Paul Graham Raven

Bearings: Reviews, 1997 – 2001 by Gary K Wolfe

Publication type:

Publication date:

July 2010

Original venue:

Interzone #229

See original version

How should one review a book of reviews? The constraints of deadlines mean that one is obliged to read a collection like Bearings in a way that may not ideally suit its purpose: critical collections, for this reader at least, are better dipped in and out of over time than (ahem) wolfed down in one lump.

That said, Gary K Wolfe’s reviews retain readability even when approached en masse, perhaps because of his approach to criticism, which—though not unique—is fairly rare: Wolfe begins each book dearly wanting it to win, and he’ll give it every fair chance to do so on its own terms. We can assume that absence is a form of criticism in itself, but it’s fun to watch him wander the genre landscape and give serious consideration to books that others might pass over. Point in case: a few of the sort of ‘prophetic futurism’ novels that people outside sf tend to think of as exemplary of it (and that those within tend to disdain with prejudice) are treated with respect, and always with that yearning for quality that characterises Wolfe’s work.

That yearning is no secret; in his introduction, Wolfe states his belief that one should review “the book the author actually wrote rather than the book the reviewer wanted her to write” [7], and that he’s more interested in mapping commonalities across the ill-defined territories of genre than he is in building fences around them. Which isn’t to say Wolfe won’t call out failures when he sees them as such, or that he doesn’t know the classic clangers and pitfalls of genre: when he remarks that Patricia Anthony isn’t “out to create one of those shaggy secret-history tales […] to explain, say, the real origins of the baked bean” [43], it’s the amiable cynicism of someone who has read plenty of stories just like that. Wolfe knows whereof he speaks, and has a lover’s eye for genre—he accepts it, warts and all. He also understands that expectations of a book should be realistic, as in his discussion of Walter J Miller Jr’s sequel to the sf classic A Canticle for Leibowitz; hoping for it to equal or eclipse such a central text would be unreasonable, and leaving that aside gives Wolfe space to discuss the ways in which it succeeds.

You don’t need to read a whole book of Wolfe’s reviews to see he doesn’t go in for stylistic pyrotechnics a la John Clute, of this parish. But doing so allows you to see Wolfe’s own wit emerge, gentle but firm, wryly smiling—comparing Stephen Baxter to Antonio Gaudi [143], for instance, or describing a graphically gruesome WW1 alternate history as a novel that “makes you aware of where you put your hand down” [131]. It also enables you to get a sense of flow, to hear the genre converse with itself through its texts over time. This, one suspects, is Wolfe’s true passion; he speaks so that he has more opportunities to listen closely.

It would be remiss not to mention the index of Bearings, a wonderful effort that combines the hard-earned skills of a cataloguer with the specialist knowledge of the genre aficionado; by the same token, it would be remiss not to point out that another good proofreading pass might have caught most of the minor but disappointingly frequent typos and formatting slips that litter the book. But it should be remembered that collections like Bearings are predominantly labours of love for all involved, and the genre world would be a far darker place without them. Wolfe is a leading light of literary criticism in our field; not only would we be lost in his absence, we’d not even know that we were lost.

Commentary notes

Ah, Gary Wolfe—a man as agreeable and knowledgeable as his writing. Had the pleasure of meeting him at, I think, one of the Science Fiction Foundation masterclass summerschool thingies; if you wanted Central Casting to fill a slot in a script marked out for Affable USian Humanities Professor, he’d be a great pick.

Late in 2021 I heard Edward James talking about the history of sf criticism, in the context of the career of the inimitable Clute, and he mentioned that Wolfe, a prolific veteran of book reviews in the genre field, had received significant professional stick for it: I forget the exact line, but apparently a colleague once asked him when he was “actually going to do some real work”. Reviewing isn’t much valued in academia, it’s true—more’s the pity, as I’d quite happily crank out a couple dozen a year for the rest of my life. But I wonder if Wolfe’s implicit refusal to be cruel or cutting wasn’t part of the problem; academia does not value generosity much either, it seems.

I took from Wolfe, as much as I was able, that directive of generosity. But I have some standard postmodernist issues with the whole “book the author actually wrote” idea, which in the wrong hands becomes the intentional fallacy wielded against the critic rather than by them. Like Wolfe, I always want a book to win… though the exigencies of reviewing to commission mean that sometimes you don’t just get to set aside a book that is losing badly. There have been a few occasions where I’ve been obliged to finish a book I really wasn’t getting on with, and then write about it; some examples will appear elsewhere in this collection, and the reader will likely spot them easily. I compromised in some earlier reviews, attempting to damn with faint praise (which is actually pretty demanding of writerly skill, which I lacked at the time), but for me it always felt wrong, somehow. Reviews go out with my name on them, just as the books go out with the author’s name on them; my right to write what I really think is equal to theirs, of course, but it’s not just a matter of rights. I was raised in a household where I was taught that “if you’ve got nothing nice to say, say nothing”; it was a household full of seething resentments and unvoiced frustrations, a poor advert for the aphorism.

Nonetheless, I do try to review the book the author actually wrote, and I try to be clear about the standards against which I am measuring it, the milieu in which I see it to be set; perhaps the difference is that I can get quite angry about a bad book, while Wolfe just sees them as part of the tapestry of literature. Some say that writers shouldn’t review, as it’s like trying to be poacher and gamekeeper at once. But plenty of writers I admire do review, or have done (Roberts, Harrison, Sterling, Russ, to name but a few), and few of them were particularly nice about it (though they were often behind pen-names when they did it). I dunno… reviewing is so much a part of what I do as a reader and writer that I can’t see myself ever giving it up. But perhaps that’s the answer to the question of why I have so few friends in the writing fraternity?