The Right of Fanzine Reviewing: Part 2
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| Title: | The Right of Fanzine Reviewing: Part 2 |
| Creator: | M.J. Fisher |
| Date(s): | August 1976 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Star Trek: TOS |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The Right of Fanzine Reviewing: Part 2 is a 1976 Star Trek: TOS essay by M.J. Fisher.
It was printed in Spectrum #27.
The essay is a companion piece to The Right of Fanzine Reviewing: Part 1 by Sharon Emily.
Fisher opens with "The subject of reviewing has passed in and out of discussion many times in fandom but apparently it is getting more than its share of attention this summer, with the controversy ranging about the subject of content, and what or perhaps what not lies within the realm of reviews."
Some Topics Discussed
- fans pay cold hard cash for zines, and they shouldn't pay for things that aren't very good
- reviews are a service for fan consumers
- "Reviews can hardly be more advanced than the art of Treklit and if we are to expect reviews to be perfect then perhaps we may also expect Treklit to be perfect as well."
- Trek fans have more choices than in the past, and therefore they can be choosier
- fans have been used to gushing reviews, so when they read an honest one, they are shocked
From the Essay
The main purpose of a review is to act as a service to fans. Just as lists of conventions, or news of the important people serves as a guide to informing fans what is going on, a fanzine review 'poses as a guide to those amateur works extant in fandom. Fortunately for convention listings and news of the stars it takes little experience to write one, and seldom are attacks leveled at the people who write them.
Until only a year or so ago, there had been no really respectable forum in fandom where fanzine reviews were common, frequent, and accepted. Two zines have come into this area which have the ability to carry fanzines because of their fannish orientation. Those zines are Halkan Council and Spectrum. They work together well because not only do they reach out to a more serious fan audience but the reviews in each zine usually differ quite a bit in tone and handling, giving a good overview of the zines around. A third zine which has yet to prove itself is the Fanzine Review 'Zine, one totally geared for reviewing.
One of the items effecting reviewing thus far has been the way in which fans judge zines. Before the lines of communication were developed so well in fandom it was quite a treat to find out about any zine. Now there are a set of zines that pass among the "fans-in-the-know," and a set of zines that are considered almost a "must" to survive in any heavy discussions between fen at cons or other gatherings. Certainly that wasn't the case as little as 5 years ago when the availability was more limited. Since we have more zines around, and more basis for comparison we have set our values higher for zines. A few really fine pieces of the art have appeared as well, such as "Interphase," which give us a much loftier goal to reach for when scoring zines as "perfect." What may appear to be a negativistic trend on the outside is only a refining of standards within fandom, without which the points we judge fanzines by to day would be a half a decade out of date.
Still, it can probably be said that the majority of all Star Trek fanzines tend toward mediocre. After all, the majority of everything tends toward the average with most of the attention directed toward the high and low points. We could also say that Sturgeon's Law applies as well, that is: 90% of everything is crap. However, if everything in fandom tends toward the mediocre and if Sturgeon's Law applies then you
can hardly be sure of the fact by reading most of the fanzine reviews around which abound with praise of (oh, golly!) yet another Star Trek fanzine, make shallow, over-generalized comments, and fail to impose exacting standards on things that have been habitual in fandom for years, yet still pop up in zines like a recurrent bad dream. When a candid, hard-hitting review does come along, it may seem even more blatant and shocking by comparison, but it can't be unexpected at this point in fandom. Fandom is ten years old and you have to expect puberty to begin somewhere!
The effects of reviews can't be all that universal in fandom for a variety of reasons. For those people who only buy less than half a dozen zines a year either be cause of availability or just inclination, will not be effected by reviews of other zines much. They'll pick and choose as they please, being influenced mainly by the way it looks on the table at the convention, or the sales pitch they get from a fancy huckster or well-worded ad. Probably the most people to heed reviews will be those folk who buy zines by the armload each year and value an opinion before spending more cash on what may turn out to be a real wash-out of a zine.
Importantly, the people who buy that many zines are interested in fandom. They can't read that much and shell out that many greenbacks for totally philanthropic reasons. Those people reading reviews are among the more educated and active fans around, so a bad review in any popular zine might hit doubly hard, especially to the author/editor of the zine, because it reaches mainstream fandom, and probably many of the people the author knows personally.
The immediate effect that these reviews will have on the readers is to sway opinions. Based upon observations and good deduction, reviews will make a reader think twice about a zine with a bad review, or make him just a little bit quicker to grab one that has won the praise of the reviewer. Another very subtle affect that reviews might have is on the tastes for any particular style of writing. Enough reviews denouncing, say- Kirk/Uhura love stories, may actually exert a subtle pressure (at least psychologically) upon both readers and editors to refrain from going further into that field. This is further reinforced by the fact that anyone who is sick-to-death of a particularly recurrent form of writing will be better moved to write a review decrying it. This, however, is a long term effect and very difficult to gauge in any definable way.
People publishing fanzines are not professionals, although their aspirations may tend toward that, thus egos are a delicate thing in fandom and most reviewers try to temper their wording so that naked egos aren't left to to the mercy of verbal whips and chains. The best way of doing this is to make sure there is reason behind most of a review that can bring up a valid point, but reviews can be as complex as a written work, and reasons for one point or another may be couched in subtlety and layers of labyrinthine implications.
Points against reviews are bitter indeed, and stem from being hurt perhaps once too often by an unkind review. Negative and caustic reviews can be enough to deter people from writing before they begin, and can discourage others from continuing.
In cases where the ending of a story is revealed it can have the effect of ruining the story for other readers, and some reviewers have resorted to pure insult and slander. Or, so say the dissenters of reviews in fandom.
More realistically one must look toward the purpose of the fanzine reviewers' job - to service fans, and not the authors or editors'. Egos can be spared cruel and unusual punishment by intelligent writing, but not to the point of covering up and making a no-account zine look like Nadia Comaneci with the uneven parallel bars. Sarcasm can be used intelligently in a review too. Because of space limitations with in a zine that carries reviews it is often impossible to give a full discussion of the feelings behind any particular piece. Just as much of verbal conversation can be enhanced by hand gestures, intonation, facial expression and flashes of the eye, a short description consisting of a few sentences can convey much more information by the Use of idioms, slang, pacing, typographic tricks and the overall tone that a particular combinations of words provide. It can, as I said, be very complex, and a reviewer than can mix various styles of construction, wording, and a little psychology deserves to be appreciated more than he deserves to be chastised.
Also, a reviewer is entitled to be a little less patient with an author or editor that has made use of the same ideas or mistakes, with little change or improvement from the time before. A reviewer can always assume that a first-time effort of an author will be basis for a better zine to come, but if not, a reviewer shouldn't prepare to be too lenient with redundant plots, stagnant characters or unimproved flaws. Sometimes a sarcastic quip or an underhanded repartee is just what is needed to move an author into action to change his habitual ways.
With all of this crying over how reviewees are treated it Is important to remember that the people who sit before the typewriter and pick through all of those Ghod-Awful-Fanzines (as well as a few pretty impressive ones too) have rights themselves. Once that any particular zine is out and available to fandom in general it is in the public domain. That means anyone can have their opinion to it. Reviewer's comments are no different from anyone else's, they are only published for other fans to read. If a reviewer covers up maladies to boost the ego of those one or two people who print a zine, then he is not serving that public domain, just the author/editors. The major duty is to that greater majority, and if it hurts the editors' feelings, no matter how mildly put, it will still serve its function to the rest of the people who read it to print things honestly.
All of this talk about "bad" reviews, and negative ones isn't to insinuate that analyses of fanzines are always derogatory. Reviews, like the works they study, usually span the middle distances between praise and damnation; yet it seems that most of the criticism waged against them centers on the least little negative comment as though the credo of all reviewers should be: If you don't have anything good to say about something, don't say anything at all. In that case, many zines with reviews would carry a good many blank pages.
Although authors and publishers claim that it is they who have been oppressed, in many cases it is also the other way around. For a long time it has been hard to find a detailed and honest review in fandom because in the earlier days there weren't enough people with a sufficient knowledge of zines to review them. Now that we have the people with the knowledge the shrieks of protest and torture make it hard to convince them to do reviews. Especially in areas where a reviewer ends up discussing works of people he knows (almost inevitable because of the close lines of communication in fandom) Claims of back stabbing and character assassination can be a very powerful deterrent to someone who ostensibly hopes to help other fans with his review and not dismember them with tweezers.
Fandom can either dismiss the advice of a review out of hand or accept it just as easily. Most of the regular reviewers around are known in fandom through their other activities. It comes with the territory- in order to speak well on fanzines a review er must have a broad range of knowledge and experiences, almost requiring him to be an active fan. Depending on his experience and personal views fans can judge for them selves the merit of the review and read into it what they can...they are by no means always taken at face value.