ellen_datlow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ellen_datlow) wrote2008-05-16 06:04 pm
ellen_datlow) wrote2008-05-16 06:04 pm
Entry tags:
Review of YBFH#20
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.
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.
no subject
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."
no subject