story

Oddly, I haven’t seen too many reviews of EV 17/18, which is a sadness! But apparently Tangent Online did a review of the entire issue, including my story Enmity. Check it:

…a cerebral exploration of the creation story, spanning ancient Greek mythology, Christianity, and probably some other sources I haven’t picked up on too.

…Now, my knowledge of classical civilisation is limited at best, so it took a great deal of Wikipedia research even vaguely to understand what was going on here. Poor Eurydice goes from creator of the world, to Adam’s Eve and back again. She dies, lives, creates and destroys, all with little idea of who or what she really is, and by the end of it all I felt just as mixed up as Eurydice herself. In that sense, Bradford did well to carry me through the narrative as well as she did, but there is no real plot to speak of. I think the ‘point’ of this piece is to portray the eternal, cyclical relationship between good and evil, and to demonstrate how it transcends theology.

My intent was less good and evil but women and men. Perhaps I tripped over my own subconscious there.

People often run up against the same issue the reviewer did when it comes to my mythpunkish stories — I pack in a lot of mythology, some recognizable by folks with a passing knowledge, some not. Apparently my target audience consists of people who have not only read a lot of mythology and folklore from various ancient civilizations but who’ve also delved into the cultural forces that shaped those mythologies and, perhaps, have also done some research into how folklore and mythology change as the socio-cultural landscape of a region or a people change.

In other words, me, Veronica Schanoes, and Helen Pilinovsky. It’s a narrow audience.

Still, I’m glad the reviewer liked it despite the confusion. Though I wonder why she objects to the line “Rape is a metaphor. And it also is not”? There’s more to the review, so click over and read the rest. And, if you haven’t read the story yet, it exists online.

People Saying Stuff About My Fiction

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been made aware of several people saying things about my stories but haven’t had the time to mention it here due to some other stuff taking up my time. Heh. Anyway, here it all is in simple list form.

  • SFScope’s Mark L. Blackman attended the NYRSF Federations reading on July 7th and gave his impressions of the stories and the readers. I have to say, he picked what has to be the worst picture of me, ever! I look like I just discovered a bug in my copy of the antho. :)
    • After a break, next up was K. Tempest Bradford, whose breezily snarky offering, “Different Day”, was a reaction to the common premises that alien worlds have one culture/one global government and that, invariably, they “come to America first.” She cleverly posits rival alien tribes, just as mutually hostile as our contemporary nations, visiting and negotiating with other parts of the world (like Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama), though her present-day biases and digs limit the story’s shelf-life.
  • Tom Crosshill reviewed Sybil’s Garage No. 6.
    • “Elan Vital” by K. Tempest Bradford. A story of dealing with loss, of holding on, and of letting go. The execution is superb, even if the premise feels somewhat familiar (I won’t reveal it here, except to say that this story too is about the undead, although to call it a zombie story would hardly be accurate.) At its core is a parent-child relationship, which as you will see becomes a recurring theme in this issue.
  • Sam Tomaino at SFRevu made me go “squee!”
    • K. Tempest Bradford gives us what, I think, is the best story in the issue with “Elan Vital”. … This is one you won’t forget soon.

There’s more to that last review but it’s a bit spoilery. Obviously you should read the story right now so you can then read the whole review ;)

The Internet Taketh Away

The Fix finally reviewed November’s Strange Horizons, yay!  But the reviewer did not dig my story that much, boo.

K. Tempest Bradford offers an interesting look at the effects of continually reflecting on national tragedy in “Until Forgiveness Comes,” but the story is a little too ambitious for its length. Set in a fictional world with very direct real world analogies (setting it in the real world would have strengthened the gut level emotional response), Bradford questions the reasons people have for needing to remember and the methods in which they remember. Told within the unnecessary framing device of a radio report, the ghosts of the victims of an al-Qaida-esque terrorist attack reappear each year on the anniversary of the attacks when a memorial service, haitai, is held in their memory. The piece looks at the individuals who come to see their loved ones in their final moments. Unfortunately, given its brevity, and the mock radio reportage, Bradford can’t fully explore any of the issues she raises, leaving the piece an interesting one, but not one that fulfills its potential.

Ah well. But! I am glad they reviewed it.  I need to create a reviews section for this story, methinks.

Another Nice Review and Another Sale

First, the sale: some time ago Matt Kressel of Sybil’s Garage informed me that he would like to buy my story Elan Vital, which I affectionately refer to as my Dead Mother story.  I wrote the beginning of that story when I was last in England (in Penzance to be exact).  England and Penzance are apparently inspirational — part of the well that Black Feather came from originated in my first visit many years ago.  Perhaps I should look in to living there.

Anyway, Sybil’s Garage rocks and I’m all excited to have a story in it.

Next, the review: Mercurio Rivera is the designated Locus subscriber in our writing group (this is probably not his official function…) and he passed along Rich Horton’s review of Until Forgiveness Comes:

“K. Tempest Bradford’s ‘Until Forgiveness Comes’ was intriguing.  Most simplistically, it’s a 9/11-derived story — well enough done, about a yearly ceremony remembering a terrorist attack.  But as an SF reader I found myself far more intrigued by the tantalizing hints of a cool alternate world in the background — with, perhaps, Ancient Egyptian culture having survived in some form, leading to a radically altered Jesus-figure, and a much more different Western Europe.  The story is only two thousand words long, and that sketched background isn’t at all the point — but I confess it’s what gripped me.”

Thanks, Rich!

Couple of Mentions for Until Forgiveness Comes

IROSF had this to say about the story:

If you want to posit a distinction between a fiction and a story, this one is a fiction. The events of the story, or the several stories, that lie in the background of this scene must be inferred by the reader. Nor is it clear even to the participants just how the ghosts are invoked, or what sort of presence they have there. None of this really matters in this piece, where the point is the presence of the observers and the different reason that each of them have for coming to confront their ghosts, or not.

Also, Willow Fagan (whose artist spotlight is up today and you should def. check it out) mentioned it on his blog.

At the beginning of this story, I thought the use of the style and format of a public radio show was clever and interesting.  By the end, I was very moved.

That’s what I was going for :)

Reviewing

Reviewing

The recent stuff about Authors Behaving Badly reminded me that I wanted to write something on Mike Brotherton’s SFNovelists post about reviews and reviewers. A little while ago he put up some guidelines for what he thinks reviewers shouldn’t do from the perspective of a writer. The basics:

Guideline 1: Reviewers should stick to reviewing the kinds of books they like.

Guideline 2: Reviews should describe what the book is like, and not just represent a visceral reaction of the reviewer.

Guideline 3: Putting a book in context relative to other work by the author is great, as long as there is clarity in doing so.

Guideline 4: Review the book, not the author.

On the surface maybe these are good guidelines. But, as I read, I felt myself disagreeing with almost every one of them. I’ve been thinking about why ever since.

Guideline 1 comes out of many genre authors’ frustration with reviewers who clearly don’t “get” SF still being assigned SF books, to predictable results. Still, I don’t think the problem is reviewing the kind of books one likes, but the kind of books one is likely to understand or get.

I’m not a huge fan of horror, but I’m confident in my ability to tell if a horror story is good or not. “Not My Target Audience” is an excuse that can only carry one so far. If a reviewer is actively hostile toward a genre, that’s a different thing. But I think that any competent reviewer can read books that are outside her “favorite genres” and still deliver intelligent proclamations about them.

Guideline 2 strikes me as something that bothers writers of the books being reviewed, but not the readers. The last thing I want from a review is to describe the book. I have a jacket flap for that. I do want the visceral reaction, because that is a signal of what a book is going to do for me. Perhaps I am alone in this.

Guideline 3 I’ll discuss in a bit.

Guideline 4 almost, almost got past me until I read this supporting bit:

No reaction to the author as a person is appropriate (e.g., that apparently “racist story” might just be an attempt to understand a particular type of unsavory person, something that writers need to do effectively from time to time, rather than an expression of racism).

Oh here we go.

The problem with this guideline is that, on some level, you cannot review a work without taking the authorship into consideration. Certainly it isn’t useful to dismiss a book because you have something personal against the author. In fact, if you’re pissed at the author, you shouldn’t be reviewing that book at all. And, of course, you shouldn’t be going on about your perception of the author based on your own hangups or, need I say, their name and how stupid or fake you think it is. (Okay, I will admit, that still irks me a little. I am working to get over it.) However, it is perfectly valid to consider the author’s motives and question his process and reasoning concerning the themes, ideas, and characters in a book or story.

And, quite honestly, most people intelligent and brave enough to bring up how the racism in a story might reflect the (perhaps unconscious) racism of the author are usually smart enough to tell the difference between a story that is exploring racism and one that is based on the racist ideas/thoughts/tendencies. And if an author has to say, “No, I was hoping to EXPLORE that concept, not endorse it!” they have obviously failed and someone should point that out.

Which brings me back to Guideline 3. If a reviewer is allowed to discuss a book in relation to the other books that author has written, whether those books are related in any other way or not, then that is “reviewing the author” in a sense.

Now that I’ve just torn Mike’s poor post apart, I will say that I do recognize that everything he said comes from the perspective of the author being reviewed. And it’s perfectly fine for him to feel that way and want these things. Except that reviews are not for the benefit of the author. They might have that effect, sure, but reviews are there for readers. They are there to let readers know, in one person’s opinion, whether they should pick a book up.

What do readers want when they look at reviews? That’s what I’m mostly concerned about.