Ethics and Enthusiasm

Hal Duncan wears me out with his long blog posts--here's to rumors of a book of his entries so I can enjoy them in a less frenetic context--but you should definitely check out his latest, entitled "Ethics and Enthusiasm," which analyzes the whole bruhaha re the SFFE group and touches on the same things mentioned by Evil Monkey in this post.One thing I found interesting was his point about a writer correcting a reviewer on a point of fact. I talk about this in Booklife--as the only time a writer should consider, either him or herself or through a third party--finding a way to get a fact correction out there. (And, yes, part of Booklife is giving out advice hard-earned from this very imperfect human being who has, of course, responded to reviews at times.) It's not really important in the context of Hal's post, but it does reflect one reality about the internet and the new wave of home-spun journalism; in this new context, I think you're going to see more writers engaging in some form of fact correction. For better or worse.As for SFFE and the whole issue...I see nothing review-wise on the SFFE site that I'd call any better than mediocre. It's just...boring. On the other hand, it's harmless and if they wind up doing a good job of promoting interesting work, more power to them. On the other other hand, I'm not a big fan of snarky negative reviews while being totally uninterested in websites or magazines that only post positive reviews. I'm also not interested in reviews where the reviewer makes him or herself more important than the text.As for the rest of what I want or don't want, it's all here.