I’m both a writer and a reviewer. I read a lot, and I’m opinionated, and that’s the basic formula for a reviewer. Most of my reviews are on Goodreads, but I also review on Amazon.

There are some pitfalls to wearing both hats. The writing community, especially the indie writing community, is very connected, and there’s some expectation (even if it’s only in my head) that I’ll review my friends’ stuff positively.

I don’t always do that. I say what I think. So far I haven’t hit anyone like the guy described in this post on Making Light, who responded to a negative review from another author by trashing her book in revenge. (Pro tip: don’t do that.) The people I choose to hang out with are sensible adult human beings and they will take a less-than-raving review in their stride. But I try to make it easier for them (and for authors I don’t know) by following a few important principles.

Actually, of course, reviews are not primarily for the authors’ consumption. They’re for other readers. I know I appreciate reading a review that warns me about the weaknesses of a book, so that I can assess whether they are likely to spoil my enjoyment or not, and alerts me to its strengths, so that I can decide whether that’s a thing I like or not. And this is why I write reviews the way I do.

Here are the principles I try to follow. They’re a work in process and I don’t guarantee that every review I’ve written, or even every review I’ve written recently, follows them perfectly. But this is what I’m trying for.

(This post, incidentally, was partly triggered by Lindsay Buroker’s Tips for Dealing with Bad Book Reviews. One of the commentators suggested that someone should do a post on “Tips for Writing Reviews Where the Books Weren’t Totally Awesome”. Challenge accepted.)

1. Objectivity: Say specifically what you saw on the page

I get no value from a review that says “this is a badly-written book” or “this is my favourite author” or “I loved this so much” or “I hated every page”, any more than I get value from reviews that copy and paste the publisher’s synopsis at the beginning. I want to know what I will see on the page that is, potentially, good or bad.

I was a book editor for a while (nearly 20 years ago now, but I still have the mindset), so I will often highlight the author’s competence with punctuation, or use of words that don’t mean what they think they mean. Some people don’t care about this at all (since they don’t know or follow the rules themselves). The fact that the author gets these things wrong won’t interfere with their enjoyment of the book. But if you do care, it will interfere with that enjoyment, and I for one would appreciate knowing that about a book in advance.

It’s also, unlike most other feedback, useful to the author, since it may help to motivate them to get a better editor next time (or get one at all).

I also talk about anachronisms in books with historical settings, for much the same reason.

2. Subjectivity: Acknowledge that tastes differ

Sometimes, what I hate about a book may be someone else’s favourite thing. So I phrase my opinions as opinions. I talk about what the author did (objectivity) and how I feel about it (subjectivity).

For example, I recently reviewed a book that had no antagonist and very little of what could be traditionally called “conflict” or “action”. People sat around and ate ice cream together a lot. Many, many readers would hate this, but (because of some other aspects of the book, which I also mentioned) I liked it.

There are also things that annoy me that don’t annoy other people. I’m fussy about names, for example. I like the non-fantasy parts of fantasy worlds to work like the real world, so having a full moon and a new moon in the sky at the same time is a big black mark. If this kind of thing is what I didn’t like about the book, again, I say so (rather than a vague “the worldbuilding is sloppy”), and usually mention that it may be a thing that only bothers me, so that if someone else doesn’t care they can discount my rating.

3. It’s not about the author

I try (again, I may not always succeed) to avoid making the review about the author’s competence, let alone their personal qualities. “I don’t see X on the page” is a much more emotionally neutral statement than “the author is no good at doing X” or “this is a lazy, bad author” (though I’ve been guilty of saying something not too different from that last one).

“I didn’t enjoy it because Y” doesn’t need to become “I hate this author and his little dog too”.

4. Allow for the possibility of improvement

Just as I rarely give five stars, I rarely give one star. To me, five stars means “it would be difficult or impossible to improve this book”, and I rarely think that. And one star, in my personal rating system, means “this is a complete waste of time with no redeeming qualities and I don’t even see any potential in this author”, and that’s even more rare. I always try to talk about things that worked, and if I finished the book there must have been something that worked. (Sometimes I don’t finish the book because, for me, not enough is working.)

I recently reviewed a second book in a series, and took pains to point out the ways in which it was an improvement over the first, even though I still felt it had significant flaws.

5. Say something fresh

Again, this is something I do that other people may not. Some reviewers read other reviews of the book before writing theirs, and enter into a kind of dialogue with them, disagreeing or agreeing. I don’t do that, in part so that my review will be a fresh perspective specific to me.

If I’m writing for other readers, rather than just to relieve my feelings, that will best be served if I say something that other people aren’t saying, with specific reference to what’s on the page, acknowledging my personal taste and avoiding attacks on the author.

In my opinion.

There’s an advantage I didn’t anticipate to writing a fantasy novel without a Chosen One.

I mean, obviously it means that I’m not telling the same old tired story that’s already been done to death. I knew that. What I didn’t anticipate was that if nobody is the Chosen One, then anybody’s story can be interesting.

Can be interesting in itself, even if it’s tangential to the main story. Even if it’s completely unrelated.

For example, I’m currently polishing a short story for a competition. It’s about the young man in the last paragraph of this excerpt from the novel.

Yes, the one with no name and no lines. He nods his head and looks keen, and that’s his whole appearance. (I decided that Keen was his name, when I went to write more about him.)

He’s one small step up from a face in the crowd, and yet I wrote a 6000-word short story about the next 26 years of his life. One of my beta readers commented that it could easily be expanded and still remain interesting.

As it happens, I was listening to the latest Galley Table podcast from Flying Island Press this morning, in which the crew interview Nathan Lowell. Nathan is the champion of what some people have called “blue-collar spec fic”, about people who aren’t rulers or commanders just going about their daily lives and heroically doing what they have to do in order to get by. I’ve been very inspired by him and what he does. I’m not sure that the idea of a novel about heroic civil servants would have made it into my consciousness if I hadn’t listened to his work (thanks to Podiobooks.com).

The truth is, while the Chosen One story appeals to something in us that longs to be taken out of our everyday lives and be heroes and have adventures, because unbeknown to us we’re significant, the reality is that we can be heroes in the way we live our everyday lives. Because we actually are significant already.

So, the market for urban fantasy is looking pretty saturated – hard to break into. And you’ve been eyeing up this steampunk thing, but it looks like it might involve work. Fear not! Steampunk is selling, and as a former employee of a large publisher I can exclusively reveal that large publishers don’t give a fat rat’s for quality, because they make their money on quantity.

And, having read a bunch of the results of this policy, I can now impart to you the never-fail, paint-by-numbers formula by which you, you lazy, talentless hack, can also get a publishing contract (and a legion of diehard fans in funny costumes).

1. Setting. In practice you can probably set steampunk anywhere from the Renaissance to about World War II, but its heartland is the Victorian era. Even if you’re setting your story in a secondary fantasy world, you should stick in some kind of Victorian reference.
   You might think that this will involve research, even if it’s only spending a few minutes browsing Wikipedia. Don’t worry. Whatever vague impression you have of the Victorian era is fine. Most of your audience won’t know any more than you, and they will defend you against any nitpicker who does (or has spent a few minutes browsing Wikipedia) by chorusing, “It’s only fiction! Get over yourself!”
2. Set dressing. Steampunk is all about the set dressing. No, really, if you get this right you can screw everything else up completely. Memorize these words: Brass. Steam. Gears. Airship. Goggles. Clockwork. Punched cards. Corset. Automaton. Use several of them on every page, and you’re golden.
   Of these, you would think “steam” was the most important, but actually it’s “brass”. Brass is shiny, and distracts your readers from the fact that you’re a crappy writer. Make everything you can out of brass.
   Don’t worry in the least about whether making that thing out of brass (or powering it with steam, or clockwork, or using punched cards with it) makes any sense whatsoever.
3. Characters. You can just order these from stock. You’ll want a square-jawed hero, probably, a plucky gel (that’s important), a mad scientist or two, some minions, you know the drill.
   Your villain should be so villainously villainous that he hardly has time to plot, between kicking dogs, killing incompetent henchmen and innocent bystanders, and twirling his moustache. He should always seem like he’s on the point of tying a girl to some railway tracks while saying, “Aha! My proud beauty!”
   Give your main character something they’re afraid of, or that they dislike intensely, that makes no difference to their actual behaviour in situations where they encounter it. This establishes their iron will and their unshakeable badassness, and your fans will praise this as “deep characterization”.
   Be hard on your characters, by the way. There should be a high body count of nameless mooks and bystanders. Beat your main characters up, have them tied up and imprisoned as frequently as possible. Remember: steampunk fans like to dress up in corsets. I trust I don’t have to draw you a picture.
4. Language. Your characters don’t have to talk like a 19th-century newspaper, but some fans will expect it. Don’t worry if you don’t write this terribly well, nobody expects you to. And it helps to hide the plot holes if your fans are spending all their brainpower on parsing your sentences.
   Speaking of which:
5. Plot. You do need one, but any pulp plot from the 1930s will do. Some guy wrote a book with all of the pulp plots in, but I can’t be bothered to Google for it, so I’m guessing nor can you. Just watch any of the Indiana Jones movies (doesn’t matter which, the plot’s much the same) and steal that one.
   Lots of travelling about in different vehicles (but call them “conveyances”) and getting in fights is absolutely essential.

Follow those five simple steps, and steampunk success is yours (or your money back). You can write any old crap, as long as you stick to the formula, and you don’t even need to spell or punctuate correctly.

TL;DR:

Victoria had an automaton,
Its clockwork was of brass.
And everywhere her airship steamed
The villain kicked her arse.

This post arises from a few things I’ve read or seen recently that have got me thinking about how emotional impact in stories is often done badly, or at least very coarsely. It’s kind of like the difference between being a fry cook and being a chef.

For example, there’s the Alderaan Ploy.

Rocks fall, everybody dies, nobody cares

Early on in Star Wars: A New Hope, as I’m sure you remember, Darth Vader blows up the entire planet Alderaan and its population of millions, simply to show Princess Leia that he’s a hardass and doesn’t make empty threats. (Of course, he then has no further leverage against her and she’s less likely to cooperate with him than ever, but we’re not talking about that.)

What is the emotional impact, for the audience, of the blowing up of Alderaan? To put it another way, what was George Lucas setting out to achieve in this scene (because every scene should achieve something), and did he in fact achieve it?

Well, he establishes that Darth Vader is a really evil, evil, really evil person. Which we’d kind of picked up from the costume and the music, actually, George.

And I suppose he establishes that Princess Leia is incredibly loyal and determined and doesn’t bow to threats.

But what he doesn’t achieve, in my view, is much emotional impact.

You’d think that blowing up a planet would be as much impact as you could possibly have. But no.

See, we don’t know anyone from Alderaan, except Leia, and we just met her. And apart from briefly registering “You fiend!”, she doesn’t seem that emotionally impacted herself by the death of everyone she knows and the destruction of the place she grew up. Millions of people, we are told, died, but they don’t have names. They don’t have faces. They don’t, therefore, have impact.

Child sponsorship organisations are onto this. They don’t just recite statistics in their TV ads. They show us a face. They give us a name. They tell us a story that gets us to relate to the child as a child, not as one of a large number of nameless, faceless people we’re being told are having tough times somewhere we’ve never seen and can’t imagine.

Bonus points for showing the child’s mother, because here is someone who is emotionally impacted by the child’s plight, and in seeing that, we share it. It’s how we’re wired. People who are close to us or who are like us in some way, or who we feel we know, even just because we know their name and have seen their face, gain more empathy from us, and if we see them having emotion we share that emotion. It’s just the way the human brain works.

I recently read E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Triplanetary, the lead-up to his Lensman series. (Links in this post are not affiliate links, they’re to my reviews on Goodreads, by the way.) It’s Alderaan ploy all the way around. No actual complete planets are blown up, but large bits of them are. Pittsburgh is destroyed by aliens. The entire human fleet, almost, is annihilated. Millions of aliens are also killed. But as far as I recall, none of the named characters come to harm. Everyone who dies is nameless and faceless, and the characters have such stiff upper lips it’s a wonder they can pronounce the letter “P”, so despite the vast scale of the destruction I didn’t find myself caring.

Nobody that the author had made matter died (again, as far as I can recall), and those who did have names and faces took all the tragedy so well that we didn’t get a second-hand emotional impact off them either.

The spy who didn’t care about me much, and vice versa

Thrillers in the James Bond mould usually achieve their emotional impact through the Alderaan Ploy. There are lots of big explosions. But I recently read a technothriller, Deep State by Walter John Williams, which started out referencing Bond and then proceeded to systematically subvert him.

See, Bond is a cynical character (especially in the books). He doesn’t get close to people, except in a physical sense, of course. In Bond, sex means little, violence means little, and death means little. But in Deep State, the main character, Dagmar, is suffering PTSD from the events in the previous book, This Is Not a Game, because she does care. She’s lost people close to her, friends and lovers, and she’s terrified of it happening again because it was awful, she felt a real sense of loss – and so do we. And so when people die in Deep State, people who have names and faces, it means something – to Dagmar, and to us. It has impact. And when she takes a lover, it has impact, because we know that means something to her too.

This is why I love Jim Butcher and Lois McMaster Bujold, too. Their main characters care about things, care deeply, and are able to be deeply hurt – and hurting them deeply is exactly what the authors do (as a deliberate policy, in both cases – they’ve both talked explicitly about it).

But they don’t do it by blowing up planets. Bujold is able to give me more emotional impact out of a failed dinner party (which is also completely hilarious) than most authors can achieve by wiping out an entire sentient species. Sure, people die in their books, too, but it always matters. It matters deeply. It affects the people left behind. They feel the loss, like you or I would, like a friend I worked with whose son died in a car crash did. It has emotional impact that resonates for years.

So, are you setting out to be a literary fry cook, or a chef? You can establish the evil evilness of your evil villainous villain by having him murder a few people, or a lot of people, out of hand, sure. You can make people go “Wow!” by giving them big explosions.

But if you want real emotional impact, show me a character being human and vulnerable and caring about something, and then take that thing away. I’ll feel the loss, even as I see the character doing the same.

Have you ever read a book in which, if the characters had not all been incredibly stupid, the situation would have been resolved in five pages instead of 300?

That’s the result of overdoing a legitimate literary technique, dating back at least to Greek tragedy, in which the plot arises out of the characters’ flaws.

It’s commonly used in sitcoms, too. Consider Seinfeld, Friends or Frasier, three popular and long-running sitcoms which I happen to have watched a lot. In the typical episode, if the characters had acted like adults, told the truth, kept their promises, made sensible choices and communicated clearly, there would have been no story.

Why do we watch these things? Is it because we see our own flaws exaggerated and learn better from the antics of the idiots? Is it so we can feel superior, because at least we’re smarter than that?

Maybe both, maybe something else. In any event, it’s not the only way to tell a story. It’s a popular way, but it’s not the only way.

At least, I hope it’s not. I’m telling a story now about a group of elite Gryphon Clerks, trained to communicate well and to respond to unexpected situations creatively, chosen because they have been through experiences where they’ve demonstrated strength of character. A lot of the time, they’re simply not going to make the stupid choice.

But that, in turn, makes it hard to generate interesting plot. Plot arises when characters make choices under conditions of challenge. And some of the time, they need to lose.

It’s the Superman dilemma. How do you make Superman interesting? Any interesting Superman story has to be about how he uses his strength of character and his intelligence to overcome a situation that tests him at his points of vulnerability. Kryptonite, obviously (which was invented as a plot device exactly because it’s hard to write an interesting story about a hero who can easily beat all comers), but also Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane and the rest of them.

In other words, one answer to “How do you write an interesting story about someone with godlike powers?” is “take away the powers and see what’s left”. Another is “locate his vulnerability outside himself, in his relationships”.

And then there’s “fit opposition”. If your hero is ridiculously awesome, put up a ridiculously awesome villain, like Doomsday, against him. Now you have two guys fighting, but they’re fighting with ridiculous awesomeness. Plus, once again, defeat is on the table, so the conflict means something.

And then there’s the technique, used more often in writing Batman than Superman, of exposing the flaw that is at the extreme end of his strengths (obsessiveness being dedication taken to its ultimate).

Or you can take the “with great power comes great angst” approach, the Spider-Man solution.

So, applying that to my problem (and it is a problem), how do I write an interesting story about mature, sensible people who make good decisions?

Firstly, I could look for the flaws or vulnerabilities they have, and hit those vulnerable spots as hard as I can, so they get an opportunity to show their strength of character in overcoming challenges.

It’s easy to come up with key flaws for each one, too. Patience, the aristocrat, hero-worships Victory and automatically trusts people in her own class. Berry wants to belong. Rain is afraid that she really is the violent sociopath she once pretended to be.

That’s the basis for my “things that can go wrong” list. What if Patience discovers that her friend, the charming aristocrat Confident, is using her charity to launder criminal funds? What if another shaman challenges Berry and implies that she’s not a real shaman? What if Rain has to defend herself in a desperate situation and kills someone?

Problem is, I ran that middle scenario and Berry acted like an adult and basically won a shaman-off hands down, making the other shaman look foolish. And it doesn’t work any other way in my head. That’s who she is, that’s what she’d do.

So maybe I need to work the “vulnerability through relationships” angle. Berry’s vulnerability is Rain, and when Rain is attacked, Berry stops being quite so adult.

Then there’s the “fit opposition”. I’m bringing in a kind of Nazi party, the political face of the Human Purity bigots, and for them to be any kind of decent opposition at all, they have to have been severely underestimated. Even by Victory, who has the best strategic intelligence (in both senses) of anyone.

I’m thinking the dwarves caved way too easily on the emancipation of the gnomes, too. They’re big industrialists. They’re bankers. They’re used to having power, and they’re not going to give it up easily.

I need more villains onstage. And they need to be smart villains, whose villainy consists in the fact that they are out to enhance their own interests at the expense of others (whereas the Gryphon Clerks are out to enhance others’ interests at, if necessary, their own expense). But they need to be otherwise equally matched.

I’ve been reading a bit of steampunk lately, and so far I’m only middling impressed. I’m sure there’s great stuff out there, but I haven’t found much of it yet. I’ve mostly found the ones that are by hack writers who think that putting in plenty of brass, steam, mechanical computers, crystals and clockwork (even when it makes no sense), plus somehow referencing the Victorian era, is all you need to do.

Which is kind of like the writers of the Halle Berry Catwoman movie thinking that putting Halle Berry in a leather catsuit was as much effort as they needed to make.

Anyway, since The Gryphon Clerks is at least a little bit steampunk, it got me thinking about that elusive subject, genre definition, and what appeals to me, specifically, about a steampunk setting. And I decided that it’s a particular aspect of the Victorian era that isn’t (apparently) the one that a lot of writers first think of.

Different people have different associations with the word “Victorian”.

For some, it’s all about the class struggle, and you can do good things with that (Brand Gamblin does, in The Hidden Institute, which is neo-Victorian – like The Diamond Age, another of my favourites.)

For many others, the first association is “uptight, old-fashioned, prudish and hypocritical”, which is certainly a perspective. Not an entirely accurate perspective, or one that interests me much, but a perspective.

Some pick up on the “adventure, discovery, colonialism” vibe, which somehow has a wormhole in it leading to 1930s-style pulp plots.

But to me, one of the most interesting things about the Victorian era was not its conservatism, not its injustices, not even its colonialism, but its pursuit of scientific knowledge, technological progress and human rights.

Part of that I attribute to the fact that I’m a New Zealander. New Zealand was colonised starting in the 1820s, and the Treaty of Waitangi, its founding document as a nation, was signed in 1840, not quite three years after Victoria’s accession. So the early history of the country and the city that I live in is Victorian. To me, then, the Victorian era is one of building and development and new things never seen before.

Besides which, we New Zealanders have the proud claim to have been the first to grant women the vote, in 1893. At the end of the 19th century we were the social laboratory of the world.

Back in England, meanwhile, Charles Dickens was only one of the most prominent people campaigning for the betterment of the poor and increased social justice in the still relatively new conditions of an industrial society.

So that’s why The Gryphon Clerks involves freeing the gnomes from their industrialist dwarf oppressors and promoting education for the lower classes. That’s why I’ve included the tribal society of the beastheads getting the opportunity to participate in wider civilization (duly informed by postcolonialism, since, in a sense, that wider society is itself postcolonial, or at least post-Elvish-Empire).

That’s also why, to me, the most interesting thing about the new magical technologies is how they affect society (though that’s always the most interesting thing about technologies for me). They’re not just gizmos for the sake of atmosphere.

What’s more, the Victorian themes that interest me are very much relevant today. There are still workers struggling under industrialist oppression, they’re just in China rather than Manchester. Education is still an issue, as it probably always will be. For that matter, a hundred and twenty years after women got the vote they’re still not equally paid or equally represented in positions of power. (I work around that, in a way, in The Gryphon Clerks by positing that the Elvish Empire had already achieved gender equality centuries before, and the humans have inherited that cultural attitude – but in dwarf and gnome culture there are still very strongly defined gender roles. Meaning it can be an issue to explore or not, depending.)

I’m no Dickens, and I don’t want to be all preachy (or “relevant”, which means “irrelevant in another five years”). But I want to write books that are intelligent as well as entertaining, and that means paying some attention not only to the headlines, but to the human universals behind them.

So, yet another list of favourite books has come out topped by The Lord of the Rings. (This one from NPR.) It got me wondering: Why?

Now, I read the trilogy at least eight times, in the paperback single-volume edition that my grandmother gave me sometime in my early teens or thereabouts. (I will say I haven’t had the urge to read it lately.) I love the movies, too, with the inevitable few carps. And yet…

LOTR has significant flaws. The overly-massive backstory (which Tolkien’s son is still publishing in umpteen volumes) is probably not one of them, but it doesn’t make it an easy book to pick up and immediately understand. The prose is… old-fashioned, at best, exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from an Oxford don who’d been in World War I.

There’s Tom Bombadil, rightly cut from the movies (I don’t think I’ve heard anyone express anything other than relief at that decision), and the songs, likewise. The story is slow to get moving. There are only three female characters to speak of, only one actually does things (Eowyn), and she does things by disguising herself as a man.

The politics belong to the 1930s, when an educated person could say “lesser races” with a straight face (not that Tolkien uses the phrase, as far as I remember, but he doesn’t need to – it’s implied clearly enough). I could go on.

So why is this consistently the most beloved book, getting onto list after list – and not only on the lists, but usually at the top?

Let’s speculate.

It could be its iconic status as what you might call a “genre fount”. Epic fantasy owes its genesis to LOTR, after all – though I suspect that epic fantasy is, otherwise, a minority taste, so it can’t just be that. I would have expected its pulpy sword-and-sorcery predecessors to have more status, if that was so. Of course, sword-and-sorcery is a genre with multiple defining books, whereas LOTR founded epic fantasy all by itself.

It could be its nobility and high-mindedness. I’m actually serious. Sword-and-sorcery is down and dirty, urban (mostly) and gritty. It’s not aspirational literature. Epic fantasy gives us a myth of striving to preserve what is left of our noble origins in a degenerate age, which is, after all, an appealing theme, even if it’s also an elitist and reactionary one. It also romanticises rural life, feudalism and chivalry, and as westerners we’re suckers for that, apparently.

It could be, of course, that Tolkien, a philologist who loved the Kalevala and the Elder Edda and Beowulf and all those other obscure classics that only get read by students these days, was getting his mythopoea first-hand rather than, like his imitators, second-hand and diluted. I suspect that the feel of mythic power in LOTR is a big factor in its popularity, and a factor that’s a lot harder to reproduce than the externals of epic fantasy which we’re all so tired of. (Clash of great nations, quest, Chosen One, Dark Lord, McGuffin, mixed group of companions, swords and horses, nobility, mysterious old wizard, twilight of the elves/gods/empire, yadda yadda yadda.)

(For anyone wanting to write better epic fantasy, by the way, I’d suggest reading the obscure, wonderful Well at the World’s End by the multi-talented William Morris. The link is to the free text at Project Gutenberg. Both Tolkien and Lewis knew and loved it, which is why I read it, and I’m glad I did.)

Perhaps, having attained the status of a “classic” because of its freshness when originally published, its mythic depth and its many imitators, LOTR continues to be cited out of reflex when people think “great fiction” or “great F & SF”. Maybe it’s one of those “I fell in love with the genre through this book when I was young” things. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I want to bring down the burning eye of Tolkien by casting the quest-epic into Mount Doom, because even though he does it so well, many other people do it so, so badly. This happens in every genre, of course, particularly ones that start selling well. Publishers will shove out any old dreck in a popular genre once a breakout hit has made it popular, while overlooking, in general, the next breakout hit because “it’s not what’s selling currently”. So goes the world. Need I say more than “vampire”?