John Scalzi’s very Merry Christmas gift

Scalzi gets a whole page in the NY Times Book Review section. Awesome!

Here are John Scalzi’s comments on the neat event.

Of course I thought the summary was a bit bullshit:

And if he uses that work to articulate a firm position on the political issues that will inevitably define his historical moment, take a stance that considerate readers might potentially disagree with, and even risk the possibility that a half-century later, some petulant, know-nothing critic will dismiss his ideas as dangerous and obsolete, then Scalzi truly will have earned his place alongside Heinlein in the canon of military science fiction — and not a moment too soon.

Itzkoff fundamentally seems to believe that unless you’re a polemicist you’re not a Great Writer ™. Ewww. I hate that. And he completely undercuts the praise he just made of Scalzi’s work by basically challenging Scalzi in his next book to denounce or affirm the fascism Itzkoff believes he sees in Starship Troopers, or else he won’t consider it a great work, which is a cheap and manipulative way of ending the column.

Still, yay Scalzi!

Filed under the topic On Writing on December 23rd 2006 at 3:19 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.