We get used to genre-slamming as a sport many like to engage in. ________________ (fill in with the genre of your choice--romance, fantasy, sf, mystery, westerns and so on) is tripe, crap, stupid, blah blah blah blah. Mostly it comes from people who don't tend to read in the genres because, well, they know better without actually dipping their toes in and if they do dip, then they bring with them their high-brow expectations and biases and then proceed to read with the ambition of hating whatever the selected text is. But like I said, it's usually someone outside the genre. But now John Clute has decided to emulate such assholes in the very same way.
Via
Andrew Wheeler's Blog, I read about John Clute's review of Gregory Frost's Shadowbridge. John Clute is usually considered one of the better scholars and reviewers in the sf/f field. He's usually got a sharp sense of what he thinks is quality or not and he delivers his opinions quite definitely and usually satirically. He's entitled. My tastes tend to be far more forgiving and embracing. I like to be entertained, frankly. But I don't have to read or pay any attention to his reviews so live and let live. But then he has to go and say something so atrociously insulting, stupid, and just plain galling, that now I have to think everything is suspect.
Here's the review overall, which is fairly scathing (I have not read the book yet, but plan to).and below is the part that crawls down my throat and makes me want to chew iron:
". . . as benumbing for an adult to read as almost any story written for the Young Adult market, whose products are about as close to genuine fiction as megachurches are to monasteries where silence is observed."*goggle*
WTF?
A most revered critic in the sf/f world is, as Andrew Wheeler puts it, revealed as a genre snob. I have harsher words. But as brilliant as he is supposed to be, he still makes a sweeping condemnation of an entire genre that I would guess he probably doesn't read, or if he does, comes to it so tainted with his own biases that he can't even read it with any critical balance.
Color me appalled.