Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Has Anyone Seen a Bad Review of Army of Davids?
For the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to find a single bad review of Glenn’s new book. The closest I’ve found is here, where a self-described “deist transhumanist libertarian minarchist” (i.e., heavy-breather) complains that Glenn’s book has only a 1-star rating on Amazon. He blames “review fraud” and wants to see “a system where the top reviewers could vote other reviewers ‘off the island’ so to speak.“
At least in the first two pages of a Google search, every review I find is gushingly enthusiastic, mainly, of course, by bloggers, none of whom seems inclined to cross Glenn. Glenn, after all, can give you an Instalanche! Why do bloggers want Instalanches? Actually, I’m not sure. They can get you in trouble with your ISP due to all the extra bandwidth, and after a few days your traffic goes right back to where it had been. But nobody’s going to cross Glenn, and in fact he awards Instalanches to the most fawning blog reviewers. How cheaply these folks sell themselves.
If anyone runs across even a neutral review of An Army of Davids, I’d be interested in hearing about it. Glenn, by the way, also describes himself as a “transhumanist”, which as far as I can see basically means that you’re going to have your head frozen when you die in hopes that someday they’ll be able to revive you. The guys who have their heads frozen do it, of course, because they’re too cheap to have their whole bodies frozen. This means they’ll have to wait x more years to be resuscitated, when technology will allow their heads to be attached to someone else’s body, rather than reviving their whole previous body together with their head. (But where will they get spare bodies to reattach cheap transhumanists’ heads from, if everyone is now going to live forever? Oh, maybe they can grow new bodies sans head from stem cells!)
This is how the minds of Glenn’s fellow travelers actually work. This means in turn that there’s some crazy stuff that must exist just beneath the surface of An Army of Davids. I’m waiting.
UPDATE: I had a look at the Amazon reviews, which fall into three categories. The five-star ones say pathfinding futurist, brilliant blogger, blah blah blah. (The average review, by the way, is now up to 3-1/2 stars.) The one-star reviews break into two groups, the ones who say Reynolds is a Bushie neocon (inaccurate; Reynolds does not even have that level of intelligence), and the ones that say there's nothing new here. I tend to go with the last ones. One of these predicted you'd find used copies selling cheap before long, and using a foreshortened version of transhumanist logic, I'm going to wait until used copies become available for a buck or so, as this guy predicts, before buying -- if I buy.
UPDATE: Glenn links to a review of his book by sci-fi writer and pro blogger John Scalzi. Scalzi's bio screams HACK WRITER, and Scalzi is one of those blog-cronies whose books get a regular plug from the great man himself. As a result, Scalzi has considerable reason not to cross Glenn, and he doesn't. But why is Scalzi's writing so bad? Look at this silly patter:
Moving on to another subject now, one thing I find very interesting in An Army of Davids is the extent to which Glenn is namechecking prominent bloggers in the course of the book. One way of looking at this is that it's Glenn playing to the blogger audience, but I don't think that's the right way of looking at it. As I noted earlier, if you've been keeping up with Glenn via Instapundit and his other online presences, his blogcentrism is unsurprising; namechecking Jeff Jarvis or Virginia Postrel or Josh Marshall won't do much.
He uses the word "unsurprising" or variants something like half a dozen times in a short blog post. ("This is why I mention I don't find it surprising that I don't find it surprising. . .") This, according to the Wikipedia bio, is from a graduate of the University of Chicago. Who makes his living as a writer.
Even so, I guess this is what passes for a lukewarm review in the blogosphere -- maybe as lukewarm as you can get if you don't want to cross Glenn. It was worth another Instalanche for Scalzi, anyhow. Isn't it time somebody made it plain that this kissy-kissy mutual plug business is getting old?
