UPDATE:
I’m really late to this thing, and I don’t really have anything to add, but that’s never stopped me before, so why now, eh? 😉
The book that’s the subject of the kerffuffle mentioned below has won the 2014 Compton Crook Award, arguably one of the awards most insulated from influence by the agenda-driven GHH crowd. It’s a reader-driven award for best sci-f/fantasy first novel by an individual author
http://www.bsfs.org/bsfsccw.htm
So, some guy wrote a (pretty good, IMO) space opera/first, et al, contact novel and someone else obviously trying to influence some upcoming awards (one of which the novel had been nominated for) wrote a “review” wherein she openly admitted she hadn’t really read the book, just cherry-picked things that offended her. (Apparently she wrote another that was even more over-the-top, but it seems to have disappeared from all the places links point to. Wonder why. Not.)
The review’s here: Fire with Fire: The Most Interesting Man in ALL TEH WORLDS (The book’s here or here, in case you want to make your own comparison to what the reviewer who DIDN’T read the book has to say about it.)
Here, perhaps this will push your curiosity button. One of the things that sends the “reviewer” around the bend was this cherry-picked sentence (quoted in more context at the “review”):
Downing shook Corcoran’s wide, strong hand.
Yeh, that’d give me the willies too. I would greatly prefer to shake a “narrow, weak, limp-wristed” pussy metrosexual paw. Yep. Oh, wait. That’s not me; that’s the po’ widdle baby who cherry-picked things to be offended at and who refused to read the whole thing before “reviewing” it. Might run into another scary “wide, strong hand”!
*feh*
To the po’ widdle baby who apparently “thinks” she has a glittery hoohah, but who obviously has simply spent too many hours playing with her autolobotomy kit, I have only this to offer: life won’t get any better until you put down the autolobotomy kit and stop sniffing the unicorn farts, buttercup. (Yeh, yeh, I’d offer this at the offending post, but I’m not wasting even a throwaway email address on obtaining a login there.)
As to Gannon’s book, well, below the fold, mmmK?
Still here? What’s wrong with you, anyway? *heh*
So, why did I read the stupid rant of po’ widdle buttercup? *meh* Saw a reference to something at one site which led to another which led to moron’s post. (Someone who ADMITS they’ve not read a book reviewing it? THAT’S testimony of moronic behavior offered against interest.)
So, did I read the “offending” book? Well, I had not read it until I read moron’s post. Intrigued by the stupidity of someone who would pan a book and yet admit to only having read a very small portion of it, I checked it out. Hmm. Less than a couple of cupsa joe. Bought it and read it. It’s a quick read (and I’m a quicker reader), so it didn’t take long. *meh* Just under 500 pages, so not even a particularly long book.
It’s actually, as I said earlier, pretty good. Only a few of the comma splices (inexcusable, IMO, in a book written by an English prof, but that’s another story. . . ) were really all that irritating and distracting, because Gannon handled the rest of the storytelling pretty well. Yeh, yeh, the McGuffin was obvious and waiting for the last few pages of the book for that shoe to drop, strictly in order to make the cliffhanger more irritating *heh* was. . . irritating, but not enough so to be a killer.
Yes, the plot, characters and interpersonal dynamics are are pretty predictable. So? How many plots are there anyway, and how many variations and combinations can anyone whip up? Heroes, villains, etc., etc. All the components necessary to avoid being tagged with Holly Lisle’s “Suckitudinous Fiction” label are there and pretty competently used. I’ll buy the next one, if Gannon will get on the stick and get it done. *heh*
One last thing: “reviewers” like the one linked above really do serve a useful purpose, two actually and perhaps three for folks who enjoy laughing at self-made morons. Books they pan are likely to be worth investigation. Books they like are probably “Suckitudinous Fiction” and probably worth reading only as p-sych studies or as research into that strange population of genuinely illiterate savages known as Recent College Graduates Who Have the Literacy Skills of a Bag of Hammers.
And then there are the laughs. Loads and loads of those. Can’t get enough of laughing at self-made morons.
OK
I think I’ll read it… the book that is and not the suckitudinous fiction posing as a review.
It was remarkable. The author’s a Fullbright Scholar and “distinguished” (whatever that means) English professor, so I was surprised at the paucity of grammar and punctuation errors as well as how few misused words there were in ~500 pages of text. *heh* My experience of academics, particularly of English profs, in the last 25 or so years has. . . tended to bias me against expecting anything worthwhile from them. Luckily, I prefer judging a person’s work on its own merits. I did bristle a bit at the typical characterization of Edmund Burke as an “Irishman” since he was really an Englishman from Ireland. (No, really.) And I truckled at the “attributed to Burke” comment followed by a statement he never uttered or wrote, according to any contemporaneous record or his own extensive papers. But those small cavils aside, and including the comments I made above, I’ll probably give the book a 4-star rating on Amazon, for its type. There were a few, “Yeh, yeh, old information. Repeat it only for the slow learners,” moments, but not many, and even they weren’t all that irksome. As I said, I’ll buy the next one if he’ll just get off his duff and get it finished. Heck, doesn’t he have grad assistants to handle his classes? *heh*