It’s always sad when a science fiction anthology has a real downer of a review as one of its first reviews on a website like Amazon. It happened to Space Force: Building the Legacy published in May 2020. It upset the editors and publishers no end because the said review complained that anthology didn’t do things the reviewer expected of it – it did what it said it would do in the published blurb. Had it not been for that single devastating early review, I’m sure there would have been a follow-on anthology published by now. And the world is poorer for the lack of such anthology. Basically one person’s incompetence (it’s the kindest explanation I can give) choked off would could have been an interesting series of anthologies before there was even a call out for stories for the second one.
There is nothing to stop this from happening again, and it is still happening today. Yes, I do novel reviews, but I make it clear where personal preferences have led to me disliking the book – something along the lines of I hate X, which a substantial part of said novel is about, so anyone hating X would have a similar reaction to me type of thing. People can understand that and accept it’s a reasonable point of view to take.
I’m not sure what the answer to this issue is, but one way to mitigate the impact of such a bad review is perhaps to delay publishing reviews until a total of five have been written. That way a bad one will be alleviated to some extent by the others.In fact waiting until five reviews are completed before publishing them would give a more balanced overview of the book. It’s like getting better decisions in general by using a committee rather than relying on one dictator of a person.
I’ve now made my panel preferences for WorldCon at Glasgow. Interestingly my first reaction on reading through the proposed panels was they include a lot of nostalgia for things past. There is no issue with reviewing past science fiction and the history of stuff that helped historic and current science fiction. Lessons can be learnt from that or be a good introduction into that particular area of science fiction. What got me, as it did at EasterCon in Telford, was the comparative lack of casting into the future of what science fiction might pull on, do next, how might it help society develop in a positive way and what can be done to encourage its development.
A good example is we have a whole load of science being discovered and technologies being developed without people really knowing what they are and how they be impacted by them in the future. The research going in the universities and laboratories around the world is not filtering through to the people in the street. I remember a time when there were magazines and Tomorrow’s World on BBC to do just that. It meant such information was accessible for very little if any outlay. Now research is barricaded in by non-disclosure agreements or contracts. Admittedly, I can understand a firm investing in research wanting to keep it for themselves. No issues there. But what about having a description of the research aims made easily accessible to the public without the need to go into the crux of how it works etc?
The trouble is the development of science and technology has become a veritable battlefield of secrecy and confidentiality. It is all to do with maximising profits and societal politics, and very little to do with improving the welfare of people in general. Yes there have been exceptions, like the inventor of the three-point seatbelt giving away the intellectual property rights for free. But these are few and far between.
Science fiction has and can throw a spanner in the works of the big science and technology development players. You only need to look at the extraordinary events surrounding the publication of Cleve Cartmill’s story, Deadline in 1944 to see how big such spanners can be. Is it any wonder that some of these big stakeholders in science and technology development might want to suppress sone science fiction stories because they describe far too accurately the research they are doing?
Of course one of the cheapest ways to suppress science fiction is to give the book a bad review as soon as possible after the publication. Hm… at this rate I’m going to come up with a short story about how there is a government or big corporation department whose job it is to steer science fiction away from accurately predicting the technology developments. It could turn into a very humorous egg-on-face story. Hm…
In the meantime please enjoy All Tomorrows Futures: Fictions That Disrupt while you have a chance…
Rosie Oliver 