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.
Thinking through Paul's review
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
Re: Thinking through Paul's review