Track Changes: Selected Reviews is Out in the World!

Hello from Worldcon at Glasgow, where I have a copy of my review collection Track Changes in my hands, and where it can now be purchased both from dealers at the convention, and online from the Briardene Books website or from Amazon (US, UK). In honor of the day, I have a short reflection on John Scalzi’s series The Big Idea, discussing the process of reviewing nearly twenty years of criticism and selecting from it what is worth collecting and preserving.

Going back to your old work can be painful. Your writing isn’t as good. Your ideas aren’t as developed. There is sometimes a shocking naïveté. But you also get to watch yourself get better, figure out the tools of the trade. How to construct an argument and back it up with evidence. How to keep from getting lost in the weeds of a digression. How to turn your back on the seductive freedom of an online format that lets you go on for thousands of words, and do the same work more effectively at a shorter length (well, relatively speaking).

You notice other changes too. How ideas make their way through the field like ripples in a pond. How the politics of the moment are reflected in the fiction that is being made. How your own politics develop in response to both the world, and the work of other critics. And suddenly you have your foundation, your bedrock. The thing that lasts, it turns out, is the way things change. The way the fields of science fiction and fantasy have grown and developed over the nearly twenty years that you’ve been writing about them. The way the world around you has changed. The way you have changed as a critic, a thinker, and a person. The thing that a collection of your reviews can do, as the title has it, is to Track Changes.

Ian Mond, who has reviewed Track Changes for Locus (that review isn’t online yet) has some additional, and extremely kind thoughts on his blog.

In my Locus review of Track Changes, I point out Nussbaum’s skill in building an argument: meticulous, thoughtful and passionate. Even when I disagreed with her conclusion, I can’t say I wasn’t swayed. But then, Nussbaum’s work isn’t about persuasion; it’s about articulating how genre succeeds or fails to reflect real-world issues, namely class, gender, identity and the environment.

What I didn’t say enough about in my column (due to space) is Nussbaum’s artistry in constructing a review. I know this will sound self-serving, but criticism is seen by most people as dispensable (assuming they notice it at all). Criticism only gets attention when someone either pens a hatchet job, or a big-name author attacks some poor schlub on Goodreads for saying something rude about their book, or fuckwits review bomb a book or film because “woke”. Very few point to a piece of criticism and say: “This, this right here, this is extraordinary.” Writing good criticism is fucking hard. It’s taken me four years to get a handle on it, and it’s depressing when the only reviews spoken about are “problematic” or poorly written.

This is why we need to encourage, promote, and applaud those places, like Briardene Press, Strange Horizons and, yes, Locus, that prioritise criticism and give it the space to explore, critique, and deconstruct genre fiction in all its forms. That’s why you should buy Track Changes and keep track of Nussbaum’s criticism on her blog, Asking The Wrong Question. She is one of the best of us, a true artist who inspires critics like me.

And I was also thrilled to see this expression of interest on BlueSky from N.K. Jemisin, an author I deeply admire (and whose work, spoiler warning, is reviewed in Track Changes).

A launch party for Track Changes will be held tomorrow, August 9th, at 11:30 BST at the Glasgow Worldcon. Briardene publisher Niall Harrison will interview me on the state and importance of criticism, and the process of putting the book together. If you can’t attend either the launch or the con, you can still purchase a copy of Track Changes, in paperback or ebook, at the Briardene shop or on Amazon (US, UK).