Ouch

Who would have thought that such a small book could contain so many errors? These are not the errors that a pernickety specialist dutifully finds in a popular account of a complex scientific topic. We're all prone to those, and need to keep in mind the eighteenth-century advice of Viscount Bolingbroke: "Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense." Rather, Feldman's errors in Poison Arrows are fundamental and imply a flawed scientific understanding of his material.

— John Carmody, reviewing Stanley Feldman's Poison Arrows, in this week's Nature

Ouch. Yep, that's the first paragraph of the review. Double ouch.

Now and then, I have this weird fantasy/nightmare—suspect all aspiring authors get these—in it, I get a book published and even reasonably prominently reviewed... which you'd think would be a very good thing, kinda thing you'd think you could live with quite regardless of what the reviewers said... except that the reviews are all so embarrassingly dismissive that I can't actually show my face in public anymore, since the universal derisive laughter distracts so severely from conversation... Reading a review like this, it doesn't help.

The anxiety is aggravated, of late, in my case, methinks, by the fact that the current principal object of that anxiety is a fantasy book, and besides the fact that I never really figured I'd write a fantasy book (and a lotta people who know me seem to feel the same), somehow, it seems to me, what could be said about such a work could become so much nastier: "Milne's work deftly touches on all the standard touchstones of the Campbellian myths. Which is my entirely too polite way of saying it's really, incredibly, painfully derivative. Save yourself a few bucks, and just read the dust jacket. It's pretty much that obvious."

It doesn't help either, methinks, that I've read so many very nasty reviews (and hell, even written a few). And, sadly, I kinda like them. So I can't really help myself. There's just so much I could do with such a work: "Baroque prose style? That's putting it politely. Let me put it more honestly: it will not be sufficient merely to hunt down Mr. Milne and kill him for putting such sentences together. We should also find all the editors involved in allowing them to run. And their extended families. And their pets."

'Kay. Enough of that. Gettin' scary.