{"id":19174,"date":"2021-11-15T10:03:38","date_gmt":"2021-11-15T18:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=19174"},"modified":"2021-11-15T10:03:38","modified_gmt":"2021-11-15T18:03:38","slug":"russ-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2021\/11\/15\/russ-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Russ reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>My pick-a-random-unread-book system recently picked Joanna Russ\u2019s reviews-and-essays collection <cite>The Country You Have Never Seen<\/cite>. I\u2019m not normally a big reader of reviews\u2014I don\u2019t hate them, they\u2019re just not something I tend to be super into. But in this case, I laughed out loud half a dozen times in the first couple dozen pages.<\/p>\r\n<p>Partly that\u2019s because some of her reviews are entertainingly snarky, which is a mode that I often find a little offputting (I generally don\u2019t like mean humor) but somehow is amusing me in this context. Example (p. 7):<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>Colin Wilson has produced [\u2026] \u201ca \u2018Lovecraft novel\u2019\u201d entitled <cite>The Mind Parasites<\/cite>. Devotees of HPL will be disappointed, however, and so will everybody else; [this book] is not in the Lovecraft tradition but in the Boy\u2019s Life Gee Whiz tradition and ought to be called \u201cTom Swift and the Tsathogguans.\u201d It is one of the worst books I have ever read and very enjoyable, but then I did not have to pay for it.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>But partly it\u2019s also the occasional entertaining bit of silliness (p. 10):<\/p>\r\n<blockquote><p><cite>A Torrent of Faces<\/cite> is written by James Blish and Norman L. Knight. This makes for difficulty in constructing a compound name\u2014it comes out either Blight or Knish, which is unfair to the book.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>Anyway, aside from the humor, I like that Russ clearly cares deeply about creating good science fiction, and in most of the reviews she talks about both things that she thinks were done well and things that she doesn\u2019t (usually from a perspective of also being familiar with the rest of the author\u2019s body of work). I also like that she\u2019s fine with pop culture entertainment. Her most frequently recurring objection in the reviews I\u2019ve read so far seems to be about books in which she feels that the degree of character three-dimensionality is at odds with the kind of book it is or the way the characters are used. For example, from a review of Robert Merle\u2019s <cite>The Day of the Dolphin<\/cite> (p. 33):<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>If characters have to be introduced to do utilitarian things in books\u2014like turning on electric lights\u2014I far and away prefer the lightweight, portable, flexible cardboard cutouts that science fiction writers are so fond of to M. Merle\u2019s well-rounded, \u201crealistic,\u201d ponderous, wooden dummies.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>So far, I\u2019ve only read the first 40 or so pages of this book, reprinting Russ\u2019s <cite>F&SF<\/cite> reviews from 1966 through 1970. But I\u2019m enjoying the book so far.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,43,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reviews","category-speculative-fiction"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19175,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19174\/revisions\/19175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}