It turns out I have published 30 reviews, all of them of academic books, and I have two more about to be issued, which amounts more or less to one per year on average in the 33 years I have been an academic.
For me, the most memorable for me is, no doubt, my review of Michael Pitts’ Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man (Lexington Books, 2021). I got annoyed by the author’s leniency with the women writers, whose male characters are far from perfect and I’m afraid that I wrote a negative review, though not a nasty one. This was for Extrapolation. As happens, Michael Pitts became shortly after I penned the review the editor of a symposium on masculinities for the SFRA Review, in which I very much wanted to participate, being a specialist in SF and masculinities. So, I swallowed my pride and embarrassment and emailed Michael explaining the situation. Now that I call him my friend, I can tell you that he is an extremely kind man. I showed him the review, which I offered to withdraw, and we finally agreed that I would go ahead with it but with more emphasis on the positive aspects of his book, which are many. To my infinite surprise, Michael not only accepted my piece on Blake Crouch and Matt Haig for the symposium, published in 2022, but also proposed that we worked together co-editing a book (on masculinities and SF series) that we’re now about to hand in to Bloomsbury Academic. The darned review was published in Extrapolation in 2023, but please skip it. Or read it as the strange beginning of a beautiful friendship. I have learned the lesson, and I have made a point now of only reviewing books I truly like.
Michael is currently the review editor of the SFRA Review for fiction, so after telling my students our story, I have introduced them to the journal as an example of academic reviewing. We have read from the most recent issue the non-fiction review by Sarah Nolan-Brueck of Debra Benita Shaw’s Women, Science and Fiction Revisited (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). As I have explained to my students, it is common for academics to start reviewing as doctoral candidates, which is what Nolan-Brueck is, when you are minimally knowledgeable and can review with confidence major scholars like Shaw. I wrote my first review in those circumstances, feeling that it was very wrong for me to give an opinion on a book edited by Susana Onega, one of the most relevant Spanish scholars in English Studies. My good colleague and friend Felicity Hand gently pushed me to write the review (one of my first publications) and guided me in how to do it. As a general rule, you need to be extremely diplomatic when criticizing other people’s work, much more so when they are your seniors, but you should never flatter so much that you sound hypocritical. In the case of my not so positive review of Michael’s book I acted as an obnoxious senior scholar, as I grant and I’m sorry for.
Nobody really teaches how to write academic reviews: we just learn from example. This is a genre that is deceptively simple but that really involves a lot of hard work. You need to show your reader, another academic, that you have understood well the text, can highlight the main arguments, and are able to offer valuable criticism at the level the text deserves. You’re tested as a reviewer as much as the author is tested. Nolan-Brueck’s review of Shaw’s volume includes the usual ingredients: a presentation of the volume (as it happens, it is a revised edition of a previous volume), the enumeration of the contents chapter by chapter, a sustained analysis of the main arguments, a description of the strong points, a criticism of the weaker points and a conclusion, stressing the pleasure (or displeasure) the book reviewed provides. Nolan-Brueck’s review is positive, and I found it interesting that she only has a negative comment to make, concerning whether Shaw is right to use a novel by N.K. Jemisin, as this author tends to write fantasy rather than SF. My impression is that Nolan-Brueck had more to say in that regard but has been cautious. On the other hand, given the laudatory tone of the review, one can imagine her and Shaw discussing Jemisin over coffee.
To introduce students to fiction reviewing, I have chosen from the same issue of the SFRA Review Kristin Larsen’s critique of John Scalzi’s entertaining SF novel The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022). Larsen, a professor of astronomy at Central Connecticut State University has published a variety of non-fiction volumes, including Science, Technology and Magic in The Witcher: A Medievalist Spin on Modern Monsters. The tone she uses is not as formal as that of Nolan-Brueck’s review of Shaw’s volume, but she is clearly addressing peer readers of SF, which is why the focus falls on the rather good quality of Scalzi’s worldbuilding. Since Larsen is not part of Scalzi’s professional circle, she feels free to complain that the description of the kaiju is not nuanced enough. Curiously, though she generally praises Scalzi’s novel, finding it above what could be expected from pure entertainment written during Covid-19’s lockdown, Larsen ends her review forecasting that Scalzi’s novel will not pass the test of time and will have been forgotten in five years’ time unlike more solid SF productions, including the author’s other novels. I assume that Scalzi, who makes no bones of presenting himself as a blatantly commercial author, will be satisfied enough.
Fearing that my students might find it too difficult to imitate Larsen’s review or others of similar high standard, I have shown them Luchia Houghton’s review of the same novel by Scalzi, published in her own book reviewing book. The structure is necessarily similar (presentation, plot summary, positive aspects, negative aspects, conclusion) but Houghton separates each part into sections and tends to be much more informal, frequently using exclamation marks and bullet points. Tellingly, whereas Larsen recommends Scalzi’s novel for first-year college readers, particularly in science degrees, Houghton enthuses about her own identification with the characters. As I have told my students, you’re not supposed to make personal commentaries of this kind in a serious review, though you can indeed be present in the text, voicing opinions and, most importantly, tracing intertextual connections. To be perfectly fair, Houghton’s review does a very good job of telling other readers why Scalzi’s novel could be fun to read if they are the kind of reader attracted by monster stories, but her analysis is shallower than Larsen’s. I have also warned students that one needs to be careful about the inclusion of diversity in texts. As happens, Scalzi never discloses the gender of his protagonist Jamie, an authorial decision which Larsen is not too happy about, as she finds it gimmicky. Houghton is much more pleased, though she unwittingly discloses that this might just be Scalzi’s strategy to attract young readers rather than heartfelt support for diversity.
I ran out of time to share a third review, by professional author Paul Di Filippo for Locus Magazine. This is closer to what I would like the students to produce, but still quite sophisticated for, let us not forget, ideally reviews should make a point beyond the book reviewed. Thus, Di Filippo notes that Scalzi’s novel, “like those of Ernest Cline, is what I have come to think of as ‘self-aware science fiction.’ That would be science fiction where everyone in the book is steeped in the actual literature and acknowledges the existence of past classics,” such as Jurassic Park or Godzilla (though we found in class none of the three reviewers seemed aware of Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim). This self-awareness, Di Filippo further argues, consists of “conveying a pop-culture sensibility. Too much of this can, I think, throw the reader out of the dream, reminding them of the fictiveness of it all. But on balance, Scalzi handles it well.” This means that SF is now solid enough for authors to expect characters and readers to recognize allusions to previous SF, as literary readers may recognize allusions to Dickens or Joyce. I would say that this post-modern approach to writing SF started back in the 1990s, but Scalzi, who loves Robert H. Heinlein, has always been upfront about his many borrowings (or homages) from the past. It’s interesting that his characters have joined the author in this.
So, apart from the ability to structure opinion in the sequence that all reviews require, the better kind of reviewer can drop names and even come up with new theoretical concepts. The three reviews, by the way, make a point of citing the author himself, which I find a very good idea. The citations come from interviews and the author’s note included in the novel, so that the reviewers can simply reproduce the author’s claims about the origins and purpose of the novel. It is, besides, particularly difficult to find enough substance to review an unambitious novel like The Kaiju Preservation Society. It is always easier to comment on a denser book. The three reviews, in any case, judge the novel according to the author’s purpose (writing light entertainment) rather than apply a general literary standard. In comparison to the novels by any Nobel or Pulitzer prize winners, Scalzi’s bubbly adventure story is scarcely worth paying attention. But if it is reviewed from such different angles by a variety of reviewers this is because within the genre he practices, SF, Scalzi is quite good (though he is not the best, far from it).
Having read the three reviews, another main issue that needs to be highlighted is how precise the plot summary needs to be to avoid giving too much away. The reviewer needs to go beyond the one-liner (“this is a novel about a young person stumbling into another dimension with giant monsters”) but also carefully avoid spoilers (“in the end…”). As a general rule, the more formal reviews published in academic publications might contain spoilers, but the less formal reviews do not. In GoodReads, warnings are included so that if, like me, you don’t mind spoilers, you can be better informed about the books you plan to read.
More next week!