Podcast: Critical Friends 5 at Strange Horizons

It's a strange thing, but despite being very much a product of the Web 2.0 era, I have never gotten into podcasting. In fact, I wasn't even much of a podcast listener until a few years ago, and my very first podcast appearance happened merely a month ago. Happily, that podcast was Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons reviews department podcast hosted by the inimitable Dan Hartland and Aishwarya Subramanian. They had me on to discuss—what else—negative reviews. We covered a wide range of subjects, from what makes a review negative, to when the negative reaction is justified, to whether the community discourages negative criticism.

Dan Hartland: Reviewers need to have the space to call out bad books because sometimes it isn’t just an aesthetic judgment, sometimes it is. So sometimes a book will just be, it might make us cross, but it’s just clumsy or poorly wrought. But sometimes it will be actively malicious, either in intent or more commonly, effect. And there is a real danger of closing the spaces in which reviewers are able to say those sorts of things for fear of the retort. Oh, well, it just wasn’t for you.

Aisha Subramanian: Drawing from what Abigail said about, okay, sometimes this book is bad and sometimes this book is doing what it wants to do very well, but that is not for me. There’s also the response that is, this book is very good at what it wants to do. And I fundamentally disagree on a moral level with that project.

Dan Hartland: Exactly.

Aisha Subramanian: Which I think is where this then comes in, where we’re like, okay, so what is this aesthetic project? What do I feel about that superstructure, and then, how do I feel about this book in the larger context of that? And I think that if we, only speaking as a reviews editor, if we only place books with people who already agree with the project of the book, then we’re losing something really important from a critical perspective.

Abigail Nussbaum: Yeah, I mean, just in general, I think it’s sometimes useful to have someone come in and say, what is the value of this project? Not even from trying to tear it down, but simply, like, kicking at the foundations and trying to figure them out. I think that that can be useful, not for the specific work, then for the field as a whole to just take a step back and say, what’s going on here?

You can find the Strange Horizons podcast, which includes the Critical Friends series, on your favorite podcast app, or you can listen on the Strange Horizons website, where there is also a transcript. I hope listening to this episode is even half as much fun as it was to record.