A review by Paul Kincaid:
Sfsite

I rarely argue with reviews. When I have on one or two occasions is correct a review, which I will do here--this is what Kincaid says:

"Just about all of them pay reverence to the ghost stories of the past, perhaps most blatantly in Gene Wolfe's "Sob in the Silence," a nasty but inconsequential tale that, I suspect, would not have been included here if it didn't have Wolfe's name attached to it."

I object to this most strenuously.

Perhaps Kincaid didn't care for the Wolfe story, but I found it creepy and scary. I don't know what what he means by "inconsequential" --perhaps it's not a socially instructive moral tale such as Geoff Ryman's "Pol Pot's Daughter (a Fantasy)" which Kincaid considers the best story in the book. But IT DOES WHAT IT IS MEANT TO DO.

However, that is not what annoys me. What I do object to (and I hope someone sends him over here to read this) is the idea that I included the story because of the presumed marketability of Gene Wolfe's name. Sorry, but that's not how I edit YBFH.

I have NEVER taken a story for YBFH for the name value. I've NOT taken plenty of stories by writers whose names have a much greater impact on the marketing of a book than Wolfe's.

I have no interest in responding to the rest of the review but to say that Kincaid seems not to understand horror vs fantasy. Horror is usually better served in traditional forms/structures --which isn't to say that occasional experimentation isn't sometimes effective in evoking horror. But I'd say that too much structural fooling around can dissipate the mood.
Comments most welcome.
Tags:

From: [identity profile] coppervale.livejournal.com


I'm betting Gene would make the same objection. 'Name Value' over 'Story Value' may happen - but no good editor would take a story just for the name attached; and no author (of any repute) wants to sell a story just because it's THEIRS. We want the story to hold its own. (And it's also a poke at authors of less stature than Gene, that they MIGHT have sold a story that was better, if his hadn't been included because he was Gene Wolfe).

Yeah, that's a sour note in the review.

From: [identity profile] skaldic.livejournal.com


Ironically, by essentially accussing you of not being professional, he's pretty much shown that he isn't. No reviewer of repute would make such a statement about a professional editor's selection in a significant anthology, no matter how much they disliked a story or thought it didn't fit. Pros don't select stories for an anthology that way, and pros don't make assinine statements like he did.

From: [identity profile] nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com


He has no particular reputation. His sort of comment is just the usual fannish handicapping that we hear all the time.

From: [identity profile] realthog.livejournal.com



"He has no particular reputation."

In fact he's got a fairly high reputation. He's just not particularly known in the US.

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From: [identity profile] imago1.livejournal.com


This is just more of Mr. Kincaid's froth and bluster regarding year's bests. The Wolfe comment is cringeworthy.

From: [identity profile] ellen-datlow.livejournal.com


Has he reviewed them before? (I don't recall if he's reviewed any previous volumes of YBFH)

From: [identity profile] imago1.livejournal.com


I presume there's a 2006 article archived on the SF site. It was a longish piece whipping on year's best anthologies, with, as i recall special attention paid to Hartwell & Cramer's Year's Best Fantasy. Gordon forwarded it to me.

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From: [identity profile] douglascohen.livejournal.com


If there is a time to speak up regarding a review of one of your anthologies, this certainly qualifies. Good for you, Ellen.

From: [identity profile] brendan-moody.livejournal.com


I happen to agree with his judgment of "Sob in the Silence" as a story, but his suggestion about the reasons for its inclusion is insulting to both author and editor, and seems to suggest that no one's opinion of the story's worth could differ from his own.

I think it's very easy to put too high a value on experimentation and originality in modern genre fiction, and to assume that genuine originality is easier than it is. So often works that are praised as novel or daring turn out to have precedents of which individual reviewers are simply unaware. The two stories that Kincaid isolates as "pushing us out of the comfort zone" seem to me to exemplify this. I enjoyed "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter," but modern and adult variations on the fairy tale mode are fairly common, as your own and Terri Windling's editorial work demonstrates. Precisely because of this I didn't feel quite as moved by it as I might have. "Fourteen Experiments in Postal Delivery" was quite clever and funny, but on an emotional level I felt it was something I'd read a lot of in the past.

Given that there really isn't much new under the sun, I tend to look for stories that take traditional modes and carry them off so well that their familiarity becomes irrelevant. "The Last to be Found" is a fine example of this: it's broadly Jamesian, as Kincaid says, but it's so unsettling that this ceases to matter. I would say the same about the execution of "The Muldoon" and "Raphael." I think that kind of effect is (even) harder to achieve than is success with what you aptly call "structural fooling around."

From: [identity profile] benpayne.livejournal.com


I think it's an easy (and lazy) assumption to make... if you don't like a story by a well-known author... to assume that it was included because of the author's name...

It's an unsupportable assumption really, and ignores the basic fact that not everyone has the same taste. I don't blame you for taking offence. If he doesn't like the story, fair enough. But he has no business ascribing motives to you without evidence.

From: [identity profile] ellen-datlow.livejournal.com


Sure. I'll look at the TOC of the other Best of the year anthos and will think "huh?" If all the stories were the same in each Year's best --that would be proof there's no need for most of them.

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From: [identity profile] peake.livejournal.com


Thank you for your comments on the review. I did not intend that it should cause offence, and I apologise if it did. But I stand by what I said about the Wolfe story. Yes horror, and particularly the ghost story, tend to rely on traditional forms. This can be very effective, as I pointed out with the Christopher Harman story. But I did not feel it was at all effective in the Wolfe. It was very knowingly using our expectations of the form, but not, I felt, to any surprising, original or moving end. I found the story neither creepy nor scary, and I say this as a great fan of Wolfe's work and someone who has written quite extensively on it, so I was predisposed to like the story. Given that it was, to my mind, a very ordinary story from an extraordinary writer, I had to wonder whether the name played any part in your selecting it. I am delighted to accept your assurance that that is not the case.

And in an aside to [Bad username or site: nihilistic kid @ livejournal.com], I'm not sure what ad hominem insults add to this discussion.

Paul Kincaid

From: [identity profile] ellen-datlow.livejournal.com


Paul,
And thank you for coming by. Strong opinions about published stories are what makes the literary world go round.

Thank you for your apology regarding my reasons for reprinting it.

From: [identity profile] nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com



And in an aside to [Bad username: nihilistic kid], I'm not sure what ad hominem insults add to this discussion.


An interesting position, given that the objection to the review is based on your ad hominem attack on Ellen Datlow. You specifically malign her as choosing material in bad faith, which is an attack on her character -- an attack you present instead of presenting an actual argument about the Wolfe story, which you instead just dismiss in a phrase.

As far as my comments, I made no remarks about your character; I simply pointed out that you are not a reviewer of reputation, and you indeed are not.

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From: [identity profile] imago1.livejournal.com


Paul:

"Given that it was, to my mind, a very ordinary story from an extraordinary writer, I had to wonder whether the name played any part in your selecting it. I am delighted to accept your assurance that that is not the case."

Pity you didn't choose to seek out such assurances from Ellen (and other editors casually maligned by your comments) prior to airing your missapprehensions in a published review.

From: [identity profile] bondgwendabond.livejournal.com


This the same reviewer that gave a negative review to Pat Murphy's The Wild Girls essentially for being what it is -- a mainstream middle grade novel.

From: [identity profile] dsmoen.livejournal.com


One of the best lessons I got at Clarion was a one-liner from Terry Bisson. The essence was: the weirder the story form, the straighter the structure had to be, and comedy or horror are weird story forms.

Anyway, Gene Wofe is GENE WOLFE because he is Gene Freakin' Wolfe -- and can pull a puppy out of a black hole with words alone.

From: [identity profile] ellen-datlow.livejournal.com


Thanks for the comments. I think the passions generated are healthy (the flames could have incinerated everyone but didn't-quite). I


From: [identity profile] danelpolson.livejournal.com

Thinking through Paul's review


Maybe we can understand Paul's positions better keeping in mind that we all have different taste, and a convention of criticism is to always find at least one fault somewhere.

What might be a key problem, though, for many reading the review (at least for me) is the assumption that to be truly new, stories and poetry should be divorced from what came before, and neither comment on past masters' works or evolve them. I sense that literature is not so much a meteor from who-knows-where or a nameless wind, but a human reaction, cry, or response to what came before. I am not sure we can ever get away from those who have died, yet live in us.

A point forgotten by the review is that, in a way, Death does not really take the great characters away. The characters of the past, and their complications, simply come to us in new masquerade and composite, tho' a twenty-year old writer in 2008 might put them in a spacesuit and launch them to Mars. If a writer, say Conrad, manages to imbue figures and conflicts with life, neither artists nor readers can easily escape them. You can talk about great books or stories written a hundred years ago, but you still don't say "the late Mister Kurtz". He may've died on the page, but his are the lips we see move in the gloam of our dreams, as we hear his haunting last four words.

I raise THE HEART OF DARKNESS, even if you might not count it as a favorite, because what struck me as pointless shelling in the article were the complaints against Simon Clark's THE EXTRAORDINARY LIMITS OF DARKNESS. As Paul lambasts,

"[This story has] the gall to present itself as a companion to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, yet all we get is something trashy and febrile and unsubtle … To be honest I can't work out how this puerile nonsense got published in the first place, let alone how it got picked for a best of the year anthology. Fortunately, not all the stories are as bad or as reliant on the familiar as that."

If this heart-breaking story of human coldness is merely indecent and derivative, I would hate to be sitting next to our reviewer in a theatre where a certain film of vast Conradian debt was re-released--APOCALYPSE NOW.

In truth, I have read these stories in the 2007 YBF&H that were blasted, charred, & flamebroiled, and I can't make a case for Paul on any of them. If there is a problem in that stellar anthology, that review didn't catch it I'm afraid, and neither have I. But I am not a knight, and Ellen Datlow will never need me to defend her. I only write because I have appreciated these challenges: they help me think out my position on editing more clearly, for whatever dubious worth that is to you.

I certainly respect Paul for coming online to clarify his thoughts.

Salud,
Danel
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