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From: moreau%babel.DEC@decwrl.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Critics and SF
Message-ID: <3206@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Fri, 9-Aug-85 10:17:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.3206
Posted: Fri Aug  9 10:17:59 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 12-Aug-85 20:31:30 EDT
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Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
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From: moreau%babel.DEC@decwrl.ARPA  (Ken Moreau, ZKO2-3/N30 3N11, DTN 381-2102)

Davis Tucker writes:
 
>                                                  Authors often
>forget that it's better to be terribly excoriated in print than
>simply ignored, that anything is preferable to being overlooked.
>                      .
>                      .
>                      .
>                   There's the science fiction paraphrase of the
>Republican's 11th Commandment - "Thou shalt not speak ill of thou
>fellow authors". Which is understandable.  But there's no group of
>people who fill in the void, who provide their readership with
>accurate insights into the work behind the work, who tell readers
>what they can expect, and why or why not this work is any good.

It is my impression that you are describing the feeling that criticism 
is valid only if it savagely rips apart everything.  You use words
like "objective" and "accurate", and yet state that authors should 
welcome being "terribly excoriated in print".  Isn't it possible for 
a critic to admit that something might actually be good?  Granted that
90% of everything is crap, that means that there is SOME good stuff.

It seems to me that critics are only happy when either decrying the
lousy taste of the public by automatically condemning any work which
sells well, or lauding to the skies a work which most people (me) find
totally unapproachable.  I gave up on the New York Times Book Review
column for precisely this reason.  I grant you that tastes differ, but
that doesn't mean that the public (me again) is incapable of finding
out *BY THEMSELVES* whether "this work is any good".

I applaud Spider Robinsons comment that "A critic tells you whether 
it is *ART*, a reviewer tells you if its a good read".  To me this
indicates that the two concepts are orthogonal, and have nothing to
do with each other.  Thank you, I will ignore both *ART* and critics 
who talk about *ART* because I have found this bias to be pretentious, 
boring, unapproachable, and generally gives me no pleasure.  (I am 
thinking specifically of a New Yorker magazine review of "Star Wars 
(A New Hope)" which ignored the movie to talk about the deep 
philisophical implications of droids.  It missed the entire point of 
the movie).  I will read reviewers who tell me "if its a good read".  

							Ken Moreau