In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Hana Carolina and Alex Kingsley join Dan Hartland to think about reviewing debut books and writers. Is there an extra responsibility reviewers owe to new writers? And if so, what might it be?

Hana's review of Krackle's Last Movie by Chelsea Sutton

Alex's review of Isaac by Allee Mead

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 23: On Reviewing Debuts

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the reviewers and fiction writers Alex Kingsley and Hana Carolina.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss speculative fiction reviewing: what it is, why we do it, and most importantly, how it’s going. In this episode, we look specifically at how we review debut books. Is there an extra responsibility reviewers owe to new writers? And if so, what might it be?

We discuss the material contexts in which debut writers are publishing, how reviews and criticism do and do not, and should and should not, contribute to that ecosystem, and the role of negative reviews. What is the position of the debut book, and the debut writer, in the world of letters, and how should critics interact with it?

But we began our conversation with Hana’s and Alex’s latest reviews for Strange Horizons.

[Musical sting]

So, both, thanks ever so much for joining me for this conversation, particularly as in a lot of these episodes I spend talking to other critics and reviewers—and you are critics and reviewers—but you are also fiction writers. And I thought it was really important to get that perspective too on this topic, which is: How should we review debut novels … and debut novelists, right?

Both of you have written reviews recently for Strange Horizons of debut novels or novellas, I think, in both cases, right?

Alex Kingsley: Yeah.

Hana Carolina: Yeah.

Dan Hartland: Yeah! So I wanted to get into the weeds a little bit about how you did that, how you approached it, how we all should approach it—because it seems to me that … well, maybe we’ll decide whether there are extra elements that a reviewer should consider when thinking about debuts.

Alex, let’s start with yours, which was a review of this really interesting novella—and you make the point in the review it’s a novella about AI, which seems like the sort of thing everyone’s talking about right now.

Talk to us a little bit about that, about the book, but also I think about how you selected it—because you pitched this to us and you said, “Do you wanna know about this book?” and I said, “Yes. It’s a book. Let’s talk about it.” But how did you select it? When you approached it, you knew it was a debut, it’s from a small press. What’s your thought process when you’re going through reviewing a book like that?

Alex Kingsley: So I’ll start with giving a little pitch of the book, which obviously, if you want to learn more about it, you can read the review! But the concept, the … It’s called Isaac by Allee Mead. It is published by Space Wizard Science Fantasy, and it is about a woman who comes home after her father’s passing to find out that her sister had rented out this caretaker robot, this AI named Isaac, who has, like, a human body and everything, and she sort of starts to fall in love with him.

But it is a very interesting twist on human/AI romance stories, especially in real life nowadays. But instead of turning it into this sort of actual romance, it instead becomes an examination of what are the ways in which technology and anthropomorphic technology can be actually useful to us and helpful to us in a healthy way, and what are the dangers, what are the unhealthy ways? Because it makes a point of the fact that, even if this woman does feel a certain way about this machine, he doesn’t have the same subjectivity that she does, and I think that’s really core to what the story is doing.

How I approached it. So, when I first started doing reviews, I did fiction first. I was a fiction writer for a long time, and then I was like, “I wanna get into reviews.” I kind of just approached it as like, “Well, I’m gonna read the book and then I’m gonna write about what I thought about the book.” And that was kind of it.

But anyone who writes fiction knows that, when you approach fiction, you’re not like, “Well, I’m gonna tell the story. I’m just gonna say what happened, and that’s the story.” It’s a process of picking the specific details that you think are important enough to merit being in the story. And I realized that reviews are very similar, because you are telling a story. Not the story of the story that you’re reviewing, but the story of your review. So there is a lot of picking and choosing that you get to do that I didn’t really realize at first.

When I first started doing it, authors were this other level, like that’s what I wanted to be. You know? But I wasn’t there yet, so these were all these untouchable celebrities. And then I started going to cons and, you know, I would write these reviews and the author would respond on social media or something like that.

Sometimes they would just, like, repost it. I once had an author DM me after my review came out. It was good. It was a good conversation! They were not upset about it, I don’t think. And it made me realize, “Oh, like, even if these people to me seem, like, really incredible and famous and, you know, all of these things”—because they are really incredible—“they are also people and they’re also in their writing journey.”

So I can’t just … I will, a) be hurting a potential friendship with them if I just go out and roast them completely, but also I’m doing them a disservice. And I do think that the point of reviews should partially be that, a service to the author. Like, yes, it is for telling people, do you want to read this or not? But it is also telling people: “Hey, let’s shine a spotlight on this thing that maybe you don’t know about!”

Which is why it’s so important to me to review indie books, to review debut books, because I was a debut author very recently, and I remember how stressful and scary that was, because it is still a very visceral recent memory. And having people, especially people that you don’t know, go out of their way to support you, to write about you, to really think critically about this thing that you have put so much of yourself into, is really, really important.

And then—this’ll be the last thing—to speak to the press specifically, and they’re doing such fantastic stuff that I was like, “I will take any opportunity to shine a light on all of the great stuff that this cool indie press is doing.”

Dan Hartland: Those are all great starters, and I want to pick at all of it. But before we do, Hana: So you’ve just published a review of Krackle’s Last Movie for us, and I should say that we’ve also just published a couple of weeks ago, by Nick Hubble, a review of your debut. So there’re several layers going on here.

Hana Carolina: Yeah …

Dan Hartland: Let’s talk about that. Is what Alex is saying familiar to you? Do you have, like, similar takes, different takes? How did you approach reviewing this debut? You don’t have to talk about how you felt seeing your debut reviewed, but you can if you want!

Hana Carolina: Well, there’s been a lot of exciting things happening, that’s for sure, so I’m having many emotional waves right now!

But I think, you know, in a way, talking about debuts, I relate to a lot of what Alex is saying. But I also think that, with Chelsea Sutton—who’s so established also in the theater and writing for such a long time, having so many short stories out, and so on and so on—in a sense it doesn’t feel like a debut, it feels like a very established piece of work. And that was my first impression and what really kind of grabbed me from the first page: just kind of that experience was really visible from the very beginning.

And I think that’s a beautiful thing to witness, and I think—exactly that part about debuts being so sensitive—I listened to an interview with her as well, and she just said she’s been absolutely ripped to shreds multiple times throughout her career, and she kind of, you know, accepts it. And I think that made it easier for me, as well, when I was reviewing to kind of, balance—because I do find it difficult. I do think about the people who write those books a lot, and I do feel like I become kind of like a friendly stalker when I engage in reviewing. I develop a relationship with these people that are not aware of it.

So in that sense, I feel that responsibility as a reviewer, but also just as someone who looks at a fellow human who’s doing something that I also aspire to. So I think that is a key element. But yeah, it was wonderful to have a review of my novella out. That has been a beautiful and special experience, and I feel grateful for every review I get, but this one was, yeah, it was really special.

I think, you know, when it comes to the novella, I have plenty to say, but I also said so much in the review itself. There are a lot of theoretical threads in it, it’s a very kind of academic type of text in a sense, so there’s a lot to pick apart.

Dan Hartland: It’s really interesting. So, I mean, I’m not a fiction writer, so I guess inevitably come to these things slightly differently. But the responsibility that I often feel—and again, Hana, your debut is not the only recent debut by a reviewer that we’ve published, so for example, we recently published a review of Daedalus Is Dead by Seamus Sullivan, who writes reviews for us—I always feel very tense in those moments.

You hand those novels or novellas over to a reviewer. They are written by another one of your reviewers, who is probably in the same round reviewing something else for you. And you kind of … I kind of think, “Oh, is this review gonna be a good one or a bad one?” And my policy is not to shape someone’s opinion of a book. My policy is to help them express whatever opinion they have as well as they can. So if a bad review comes back, it’s getting published. I just sometimes really hope not to be in that position!

Because, yeah … as you said, we’re reviewing texts, but these are texts written by people, and both of you have mentioned that kind of para-social feeling that you have when you’re reading a novel. And, when you’re reviewing a debut, it sounds like the biography of the author is important.

So, Hana, you mentioned Chelsea Sutton. She has a long-standing career.

Hana Carolina: Yes.

Dan Hartland: So that’s a factor in how you receive it. But Alex, I don’t know whether your author, Mead, has that, or whether it’s a much sort of newer and more kind of embryonic career there, and that comes into it. So how far do you … Hana, you mentioned that you become a friendly stalker of these authors! Like, how far do you think about where that person is in their career when you are reviewing their books?

Hana Carolina: Yeah, I do quite a bit, and I feel like it’s so completely different.

I mean, I’m experiencing it from a different perspective in the sense that the first type of reviewing I’ve done was academic reviews. And when I was doing that, that was extremely impersonal and it didn’t have that dimension at all. I was in fact extremely critical, and I am kind of as a person extremely critical, which you can’t probably tell by the way that I write fiction reviews because I have a completely different emotional journey when I do that.

But I really loved writing academic reviews because I felt like I was able to be that critical and be that intense because I was contributing to a larger debate, and I felt I had a debt to the debate rather than to an individual person, and that really kind of clears a lot of that tension up right away.

I think I approached it in a very black-and-white way in that sense, because of course my supervisors would say, “This is a very niche discipline, and everybody knows everybody else. Those people could be, like, reviewing your article in the future, and they will remember, and they will somehow” … You know, they were just like, “Be nicer, please! Be nicer.” And I was saying like, “No, it’s actually so extremely important to not be nice because we’re trying to do something here that requires really sharp critical thinking, and we’re trying to undermine those arguments and build on them and, and do something like this.”

But with fiction, I just like … you know, criticizing somebody’s academic text feels fair, and criticizing somebody’s fiction feels like kicking their toddler. You don’t want to do it.

I also have very strong feelings about, when it comes to reviews or even working with people, depending on the level of experience and so on and so on … I feel like I never want to make it sound like I’m being nice. I don’t want to, because I feel like if, if it’s just that, then that’s very patronizing. That’s me assuming those people can’t do a specific thing, and I would never want to do that. So I’ve been extremely lucky because I’ve been so far reviewing things I really loved, and I dread the day when that changes. I have the skills to handle something very critical, but I’m not sure if I have the heart.

Dan Hartland: Alex, talk to me about the same thing. So, when you’re approaching an author, how do you take into account their standing, where they are in their career? Do you? I mean, is that at all relevant?

Alex Kingsley: Yeah, absolutely. I won’t do, like, a ton of research on the person. Obviously, if it’s someone that I already know or know of—like, if they’re a really big name—then I know. But I’m trying to look at the text on its own.

But I will keep in mind if this is a debut, if this is someone who is not well-known, because it means to get a review as an unknown author is very, very different—

Hana Carolina: Mm-hmm.

Alex Kingsley: —than to get a review as a … Like, the subjective experience is just very different.

I totally agree with a lot of the stuff that Hana was saying, especially this idea of it’s scary to be like, “Oh, what if I don’t like it?” Because you really don’t wanna do that. But you also, like you said, you don’t wanna lie. And that is a promise I have made to myself is I will never lie about my opinions in a review.

That also doesn’t mean that all of my opinions get into the review, and that is something that it took me a long time to realize: that, like, I’m going to have way more than 1500 words’ worth of impressions of any book that I read. And what I am condensing and putting into my writing about that book is these are the things that I found most interesting.

And usually the things that I found most interesting are the positive aspects of the book. Usually I am shining a light on all the things that I think are done well. Sometimes there are things where I’m like, “And this was interesting, but in a not so fun way.” And I have done that where I’m like, “Overall, here’s some cool stuff. Here’s some things that, you know, where it didn’t quite work for me.”

And I saw, Hana, in your most recent review, that you kind of did the same thing: overall very positive, but then that didn’t mean that you held back from discussing the things that you didn’t like about it so much. And that, I think, is really crucial to keep in mind: that every thought that passes through your head while reading it doesn’t have to make it in there. What has to make it in there is what will actually be useful to, a) the audience reading the review, but also, b) the author themself. Like, those are the two people who are served by you writing it.

And I had a very similar experience where my … I also write for Ancillary Review of Books, and they did publish a review of my debut while I was reviewing for them. Like, I had a book that I was reviewing at that time. And like you said, it would be patronizing if they were just like, “Yeah, yeah, it’s great,” and it was obviously just because I was a reviewer for them.

But if it had been a very negative review … I would’ve struggled! I would’ve … It would’ve been hard. It would’ve been tough! Yeah. And I appreciate and I do think that the reviewer … they did have critiques in it which were valid critiques. But I think that if they had leaned into that and focused on that, which they very well could have, it would’ve been a very different experience.

But they made the choice to focus on the things that were working well, that were interesting to them, and it felt honest without being bashing a debut author from a small press, which was great. I appreciated that a lot, and I try to give a similar treatment to every book I review, but especially if I’m very aware of where the author is coming from.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: So maybe we should kind of drill down a little bit on why this matters so much. It feels to me like increasingly new authors kind of get one shot. You know, I’m speaking to new indie authors often, and if their debut doesn’t land well, they are not likely to get a second book, or it will be harder.

Especially the big five publishers are obsessed with track, the sales track. Even indies have to keep the lights on, right? And I think up to a third of books don’t even earn back their advance. So these things all matter, and it seems to me that reviews are … they’re perhaps not the most important thing, but they are a very important thing in that landscape. They have, if nothing else, symbolic value, right? They have a value that this author is worth watching, even if they don’t drive sales, which I think in some cases they do, and in some cases they don’t.

Could you both sort of, if you put your fiction writer hat on briefly—I will get the reviewer’s hat back out really quickly, I promise!—what does that feel like? What does that mean to you? How conscious are you of the role of reviews in sort of ensuring that you get past the debut novel, right?

Hana Carolina: Well, I mean, I got stressed just listening to this introduction!

So I think my strategy is to try not to think about that, but do all the things I think I should be doing while not really expecting any results, and I think that is the only way. I mean, one of the things that is implied in all of this is that the market is extremely tough, and it is extremely difficult in every way. So I think keeping myself sane is my number one priority, and everything else comes second.

And therefore … You know, with all the awareness of how important that is, when I was kind of getting to that point where I was starting to send out requests for reviews, and I did a lot of it, and in the end I got three reviews. And I’ve sent out easily one hundred emails.

So you can really … after that experience, when you see somebody else writing, it is a treat to get to the point where somebody is engaging with your work closely. And of course, there’s the whole angle of it adds validity and prestige to the work. But also it’s just knowing that someone spent a lot of time trying to work out what you’ve been trying to achieve.

And I think with a review, when I write it anyway, I really want to kind of draw out the essence of what the person is doing, this kind of intention behind the work as well. And if, when you see someone else doing that, and if you see your work reflected in somebody else’s eyes, and it’s someone who’s professional at this and has a lot of experience—I had such luck to have Nick Hubble looking at my work with, you know, so much academic experience and so much experience of looking at fiction.

And I was just thinking, you know, “That’s incredible.” That’s horribly intimidating, but it’s also the best possible thing to get something positive back. So I think you look at all of those factors, and you consider them, but I refuse to think about the reception of my first book having a massive impact on my second, because then I’m going to have a mental breakdown, and that’s not going to help anyone.

Dan Hartland: That seems very wise to me! Alex, do you take the same approach or …

Alex Kingsley: Oh yeah! You’re right, yeah. Absolutely. Like, if you’re writing thinking about, you know, “How is this gonna be received?” that’ll ruin you. It’ll stop you from ever writing again.

I try really hard just to be thinking, “What would be really cool? What makes me most excited? What, when I’m going to bed at night, what scenes are playing in my head?” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I gotta write that down tomorrow.”

I try to just focus on that and what I think is really neat so that when I’m saying, “Hey, here’s the book,” what I am saying is, “Here’s a thing that I worked really hard on that I think is awesome because it is my taste and what I care about, and it is all the cool stuff that I find really interesting.”

And if other people find that cool and interesting, which I hope they do, that’s amazing. That’s … like Hana said, that is a real treat to get a review and be like, “Oh, hey, someone is engaging with this critically in a way that I really … You know, they’re picking up on what I’m doing.”

I had an author DM me recently about a review, and they were like, “You got it.” And that was so exciting from a reviewer perspective, obviously, but also knowing what that feels like as an author to be like, “Oh, someone saw the stuff that I put in there,” which is really exciting.

The other thing—this is part of the reason on sort of a meta level, that it is really important to me to be supporting indie presses and small presses—is that that whole “you get one shot” thing, it definitely can exist. Like you said, indie presses do need to keep the lights on. But the way that a big five publisher will be like, “Okay, you have to do really, really well or you are not getting another one,” it is not the case.

Like, I never felt with Space Wizard that Empress—Empress of Dust is my debut—that Empress had to do, like, really, really … had to, like, sell a certain amount or they weren’t gonna let me do the rest of the series. Like, I felt very taken care of, and it was clear that this was about not profiting and getting a ton of sales, but about fostering my experience as a new author, and that was really important.

So I want that work to be able to continue for other people as well, because an author’s first book is, like, never gonna be their best book. If it is, what are they doing, you know?

Hana Carolina: So true!

Alex Kinglsey: Every book that you write is gonna be better than the last book, because that’s just how any skill works, but especially writing. So I’m like, yeah, I would not want to be judged based on the first novel that I had out there, and I don’t think that any writer should be.

So the fact that that’s the way that the market works—like, the mainstream market—is really messed up. So I think we should be supporting these other opportunities where authors are not feeling that pressure, because that’s where our attention should be, I think.

It’s also really nice that we live in a time when self-publishing is really available and legitimized. There are a lot of really big self-published titles that then later got picked up by the big five. That’s really huge. But also, just the fact that you can put out a work completely on your own, get it printed and sold in some of the same marketplaces as traditionally published, and the physical object looks similar to traditionally published works? I think that’s really important, because it means that the gatekeepers are not actually keeping the gates. They’re just giving you a lot of cool extra stuff. Worse comes to worst, you can do it again and you can do it on your own terms. And that’s a big part of the reason that I want to be looking at the people who are doing that or the presses who are doing that.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point because Hana mentioned—we’ve all got so many hats!—Hana mentioned with her academic reviewer hat on, that she is conscious of contributing to a debate. So this, in some ways, frees the reviewer in that context to perhaps be a bit more critical to make sure that the ideas are as sharp as they should be.

But what you’re talking about, Alex, is another sort of field that fiction reviews—speculative fiction reviews, whatever—are contributing to, which is the wider literary ecosystem. You know, by writing these reviews of these debut authors, these indie press authors, self-published authors, we are trying to create the community that we want to see.

You’re absolutely right: We don’t want—all due respect to my friends at Penguin Random House!—we don’t want all of the books in the world to be published by one publisher. That would make us all quite a bit poorer. So I think that’s a really key idea for us to take forward from this conversation, which is, yes, exactly: reviews are themselves contributions to an ecosystem. They’re not merely comments on an ecosystem.

So the reviewer isn’t standing outside throwing things at the tent. They are themselves inside the tent, and they can choose to furnish that tent better, or they can choose to rip holes in the canvas. But equally, I’m thinking I am absolutely confident, right, that I have written very negative reviews of debut novels, I’m sure that that has happened.

As I keep mentioning, I’m not a fiction writer, so I do have a different take in part; but I’m thinking of another one of our reviewers who also writes fiction, Redfern Jon Barret. We’ve also reviewed that debut, and I promise we don’t review every debut that all of our reviewers write, it’s not a thing! But anyway, we did do that. Redfern wrote a review of a debut as well, a debut by an author called Sara K. Ellis of a book called If the Stars Are Lit—which actually has a very similar premise, Alex, to Isaac, in the sense that there’s an AI, the person who falls in love with the AI, they have another partner, a human partner, who’s sort of over there for half the book and then comes back and goes, “What the heck, dude?”

Anyway, Redfern did not give that book a good review, and has been on the show talking about that. We went back and forth a little bit about it. Redfern’s like, “Oh, I feel a bit bad about this, but nevertheless, it’s my experience of the book.” And I agree with everything you say, Alex, about editing—your review is a story itself. Like, there are things you leave out, there are things you put in. But I think where Redfern came down was, “I kind of owe it to my reader to be honest about this book.”

So, yes, we have a responsibility to the author of the text, but we also have a responsibility to the field to create a nice field, till it, mow the lawn, I don’t know. And also to the reader to say, “Look, this book is this.” So I wonder whether we could talk a little bit about that.

Where would your kind of line be for, “Okay, I’m aware this is a debut author, I’m aware this author is very early in their career, but this isn’t a good book, and I should say so.” Would you just not write that review? Would you just say, “You know what? I’m gonna leave that for someone that finds something in it, that gets it”? Or is there at some point, as a reviewer—not as a fiction writer now, changing hats again—is there a point at which you go, “You know what? No, I’ve gotta do the thing. I’ve gotta write the negative review”?

Hana, you mentioned that secretly you are very mean.

Hana Carolina: Yes.

Dan Hartland: So do you want to answer that question? How do you square those circles? How do you approach that?

Hana Carolina: Um, I think I would write the negative review, but I also feel like there are so many different ways to saying the same thing, and I think, you know, like with giving feedback, you can give someone feedback and that person, you know, hates you and breaks down, or you can give them feedback and they feel excited to make a change.

And, you know, I think there’s a lot of that going on. You kind of have to approach it a little bit from that perspective—that if you do consider the human in front of you, even though the human is not in front of you, and you treat it as a conversation, then there’s a much bigger chance that it’s going to be productive, and I think there’s a lot of value that should be taken from criticism.

I mean, I could talk forever about how amazing it actually is to receive proper feedback. Of course, that’s not quite what’s going on with the review. It’s not the same. You know, I’m not the beta reader for the person—which I would probably love to do in certain circumstances, for sure!—but there is still that element of the fact that there is a lot of respect in treating something critically and in treating it seriously and in setting standards for it and saying, you know, “This could be something else. This could reach higher.” And I think that’s very encouraging, and it should be positive.

I think there’s a lot of negativity attached to criticism in our culture that I deeply disagree with, which is why I’m very angry with myself about being sensitive to criticism with my fiction. I believe I should have no negative emotional response to that. I wish that was possible. Honestly, in my ideal world, I love every single insightful thought about what I write because what matters to me is whether this is deep engagement. It shouldn’t matter if it’s positive or negative.

And in a way, kind of any discussion about quality is going to become very murky very quickly. It’s going to really dissolve into subjective judgment. It’s very easy, and I kind of agree with the idea of criticism as a mirror: You end up writing about yourself and thinking you’re saying something objective. So if you are doing that, and you’re very serious about it, and you think, “Oh, I really know the truth,” then really the review becomes about you and not about the book.

So you have to have that openness, and you have to have that focus on someone else, to really make it work. And I think if you have that, if you are coming from this honest perspective of really wanting to engage, then I think it shouldn’t matter if it is negative. And I think I kind of … you know, I sneak in different things, and I kind of like imply things as I write, and I often do things that I think nobody probably really catches, that I do for myself to kind of like put a little bit of a release in certain places.

Dan Hartland: What are those things? You’ve gotta tell us now!

Hana Carolina: I think with my Joey Batey review, I think I was the most that—as in, I didn’t really say anything negative, but I did, like, light hints on those things could be read in different ways.

And there was … I had two reviews in my head, and I could have went with either—you know, the dark or the light! But, y’know, it was complicated. Yeah.

Dan Hartland: That’s so interesting because the Joey Batey—and again, that was a debut, right?

Hana Carolina: Yes, it was! Yeah.

Dan Hartland: And a very different kind of debut again, because Joey Batey has this whole other career over here.

Hana Carolina: Absolutely …

Dan Hartland: But it’s so interesting because I know a few other readers who did not get on with that book.

Hana Carolina: Yeah.

Dan Hartland: And I passed them your review and said, “Well, here’s a thing that is very positive about the book.” And they were like, “Huh.” So you probably saw what they saw as well as what you saw! And yet what really struck me about your Joey Batey review was how generous it was—not in the sense that it said very positive things about the book, but in the sense that it really took the book seriously. So you tried to understand the ideas in that book, and you tried to analyze it as if it were a really serious piece of work because you were assuming it was.

Hana Carolina: Yes. Yes, that’s very important. I always try to do that regardless of what I review, yeah.

Dan Hartland: And yet you’re also admitting that there is another world in which you would … you could have written a very different review.

Hana Carolina: Yes. I mean, I could I could write an extremely negative review of my own novella! I could do it. I could also write a review of my novella that would make it feel like the best thing ever written. I mean, you can do those things. And that’s why, you know, writing is magic!

But you have to make those choices, and I think I probably now I would’ve made a different choice when it comes to the Joey Batey book. I think I read … It was … I mean, it’s a long story. I don’t think we have … ! But I also went to an event promoting his book after I wrote the review, and, at the risk of simplifying, he spent the entire hour arguing with people who wrote the reviews, and there were only five at that point.

But he also was kind of arguing with the idea of criticism period—or reception or interpretation, which is … you know, makes perfect sense. That’s what his book is about. I think what I did was I was kind of reaching beyond the book. And that’s why … yeah, that’s why there was this feeling of kind of I walked into this and I thought, “No, he actually does not like the idea of other people looking at his work.” And that is something I can’t come to terms with, obviously!

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Alex, do you recognize what Hana’s saying? Like, are there always two reviews you can review, you can write of any book, or is it—

Alex Kingsley: More than two!

Dan Hartland: Right!!

Alex Kingsley: Like Hana said, there’s lots of ways to say the same thing, or lots of ways to say different things, that are all true about your impressions of the book. A lot of the stuff that you were saying kind of makes me think about—and this is probably because I have, like, a teaching background, but also, like a lot of fiction writers, have a lot of workshop experience—I’m very aware of the kinds of feedback that are constructive and useful and the kinds that are not.

And like you said, we’re not beta readers. We’re not giving feedback. But it is very similar in that we want to say something that is useful and productive for the readers and for the writer while not saying, you know, “Here’s what needs to change.” So I think of it a lot as asking questions and thinking, “Well, who might enjoy this book?”

Because, like you said, if we think of ourselves as objective readers, we are lying to ourselves. There is so much subjectivity in … Like, there’s taste and then there’s what makes a good book. And both of those things are highly subjective. So that’s the other thing that I think about, is trying really hard to be like, “Okay, maybe there’s something that I didn’t like in this book. Is that me, or is that something I think other people should be aware of going into this book?”

Because there are definitely times where I’ve been like, “You know what? This was not  for me personally. It was not my type of book at all.” I didn’t … you know, I didn’t vibe with it. But I see what it was doing, and I see what kind of person it was written for, and I’m not going to punish the writer because I happened to pick a book that was not meant for me.

I don’t really think there’s such thing as bad writing. I just think that there’s writing that doesn’t achieve what it set out to do. A lot of people have disagreed with me on that! A lot of people were like, “No, I’ve read bad writing.” And I’m like, “I think what you read was writing that set out to do a certain thing, and then it didn’t achieve it, and then we could look at why it didn’t achieve it.” And if the book is doing what it set out to do, it’s just that’s not what I wanted it to do, then it’s not for me to put that on the book.

So I’m still going to write about how successful the book was at doing what it wanted to do. In terms of if I read something and I just, like, really hate it, and I’m like, “Oh, how am I gonna approach this?” I will ask myself, a) what do I think is it actually important for people to know about the book? Because, if it is just like a “this had a lot of things that for me were not working” versus “this had a lot of things that I think could be really harmful”—which has happened, where I’m like, “There were some things in this book that felt insensitive or inappropriate.” It doesn’t happen often because a lot of the books that I’m looking at—a lot of the writers who are in this ecosystem—are very aware of the ecosystem and the people in it and are not trying to cause harm and understand the kinds of sensitivity that needs to be in place in order to do that. But it’s definitely happened where I’ve been like, “Hey, there was this element, and that was like, that was kind of concerning to me. I don’t know why that was in there.” If I think that’s really important for people to know, then I’m not gonna ignore it. I’m going to hang a lantern on whatever was, was giving me pause.

If it feels like—and this has not happened, this part—I got a book where I was like, “This feels like a debut that wasn’t ready,” like, it just feels like this author needs more time, this is just, like, not, you know … it is half-baked: In that case, I would probably not do the review because I would feel like I was doing a disservice to both the readers and the author. Because I would be partially denying the author that chance to develop.

If you get a really negative review really early on—especially if you’re small press or indie, you’re not getting a lot of reviews—if the reviews you are getting are negative, that like—yes—emotionally can be really hard to get past, but also can just make it really hard to get anyone to read anything else you do. And we have all been—not bad writers, because I don’t believe in that!—but we have all been writers who were writing things that did not achieve what it it set out to do, right? Like, we’ve all been there.

So to punish an author for being in a stage of development, or to prevent them from developing past that—not to say that a single review is going to prevent them from developing—but to be an impediment to that doesn’t feel healthy for that author or the readers who are getting a notion that this author is not someone to pay attention to or to read.

Someone that I really, really look up to and respect and love, H.R. Owen, said to me that we all benefit from having more great stories out there—and I really, really like that. And I do not want to be the person who is stopping that from happening because I discourage an author too early and discourage readers from reading that author. We all want the same thing ultimately, so what am I doing to get there?

Hana Carolina: And I think one of the ways to kind of make it a little bit more impersonal and less painful is looking at wider trends and wider tendencies and fashion and what sells and money. I mean, the answer to a lot of questions, sadly enough, is money. And then you kind of can’t look at it in the same way anymore because you kind of see the other side of this. And something that you might personally disagree with or dislike is actually a hit with that other audience that you wouldn’t be a part of. And it’s interesting to understand why it is and why that changes the way that people write.

And if you kind of strip the person and leave the environment, then you can say a lot of things that not necessarily hurt the chances of the person. I always love it when people have a discussion about reviews and they say that they actually absolutely adore bad reviews, and they look at them and they think, “Oh, actually, I, I would love that kind of book. This person who hates this book is the opposite of my taste, and this just hits all the points for me.”

So I think there’s a lot of hope that, even if you do this and then you worry, you probably don’t have to—because the interpretation, again, is going to be open, and it’s going to turn out that somebody can find something in it that you wouldn’t ever find in it as well.

I think my review where I was trying to do that was the Ben Alderson review, and I was just having an amazing time. Like I was just … You know, I had a great time reading the books, and I had a great time critiquing the books. But I think, you know, I approached it from this very kind of playful perspective, and I tried to also bring in the context of why he writes the way he writes, why it’s effective, what kind of things are happening at the moment that make this possible. And I think that became kind of the focus, and the focus kind of moved away from the individual to the trends.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I was going to bring up trends, too. Because I think you’re right, Hana. Like, that’s one way that we can consider individual books. We can consider them as parts of trends.

We were talking about—or I was talking about, I’m not going to make either of you responsible for my bad metaphor of the tent, okay?—but we were talking about, I was talking about, furnishing the tent. I don’t know what that means! But is there a world in which the negative review can actually add a lovely chair or a beautiful throw to the tent, rather than tearing a hole in the canvas?

By which I mean: Alex, you were talking about, you know, you’ll hang a lantern on a point in a book that you think, “Eh, that’s sort of problematic,” right? What if a book is itself emblematic of a trend we don’t like to see in our field? This isn’t to say, you know, you pick on one book to make a wider point; but it is to say that, as Hana says, books are published within a wider context.

So on the last episode of this podcast, I deliberately set out to kind of do an episode on romantasy that took it seriously—because I think that’s one such trend that a lot of speculative fiction reviewers and critics don’t read, they don’t get, but we should. We should make the effort to understand that because it’s a hit with a lot of people. But what if there is a bad book, a bad … an unhelpful writer, right? What if there is something happening in the publishing landscape that we don’t like to see, and a particular book seems part of that?

We’ve focused on our responsibility to authors, our responsibility to the readers, our responsibility to the field. Sometimes, right, that does require us—and I’m not just saying this because I love to read negative reviews, and I am guilty of writing them—but we should leave open the possibility of being mean, right?

Hana Carolina: Yes. I mean, people love negative reviews. That’s absolutely true, and they go viral, and people watch it, and they have the best time. And there’s the whole idea of anti-fandom as well. So, you know, hating something is very passionate, and it’s something that does spread. And sometimes it does work in unexpected ways. I mean, sometimes it does make people question the entire state of, you know, publishing! Sometimes it makes people realize something about their own taste, and it’s a very productive conversation.

That’s why I’m a great fan of negative things—which is why I’m really sad that they’re not as loved sometimes and that I am not as open to them when I write myself. But I think there’s a lot of productive conversation to be had from this negative perspective. You could even go to, like, basic psychology—the fact that unhappiness and frustration are very generative states. That’s where the brain thrives, and happiness is a boring state. It’s a stale state for our intellectual engagement.

I think if you start from that point of, you know, “This really frustrated me,” and you wonder why, you sometimes get somewhere quicker than if you just look at the things that you’ve loved. I think in the ideal world you want both, but there is something really quite exciting about hating something deeply and wanting to express that and trying to engage other people with it without … You know, there are of course horrible ways to do this that are destructive, and then there are constructive ways to do this.

But I think that distinction gets a little bit lost, and then we can talk about social media amplifying and, you know, bringing in voices that probably shouldn’t be engaged, and then suddenly we lose that ability to be negative in a productive way. And I’m very sad about that, which is why it’s kind of more difficult.

I think I will probably get there. Once I get a book that will really, really annoy me, I will try to find a way to make it happen. Because, yeah, I grew up reading negative reviews, and I adored them. In a Polish context, there used to be a lot of especially video game reviews—there was this magazine, I’m not even sure if it still exists, that I used to read as a kid. And I wasn’t even that interested in game reviews, but I was just … I was finding it hilarious, and I was loving it. And, and I kind of sometimes miss that. But it’s a difficult thing now just because I think of social media.

An actually negative rather than playfully and productively negative: I think there’s a big difference.

Alex Kingsley: Also, I definitely came of age on the Tumblr landscape. And something that is very prominent, or was very prominent and sometimes still is in that sphere, is this sort of difficulty, this almost moral policing, about what people like. And I think that’s something that I’m very aware of and very hesitant of, because there is a lot of conflation of “I didn’t like this, this made me uncomfortable, and this is ethically evil.”

When you were talking about trends, I’m like, is this a part of a trend? Romantasy is, like, kind of the thing that naturally pops up because it is often disparaged, but it is also one of those things where, like, I am very … I have that voice in the back of my mind that’s like, “People are gonna … People who didn’t learn their lesson on Tumblr are gonna do that, are gonna be like, ‘This is morally evil. This is bad!’”

And we can’t do that, but we can also tease apart, like, “OK, well … why is this popular?” And there is a huge reason, which is that women, and women as sexual beings, have not been acknowledged in mainstream media forever, and now finally that is  a socially acceptable thing to do. So of course that’s gonna be huge. And we could just go, you know, “Yippee, yippee romantasy!” for that exact reason. Like, that is already just a thing to be celebrated. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t look at these individual books, and trends within those books, and say, “Hey, why are we doing this?”

Dan Hartland: It’s also true that when we’re thinking about trends of any kind—we can use romantasy as a really good example right now—those trends, publishers notice them too. And very often—this conversation is primarily about debut books—very often writers are … they’re not told necessarily told, but they are encouraged to write to trends. Because that’s how they make that first sale!

So the interaction between debuts and trends is very much two-way, and you might even argue—because the debut novelist is somewhat less powerful—you might even argue that the primary pressure is downwards upon them. So our debuts that we are reading and trying to be nurturing towards are themselves getting affected by these trends that we might then use their books to bring into question.

So it is a very complex interaction there, and I just wonder—because we’ve read quite far outwards now, so if we could start to bring it back towards debuts—I just wonder whether we can talk about the place of the debut novel. We’ve spoken about how difficult it is, what a tough market it is. We’ve spoken therefore about how reviewers and critics might shape their responses to those books, at least in part based on that kind of material context. We’ve also said that maybe reviewers and critics shouldn’t do that—maybe they should just be mean. And I just wonder whether we could talk about the importance of debut books to the field.

Why should we be excited about them? Like, what is it that they can offer us? Why should critics and reviewers seek them out? Because very often for a reviewer, you’re excited to see the latest book by an author you’ve been following for twenty years. It’s quite hard to keep track of all these new books, there’s loads coming out all the time from indie presses, from self-published presses. At Strange Horizons, we try to get as good a cross-section of all those as possible, but it remains the case that the gatekeepers often have the biggest megaphones. So when we get an email from a big five that’s saying, “Hey, this writer that you’ve loved for twenty years, they’ve got a new book out, and we’ve sprayed the edges” … you know, inevitably you’re gonna go, “Ah, well, we’ll call that one in.”

So how, as reviewers and critics, do we think about this, and why should we be looking at debuts, and where should we be looking for them?

Alex Kingsley: It kinda makes me think about something that comes up in playwriting a lot—which is, as a playwright, your biggest competitors are not other playwrights. Your biggest competitors are old dead white guys.

What play is the community theater down the street gonna put on? Probably not your new really challenging, queer, experimental show about disability. You know, like, all of this stuff that is full of your perspective and doing interesting things. They’re gonna put on Twelfth Night again!

And that’s, I think to some degree, true of readers too. Like, old names, whether the authors are dead or alive, they’re gonna have readers. If they’re established, that is going to happen. So it doesn’t really feel like it behoves us, any of us—again, we’re all, we’re all in the tent—to spend more time there.

I mean, there’s always going … that’s not to say like, “Oh, a famous author puts out a new book, we should all ignore it.” I’m not saying that. But like, we have a limited scope, and I think we are doing a service to everyone in the community if we focus that scope on new voices who are bringing something new and interesting to the conversation.

That does not necessarily mean that every debut is going to be doing that. That does not necessarily mean that a book that isn’t a debut is not going to be doing that. But we all benefit from bringing new people in. The more perspectives we get, the more voices in the conversation, the better. So I think it’s a matter of welcoming people in, because we’re not kicking anyone out.

Like, we as individuals have a finite scope, but there is not finite space for authors in the community. So the more people that we can bring in and say, “Yes, we see you and you, we hear you, and you’re doing something really cool, and we want more of it,” the better.

Hana Carolina: Yeah, absolutely, and it feels great to kind of be able to explore and find a new voice and just wonder about how you feel and what you want to support—because it’s also like a little bit …

You know, reviewing is supposed to be to an extent like shaping the tastes and trying to influence them, and of course we could also talk about the issues with criticism shrinking and all the other problems. But, whatever we can do. There is an element to, if you find something that’s really special and it’s at that fragile state when it can grow or it might not and you don’t yet know, and you can kind of shine a light on it—that feels like a real contribution. That feels like doing something positive.

And I think that’s exactly what Alex is saying as well: that there’s this supportive element to it that perhaps is not there when you look at someone who’s already established and you feel like, “OK, well, you know, they’re on their way and, they’re not there wondering what I think about their work. It’s fine.” But in this situation you can kind of allow yourself to kind of dictate the choice and then kind of build on that and say something—and kind of try to highlight that somebody might be doing something new in one way or another. So when I started doing those reviews, like that was one of the things I kind of put on top of my list of priorities. I mean, out of the four reviews I’ve done, three are debuts, and that’s the reason—because I just thought, “OK, maybe there’s some things hidden somewhere and it’s not getting enough light.”

[Musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can listen to more of their music at grandvalise.bandcamp.com.

Our last episode on romantasy generated a modest level of excitement. Foreshadowing this episode’s focus on writers, Sarah Rees Brennan responded to Jenny and Anushree’s thoughts on romantasy by reflecting that she originally pitched her novel Long Live Evil (2025) as a meta portal fantasy—until she was told it was romantasy! She had no problem with this—“Some of the best writers write romance,” she says—but the label did lead to a shift in how her novel was perceived: “I couldn’t be trying to write a layered work,” she remembers, because she was seen to have written romantasy.

On the reception of the subgenre, Grace Hill wrote to let us know that Tansy Rayner Roberts’s essay “Romantasy All Along!” in Uncanny issue 61 is a great companion piece to Jenny and Anushree’s thoughts. And both Liz Bourke and Sean Guynes noted that the discussion was especially useful for them, as readers—like me—who didn’t read so much in the subgenre.

And, in the endless quest to merge all SF podcasts on the internet, we were also mentioned by Jonathan Strahan on Coode Street, who is likewise not a great romantasy reader, but found the discussion to have pretty much covered all the bases for readers such as him. This was very much the goal, so that was nice to hear! Jonathan did emerge still convinced that the speculative element in romantasy is secondary, though—so maybe Jenny and Anushree still have some work to do.

Finally, Liz Batty of the Octothorpe podcast offered a useful corrective, asking whether we may have underplayed the role of BookTok in the rise of the genre. I think that’s fair, but does it mean I need to go on TikTok? Please tell me at reviews@strangehorizons.com.

Until I make my short form video debut, though, see you next time.