(Apologies for the age of this wank [2007] and the shortage of fights, but the strangeness mostly makes up for it.)

Once there was a man called Nathan Carnes. Nathan really liked exclamation marks and the word “whom”, and he wrote a book called Space Ark! so that he could use both frequently. He also liked rainbows and the Copperplate font, so he created a website to promote his opus, and found a vanity publisher who was prepared to realise his dream of the world’s most amateurish cover.

( The writing was bad. Really, really bad. )

But, of course, if he’d just stopped there, it wouldn’t be a wank. What’s more, he was getting restless. During its 15 years (!) of vanity publication, the book had managed to sell only 2,700 copies (er, he says). Accordingly, Nathan sent what I assume was intended to be a query letter to literary agent Miss Snark [blog is archival], and, further, promised to let her see sample pages for the low, low price of $35!

( As you can probably guess from Miss Snark’s name, this was not a wise move. )

Regrettably, I’ve been unable to find any more of Nathan’s public utterances. I am disappointed about this because I’m pretty sure every one of them is gold. Oh, well; I shall take comfort from his “reviews”, which feature an ENT specialist, one of the agents condemned by Preditors and Editors and someone who says, “Your vocabulary is one of the richest I have encountered. Wow!” (Hint: there are times when that’s not a good thing.)

LibraryThing: a place to list your books, talk about books, and have meaningful discussions about whether Book A is the same as Book B.

One of the features of LT is that five different people can enter five different editions of a book into their catalogues, but thanks to the combining function, those five books show up as the same work. That means reviews for a Penguin edition of Pride & Prejudice are linked to reviews for a Tor edition are linked to reviews for the Barnes & Noble edition are linked to reviews for the Bantam edition, plus the French translation or the Klingon translation or whatever. It makes it possible to have 'connections' - to see what other books people own that share connections with you. Plus other things.


Combining books into works isn't always automatic, though, so there are lots of people who take it upon themselves to do it. And then you get bad combinations, so someone else will come through and separate a work. This can get really messy, say if someone combined a regular P&P plus Pride & Prejudice & Zombies plus a P&P: Vol 1 and P&P: Vol 2 and then maybe an edition that has both P&P and Sense & Sensibility. Everything has to be separated out, then like combined with like.

But whether works are the same work or not can be pretty vague. So Tim Spalding, the guy behind LT, came up with what's known as the Dinner Party Rule: if someone were to announce drunkenly at a dinner party "_____ is my favorite book ever!" and he's talking about edition X, would a conversation about the book with someone who owns edition Y cause any confusion? (er, more or less. I'm bad at explaining it.) So an abridged version isn't the same as an unabridged version, but the translation and the original language versions are the same. Got it?


It's a recipe for wank, and it didn't fail.

See: Are Norton Critical Editions the same as regular editions?

It all started with rorrison saying "some idiot went and combined the NCE with the plain edition, even though there was a notice saying DON'T DO WHAT YOU'RE ABOUT TO DO" and then turns into a small debate over whether the idiot was right or not, but mostly people were strongly separatists, or only mild lumpers.

I LOLed and commented on that, and then BAM the thread asploded with people strongly in favor of lumping showing up to argue with the people strongly in favor of separating, and the argument has gone nowhere for several days now, and it keeps growing.

And it's not limited to the NCEs, either. We now have a bit of a debate brewing over the Chicago Manuel of Style editions and where Upstate New York begins. Plus another, almost identical thread that also began today: "If anthology X has 10 stories and anthology Y has 9 stories, but they only have 4 in common, are they the same work? And are they the same according to the Dinner Party Test?"


The best part about all this? And the thing that makes me shake my head and laugh at everyone arguing in those threads? No matter what is ultimately decided, someone else will come through and combine/separate the works based on their own preferences. (And then, of course, someone else will try to fix it, before it gets changed again. Like wiki editing wars. It happens all the time!)

Who's in the mood for a good ol' academic tussle?

1. Professor Steve Fuller writes a book called Dissent over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism.

2. Professor AC Grayling reviews the book for New Humanist magazine.

It is sometimes hard to know whether books that strike one as silly and irresponsible...are the product of a desire to strike a pose and appear outrageous (the John Gray syndrome), or really do represent that cancer of the contemporary intellect, post-modernism.

3. Fuller responds to the review.

I wish I could repay AC Grayling’s compliment by naming an exotic mental pathology after him, but regrettably his review of Dissent over Descent displays disorders of a much more mundane kind: he has merely failed to read the book properly and does not know what he is talking about.

4. Grayling responds to the response.

Steve Fuller complains, as do all authors whose books are panned, that I did not read his book properly (or at all). Alas, I did.

5. Forum fight!

Over on Dear Author, Jane posts about an author overreacting to bad Amazon.com reviews

The author's fans are quick to point out that Jane is just jealous, a meanie, has no life, etc. And the author herself responds. The comments have been deleted, but breecita saved them

( Pro making ass of herself under the cut )

Whiny pros! Whinier fans! Passive-aggressive smilies!

All we need is a flounce, a sobbing vow to Never Write Again, and/or a pseudocide.

ETA: Thanks to carlanime, a prequel of sorts.

ETA2: Crap, wrong link, wrong potential post. If anyone wants to write up about possibly fraudelent conniving, lying, soul-bonding-is-my-religion! roommates from hell, drop a line.

Wank of the SF book reviewing variety- which pretty much automatically means, "Pretentious genre debate and flashing-credentials variety."

Paul Kincaid, a British SF reviewer, writes a review of the non-SF novel The Wild Girls for the SFSite. The review is pretty tepid, and was essentially only done because the author, Pat Murphy, has also written SF novels.

Literaticat, an American on LJ, disagrees.

( It's a MIDDLE GRADE novel, people )

The SF Blog Torque Control reports on both the review and the response, and the blog editor gives his own opinion, which falls solidly on Kincaid's side. This inspires a comment thread in which people from both sides show up to argue about what "middle grade" (a US book categorization that does not exist in the UK) should mean, and whether a UK reviewer is obligated to be familiar with the US book market's labels before he reviews a book.

Kincaid then responds with a quiet but decisive takedown of Literaticat's opinion:

( This is patent balderdash )

Will there be further developments in the exciting saga of what we should call this marketing category? Stay tuned!