Looks like I’m not the only one pissed off at Dave Itzkoff, the new SF reviewer at The New York Times Book Review. Looks like I’ll be reciprocating SF writer John Scalzi’s secret crush on me: he’s got this to say this week about Itzkoff:
I've sat out the Itzkoff thing because I think Itzkoff asked the wrong question, so answering the question would simply result in further error. The question is not why science fiction is so geeky -- really, that's like asking why romance novels are so kissy -- but why SF does only a so-so job at best at trying to convince people who have the equivalent of Star Trek communicators and 17 jukeboxes in their pockets via their cell phones and iPods that science fiction can speak to them. Anders is exactly correct that SF has no need to apologize for being what it is, but it wouldn't hurt for SF from time to time to explain itself a little better to the unintiated, or more accurately, to the people who think they're the uninitiated, even as they live in a science fictional world.
The Anders he refers to is Lou Anders, editorial director of SF imprint Pyr, who said this:
I think science fiction needs to quit apologizing for not being sugar-coated, consolatory, easily-digestible pap. Science fiction is the genre that exists to examine the impact on society of technological evolution, which means, in this decade of exponential technological growth, it is poised to be the most relevant branch of literature going. You can't build a future you haven't imagined first, and if you're going to denigrate the people in our culture who have the most far-reaching imaginations, it's shooting yourself in the foot.
And this is where it gets really interesting. Anders is quoted at the book blog GalleyCat, where writer Ron Hogan posted outtakes from a piece of his about Itzkoff that appears in this week’s Publishers Weekly, the gist of which is basically that pretty much everyone is pissed off at Itzkoff. Like DAW co-publisher Betsy Wollheim:
What [Itzkoff] said was basically nonsensical. I think people scorn these books because most of them can't understand them. They don't have the imagination to open a high-level science fiction book and wait the 50 or 60 pages it takes before you understand an alien world.
The Itzkoff quote at the end of the article is priceless. After a bunch of people pointing out how he’s always wrong, Itzkoff is unapologetic and admits that he frankly doesn’t care what a bunch of sci-fi dorks think. Of his continuing work at the Times, he says:
I can't predict what the reaction of the science-fiction community will be, but it's not weighing heavily on my mind.
No French benefits for Dave.
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