I’ve noticed a few other authors posting links to bad reviews of their novels on their websites. By bad reviews, I don’t mean poorly written or incomprehensible reviews — I mean reviews that tear your book a new asshole. I mean reviews that compare your book unfavorably to various types of animal dung. There’s one site I visited recently where the author had three columns displaying the “good,” the “bad,” and the “ugly” reviews of his work.
I always thought this behavior was kind of peculiar. We’re all aware that no single book will please everybody. I’ve eagerly pressed copies of Dune and Neuromancer into the hands of intelligent, well-read, open-minded people who later told me these were lousy books. So obviously, even if your novel emits white light and a heavenly choir chants every time you crack it open, there are going to be people who think it sucks big time. Why emphasize the negative?
I think I’ve discovered now why authors do that.
Imagine you’re sitting in the Coliseum in ancient Rome and two gladiators come out of the pen. One of them’s slick and unblemished with hardly a mark on him. The other guy’s got scars all over his arms and he’s missing a few teeth. Which one are you gonna bet on? I’m betting on the guy with the scars. Why? Because a scar is evidence of a tough fight that you came out of alive. It’s a mark of experience. And when we see the clean and unmarked gladiator, we just don’t believe that this guy has gone through fight after fight without making a single mistake. We figure that he’s just too young and green to have earned his scars yet.
It’s the same thing with being a novelist. If you haven’t had people dislike your novel, either a) you’ve accomplished something that nobody on this Earth has yet accomplished, or b) not enough people have read your book yet.
Lately I’ve been seeing some negative reviews of Infoquake cropping up on the web, and I’m in the mood to show them off like a gladiator shows off his scars. There was a rush of great reviews for the book when it first came out, and I’ve been wondering how much those reviews colored other people’s readings. I wonder how many people picked up Infoquake because they had heard good things about it, and were tremendously disappointed, but just didn’t feel like bucking the trend.
So I’m going to list here some of the bad reactions I’ve read over the web and some of the bad comments I’ve heard about the novel. (Of course, I encourage you to sample some of the reviews from the praise page to balance out the criticism.)