Podcast: Talking About Negative Reviews with Critical Friends

It’s a funny thing, but despite being 100% a creature of the web 2.0 era, I have never gotten into podcasting. I didn’t even listen to a lot of podcasts before the pandemic. So last month, I had the rather funny experience of making my very first podcast appearance. Happily, this podcast was Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons reviews department’s monthly discussion of the art, craft, and philosophy of reviewing and criticism. Hosts Dan Hartland and Aishwarya Subramanian had me on to discuss, what else, negative reviews, and we ended up having a lively and entertaining discussion on the goals of reviewing, what a negative review is trying to achieve, and how the field as a whole perceives (and sometimes, discourages) writing negatively.

Dan Hartland: Do you think, Abigail, that reviewers are aware of this? Because speaking as … as Aisha said, we’re sort of wearing several hats in this conversation and one of them is as reviews editors who commission reviews like all the time. And I don’t know whether you have, Aisha, but I’ve noticed over the last few years in particular a more pronounced nervousness about writing a negative review. A reviewer will still do it, but they will email you first and say, “This is going to be really negative.” Or they will say, “Do you think that’s okay?” And on one level this is really good because I think perhaps even more than a positive review, a negative review needs to be copper-bottomed. You need to be certain that the reviewer has done their work if they’re going to be that negative. So that extra element of being careful, I think is really good and to be encouraged.

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Abigail Nussbaum: I think that’s definitely there. I think that I’ve definitely had that reaction myself, even though there was no reasonable expectation of it happening. But I also think that there’s something else going on. That there is perhaps a growing mentality that there’s something wrong with writing a negative review, that it’s being unkind, that it’s hurtful to the author. And I think that maybe the self-censorship comes from that. That you’re not trying to avoid being dogpiled so much as you’re trying to think of yourself, “I’m a good person, I’m not mean, and therefore I shouldn’t write a negative review.” To be clear, I don’t think that that’s 100% a bad thing. Thinking about the fact that there’s a real person who has written this work is not a bad thing. I mean, it’s never bad to be kind. But at the same time, you also have to remember that the author is not your audience, that you’re not writing for them. The time for someone to critique their work in a private setting has passed, and you’re writing for readers. You’re writing for people who want to know if this work is for them, and you’re writing for the field as a whole.

And I definitely think that we kind of need to push back against the mentality that there is something wrong or unkind about writing a negative review while still acknowledging that a negative review can be wrong or unkind.

You can find the podcast here on the Strange Horizons website, where there is also a transcript, or on your favorite podcast app (search for the Strange Horizons podcast, of which Critical Friends is a sub-series).

If you’re interested in some of the negative reviews mentioned in the episode, I really recommend Clark Seanor’s “Recycled Air: Wayfarers and the Tyranny of the Everyday”, an essay-length reexamination of Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series which gets at a lot of my problems with it, and made several points that made me want to stand up and cheer. Or Wesley Osam’s review of self-publishing phenomenon (and recent Nebula nominee) Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree, in which he gets into some of the ways the phenomenon of “cozy” science fiction and fantasy undermines itself. For myself, I’ve also recently gotten off the negative reviewing bench in a recent roundup of reviews, in which I panned two other Nebula nominees: R.F. Kuang’s publishing juggernaut Babel, and Ray Nayler’s debut The Mountain in the Sea.