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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, the most memorable for me is, no doubt, my review of Michael Pitts\u2019 Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man<\/em><\/a> (Lexington Books, 2021). I got annoyed by the author\u2019s leniency with the women writers, whose male characters are far from perfect and I\u2019m afraid that I wrote a negative review, though not a nasty one. This was for Extrapolation<\/em>. As happens, Michael Pitts became shortly after I penned the review the editor of a symposium on masculinities for the SFRA Review<\/em>, 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<\/a>, published in 2022, but also proposed that we worked together co-editing a book (on masculinities and SF series) that we\u2019re now about to hand in to Bloomsbury Academic. The darned review was published in Extrapolation<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Michael is currently the review editor of the SFRA Review<\/em> 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<\/a> by Sarah Nolan-Brueck of Debra Benita Shaw\u2019s Women, Science and Fiction Revisited<\/em> <\/a>(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\u2019s 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\u2019s book I acted as an obnoxious senior scholar, as I grant and I\u2019m sorry for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019re tested as a reviewer as much as the author is tested. Nolan-Brueck\u2019s review of Shaw\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To introduce students to fiction reviewing, I have chosen from the same issue of the SFRA Review<\/em> Kristin Larsen\u2019s critique<\/a> of John Scalzi\u2019s entertaining SF novel The Kaiju Preservation Society<\/em> (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<\/em><\/a>. The tone she uses is not as formal as that of Nolan-Brueck\u2019s review of Shaw\u2019s volume, but she is clearly addressing peer readers of SF, which is why the focus falls on the rather good quality of Scalzi\u2019s worldbuilding. Since Larsen is not part of Scalzi\u2019s professional circle, she feels free to complain that the description of the kaiju is not nuanced enough. Curiously, though she generally praises Scalzi\u2019s novel, finding it above what could be expected from pure entertainment written during Covid-19\u2019s lockdown, Larsen ends her review forecasting that Scalzi\u2019s novel will not pass the test of time and will have been forgotten in five years\u2019 time unlike more solid SF productions, including the author\u2019s other novels. I assume that Scalzi, who makes no bones of presenting himself as a blatantly commercial author, will be satisfied enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fearing that my students might find it too difficult to imitate Larsen\u2019s review or others of similar high standard, I have shown them Luchia Houghton\u2019s review<\/a> 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\u2019s 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\u2019re 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\u2019s review does a very good job of telling other readers why Scalzi\u2019s novel could be fun to read if they are the kind of reader attracted by monster stories, but her analysis is shallower than Larsen\u2019s. 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\u2019s strategy to attract young readers rather than heartfelt support for diversity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n