textiplication.com

The walkback edition…

http://movementarian.com/2006/12/10/comic-book-owners-of-the-world-unite/

Translations:

• Uh, please don’t take my review too seriously — I actually liked the book!
• People who get upset at being called “second-hander intellectual mountebanks” are hypersensitive pickle-puss spoilsports.
• I didn’t read the book all that carefully, anyway; I basically slammed it shut when one of the characters slighted my pet ideology.

Randall Squared documented with some care some of the annoying tics in the review:

• Demanding of fiction the same amount of detail and rigor that would be expected of an academic text
• Taking a character’s words for the beliefs of the author
• Placing a quote from an early episode of the book in the context of the second half of the book

Now Mr. Swanson has stopped by the comments to drop the following bon mot:

I’m surprised that the one quote regarding Stross being a second-hander has garnered as much attention as it has. Here’s my rejoinder: http://movementarian.com/2006/12/10/comic-book-owners-of-the-world-unite/

Cheers.

Translation: I didn’t mean my words the way I wrote them!  Second-hander is a compliment! Mountebanks are skilled entertainers! Quack, quack, quack!

Quick explanation for ideologues: if you wish your critiques to be taken seriously, and not as “hatchet jobs,” you have to refrain from slurs.  “Intellectual mountebank” is a slur, a base and obvious one.  “Second-hander” is perhaps less harsh, but a slur nonetheless.  It’s my understanding of polite discourse that in a discussion of ideas, one refrains from personal attacks.  Attribution of any kind of characteristic to the author of work has no place in a civil discussion of the work itself, something that the twenty-something Aggie and the real-estate developer who coathored the original review will no doubt discover as they continue their explorations into academe. 

This is my favorite part of the rejoinder post:

The “second-hander” comment simply means that in terms of economics, the author is intellectually dependent on someone else. While this may have been harsh, I think this is fairly clear throughout the book that Stross did not have these portions of the book peer-reviewed by independent parties.

Peer review? for fiction? By economists?  Ye gods, next they’ll want to vote on ice skating. 

Fiction already has an extensive review process, far more rigorous than any used in academic journals: after the author completes a book, he/she has to find an agent.  The agent chooses books on an impression of their market potential, based writing quality, genre fit, market fit, editorial preferences; basically, they represent fiction they think they can sell to editors.  Editors buy fiction they think they can sell to bookstores that buy books they think they can sell to readers.  Charles Stross has passed all of these filters with flying colors, which means he has run a gamut obviously far more stringent than the Mises Institute imposes on its book reviewers.

How peer review about for book reviews?