or a few short years, the late, lamented Spy magazine spoke to my adult soul in the same cynical manner as did Mad magazine when I was a kid and National Lampoon when I was a teenager and college student. Each magazine--at least during the periods when they were performing at their heights, for each magazine suffered its ups and downs--perfectly skewered the mores of the time and cast a jaundiced eye over many of the excesses of our consumer culture.
One of the features I found most amusing was called "Logrolling in Our Time." What the editors did each issue was place side by side quotes from two authors who blurbed each other's books with those glowing quotes you've seen on back covers, in effect skewering the writers by insinuating that these blurbs were done not because of a disinterested desire to promote quality literary works, but rather because of a you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours mentality. Spy focused on the glitterati of the world, the John Updike or Martin Amis sort of writer, and from my vantage point as an outsider, their tit-for-tat actions seemed to deserve the nose-thumbing. So at the time, I chuckled along with the rest of the readers.
But then time passed, and I became an insider of sorts, at least within the fields of science fiction, horror and fantasy, where I started selling more stories and books of my own. I began to review the works of others, and some of these same people started to have cause to review me. Some of this critiquing was done by or about strangers, or people whom I knew only from words on the page. But as I spent more time in the field, such work inevitably came to involve acquaintances, and, eventually, friends. I began to think, "Oh, my goodness--what would Spy magazine have to say about this?"
Logrolling, or love of literature?
What has my thoughts tending in this direction once more is an e-mail I recently received from a reader, Jeff Berkwits, who also happens to be a frequent contributor to Science Fiction Weekly. He spotted an apparent conflict of interest in a recent issue that he thought should be addressed, and so, after thinking about the issue for awhile, I am doing that here, and calling for your comments. Berkwits wrote:
This morning I read Paul Di Filippo's review of
TangentOnline.com, and was surprised that he didn't mention anywhere in the
piece that his works had been reviewed (at least a dozen times) at that site.
I just thought that, in the interests of journalistic integrity, he probably
should have pointed out that fact somewhere within the article so it doesn't
look like he's working to curry favor with potential reviewers of his
material.
I mulled this one over for a while, wondering if a disclosure of that sort should have been made, and also, if so, then at what level of relationship such disclosure could stop. In certain instances, Science Fiction Weekly does choose to make such disclosures. We already let you know when we are choosing to review the works of regular contributors, as we so noted with titles by the likes of John Clute and Adam-Troy Castro. That seemed relevant to us.
But what if a reviewer is also an author who has had a book issued by a particular publisher? Does that mean that this reviewer must mention that connection whenever reviewing books issued by that publisher? When I buy a review from a writer who has in the past also bought a review or short story of mine, must this be disclosed? Does it matter that I've shared a drink or two (or more) at the World Science Fiction Convention and elsewhere with most of the people whose books (and sometimes films or TV shows) we review here? Where should we draw the line? I fear that if we started disclosing every degree of interconnectedness, there would not be one review that did not wear some sort of disclosure.
The science fiction field, though concerned with a very large universe, is in itself actually a very small thing. The truth of the matter is that anyone who spends time in it for very long will find himself connected in some way to almost everyone else working today. It is inescapable, something I did not realize back when I was chuckling over Spy magazine. My job here is to push my writers to be honest, sometimes brutally so, regardless of whom they might know. I've come to see that the only way to find someone with no level of relationship is to find someone without the requisite knowledge to critique the field in the first place. And that wouldn't serve the readers at all.
Your thoughts, as always, are welcome.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly back in 1974, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, and also edited SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel, in addition to
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. A collection of his short fiction, These Words Are Haunted, has just been published by Wildside Press.
