New SF Column from the New York Times!

But it's not by my ol' punching bag, David Itzkoff (who, it appears, was quietly relieved of the job sometime over the past two years since his last column).

No, it's by...{drumroll, please}...someone who actually understands SF and Fantasy and writes well about it! Our own Jeff VanderMeer!

VanderMeer is writing under the heading "Science Fiction Chronicle," and his first column -- which went up last weekend [1] -- covers Karen Lord's Redemption in Indigo, Ian McDonald's The Dervish House, Karin Lowachee's The Gaslight Dogs, and Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud's A Life on Paper. (That's more books that Itzkoff reviewed in his last calendar year in the same slot, so even if VanderMeer weren't a vastly stronger critic than Itzkoff -- which of course he is -- his work would be preferable purely on the bases of volume and efficiency.)

I hope that VanderMeer gets to do longer reviews, as Itzkoff did -- the current column is very similar in scope and length to one of Marilyn Stasio's mystery columns, or the occasional SF columns that Gerald Jonas did for the Times through the '80s and '90s -- but having dedicated SF coverage back at the Times is wonderful, and having it be Jeff VanderMeer is about as good an outcome as I could have hoped for. Even if we only get back to the Gerald Jonas level of reviews -- one round-up approximately quarterly -- that will be immensely better than Itzkoff's thundering bigfoot of unrealized ignorance and misguided enthusiasm.

So this will, I expect, be the very last Antick Musings post tagged as "Itzkoff," and I couldn't be happier to retire it. I expect to be linking much more appreciatively to VanderMeer's columns in the future. [2]



[1] Yes, I know. I should have linked to it before. But last week I was caught in a confluence of end-of-vacation and back-to-work stuff, leaving very little blogging time. But I certainly hope you're not relying on me for links at this point -- I got out of that game three years ago.

[2] Though I also note that we seriously disagree about Charles Yu's first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. I wanted to like it, but it wore out my patience by endlessly circling the same theme (which I found tired and cliched) and stretching a novella's worth of material like butter over too much bread. VanderMeer, on the other hand, thinks it's one of the best books of the year so far. He almost makes me want to re-read it, and describes the book I hoped Live Safely was going to be. But, given that discrepancy, if you like literary-ish SF at all, you should at least take a look at Live Safely. It's definitely ambitious, and clearly readers and reviewers don't at all agree on how well it has achieved that ambition.

Is Jack Vance "A Great American Writer"?

The New York Times Magazine was at least willing to consider the question this past Sunday, which is rather nice of them.

Speaking of Sundays and The New York Times, this week marked the 39th week of No Itzkoff. I hope you all celebrated sensibly.

Waiting for Itzkoff

The Book Review arrived with my New York Times this morning, the latest issue not to feature the "Across the Universe" science fiction column by Dave Itzkoff.

This marks the 36th week without Itzkoff, a new record.

I'm confident that Itzkoff can continue his amazing record of not writing reviews for a long time to come, so I'm going to track the lack of Itzkoff in the coming weeks and, maybe -- just maybe! -- we can see the first anniversary of No Itzkoff, which will arrive on October 25.

Of course, to break the streak, all Itzkoff needs to do is read a SF book and write a review of it -- and that shouldn't be too tough, should it?

The Elusive Itzkoff

While poking through the New York Times Book Review this morning -- parenthetically, Josh Beazell's Beat the Reaper looks like a lot of fun; I'll have to read that -- I noticed that Marilyn Stasio, the stalwart mysteries columnist, was back with reviews of another three new books (and three reissues).

And that led me to wonder what happened to Our Man Itzkoff, last seen emitting a review of Neal Stephenson's Anathem in mid-October. So I looked him up: for the year 2008, he appeared in the Book Review six times, twice writing about music and once about Cerwiden Dovey's possibly-fantastic novel Blood Kin.

That left a mere three "Across the Universe" columns -- the aforementioned Anathem review in October, a look at Michael Moorcock's Elric reissues in July, and his famously wrong-footed look at Young Adult novels in February.

I still don't think that NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus reads this blog, but, if anyone out there knows him, please whisper in his ear that this Itzkoff fellow is a serious slacker. He's not even managing to get his column in quarterly, when Stasio has had six since Itzkoff's last column. Either make him work harder -- which would be more entertaining for me, at least -- or just admit that he's a decent music writer but not strong on SFF.

C'mon -- there are at least a dozen bloggers that are better SFF reviewers than Itzy. (And I tactfully leave myself out of the running.) Surely the NYTBR can either make him work or send him home?

Itzkoff Sings an Anathem

Well, I definitely can't fault Dave Itzkoff for picking a short book, or an old one, this time -- which I've done for his last few, widely scattered, SF reviews -- since he's just come up for air on the other side of Neal Stephenson's latest bug-crusher, the 960-page Anathem. I haven't read Anathem myself -- Harper apparently decided not to send it to me for review, and getting it from the library would be more trouble than it's worth -- so I won't take issue with any of Itzkoff's pronouncements on the actual book.

And plenty of people have been tentatively saying that Stephenson has inflicted another baggy monster on us -- some have been more pointed in their criticism -- so merely saying that Anathem is not all that good wouldn't be controversial. Though the word is that Stephenson actually managed to write an ending this time, which would be inspiring if true.

Actually, Itzkoff fall smack-dab in the middle of the opinions on Anathem: he thinks it has some good points, but that it is essentially trying to do something non-novelistic and gets carried away in intellectual games at the expense of the core story. Those are Stephenson's great failings, shown over and over again -- he'd much rather intellectually wander off to investigate something cool than to stick to the point at hand -- so I'm inclined to believe Itzkoff.

So no bile this time: Itzkoff did take a whole page of the New York Times Book Review to cover one book, but it's an important book, one of interest to general NYTBR readers as well as those of us in the genre. If he's going to write reviews like this, I could even wish that he'd appear more often than once every four months.

Itzkoff and the Albino

I'm indebted to John Joseph Adams for first pointing out to me that Our Man Itzkoff was back in The New York Times Book Review -- I was at Readercon over the weekend, while both my Times and my Internet access were back here in New Jersey. So I spent a day and a half in anticipation of the pearls of wisdom and jewels of prose that Itzkoff would bestow on us this time.

As has become his routine, this time Itzkoff takes about twelve hundred words -- one whole page in the NYTBR -- to review a single book. As is also usual, he reviews a reprint of old material that he's already hugely fond of. One might begin to wonder if he's the world's first major book reviewer to hit on a way to practice his craft without actually having to read any books...but that would be unkind, wouldn't it?

The book he's reviewing is The Stealer of Souls, the first of Del Rey's new four-volume reprinting of Michael Moorcock's Elric stories. It's a nice-looking book -- illustrated by John Picacio -- and places the stories in the order Moorcock originally wrote them, which makes as much sense as any other order at this point. (Moorcock went to the ending almost immediately, and then spent nearly forty years interpolating material into different parts of the middle, and his style and concerns changed several times over that period.)

The Stealer of Souls was published in February, which makes this review quite late, but I imagine Itzkoff has been busy dealing with Axl Rose's memoir -- and, besides, the NYTBR has been notably late at covering many, many books this year, so it's probably not even Itzy's fault. (Not noting that the second volume in the series, To Rescue Tanelorn, will be published in nine days is, though, a sloppiness that can only be attributed to Itzkoff.)

By the way, am I the only one to note that "Across the Universe" is now appearing only bi-yearly? The last installment -- which I discussed in this space at the time -- was published in February of this year, covering three YA novels, and the one before that, on Philip K. Dick, was more than a year ago. I will also note without comment that two out of his last three columns are on books he read and loved as a child; Itzkoff appears to be doing very little original reading for this gig.

And so on to the actual review: there's a hideous illustration that manages to give Elric a normal Caucasian skin tone, though I can't fault Itzkoff for that. Itzkoff does realize, about halfway through the review -- but before actually mentioning anything that specifically appears in this volume, in the best Itzkoff fashion -- that he's taking up a whole page to badly review a fantasy book for what is ostensibly a science fiction column, and so he contorts himself to describe one of Moorcock's polemical essays, this one against just about every other SF and fantasy writer at the time. (I suspect this essay, "Starship Stormtroopers," is caught up somehow with the New Wave, but Itzkoff is innocent of all movements and so can't tell us.)

Other things Itzkoff doesn't do:

• mention the illustrations
• point out that this Stealer of Souls is a very different book from the old, slimmer Elric collection of the same name
• talk about any of the new material or the edits to old stories
• list the titles of any of the stories included here

In fact, he never actually mentions that this is a collection of short stories at all -- he does blather about Elric's "adventures," his "quests," and his "tales," but fails to come right out and say what The Stealer of Souls actually is. If I were a cynical, obnoxious bastard -- and don't look at me like that -- I'd say that it's hard to find any evidence from this review that Itzkoff even cracked the covers of this edition of Stealer of Souls, or possibly even saw it. (It may be personal arrogance, but I think I did a better job of mentioning the important points of Stealer of Souls without reading it at the end of this "Reviewing the Mail" post from February.)

So this is another typical Itzkoff performance of a SF review: well-meaning and enthusiastic, but galumphing off in three wrong directions at once. Itzkoff is the book-review equivalent of Beethoven the dog -- though, sadly, he doesn't have a Hollywood plot to redeem him in the third act.

New York Times Book Review, it's time to stop pretending he can review SF. Either give the job to someone else -- anyone else -- or just go back to ignoring us like you ignore romances.

Itzkoff Level Now Orange

Dave Itzkoff is a hard man to track down -- he's supposed to be the SF reviewer for the New York Times, but he's more often found doing other things. If he's not reviewing literary fiction, he's interviewing a scientist. If he's not searching for the "new Arthur C. Clarke," he's providing reading suggestions for presidential candidates. Where, oh where will the Itzkoff turn up next?

This week finds Itzkoff on the Times's PaperCuts blog, using Charton Heston's recent death as a springboard to quote the ending of Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room!

It's nice to see that there is another SF novel that he's read -- even if it is one that's thirty-plus years old -- but, in typical PaperCuts style, the post is really just an excuse for a blogger to grab a YouTube clip, retype something out of a book he already owns, and call it journalism. And Make Room!'s trendy dystopian environmentalism is exactly the kind of thing I would have expected the young Itzkoff to have gravitated towards.

So I still stand by my original characterization of Itzkoff: "the guy who read some SF in college, and didn't engage in it terribly deeply." Although, if he comes back with a passioned defense of A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, he may have a chance to convince me otherwise.

It's a Novel, Jim, But Not As We Know It

Since Certain Persons seem to expect this blog to immediately jump on any appearances of the fiend David Itzkoff in a well-known broadsheet published from West 40th Street -- and I am loathe to disappoint anyone -- the following bit is dedicated to you, my dear readers:

Itzkoff reviewed a novel in this week's New York Times Book Review, yclept Blood Kin by Cerwidden Dovey. Don't bother looking it up at Locus; it's not SF or Fantasy. It does seem to have some pomo qualities -- unspecified location, unnamed narrators, written as a "master's thesis in creative writing" -- for those seeking such things.

I haven't read it, or even heard of it before today, so I can't speak to Itzkoff's critical judgment. And only a weaker man than I would note that he wrote 800 words, and got paid for them, for reading a 183-page novel by an unknown. I will also not be so bold as to suggest that he is, once again, shirking his primary job of reviewing SF for The Times.

No, no. Perish the thought.

Itzkoff Forgets How to Plug a Book

Yesterday, Dave Itzkoff slunk into the New York Times's PaperCuts blog to chat with the man with the best hair in all of theoretical physics, Michio Kaku. Kaku gave Itzkoff some excellent quotes and background about three impossible technologies -- teleportation, time travel, and precognition -- which he carefully categorized into three classes of impossibility.

Itzkoff, since he had to provide only a short introductory paragraph, acquitted himself well. And he did manage to mention Kaku's new book, Physics of the Impossible. But this blog post is about the act same thing as that new book, which Itzkoff doesn't seem to have noticed -- in fact, Kaku's quotes quite likely came from the book itself.

(But it's better than I thought -- on my first, cursory glance, I didn't notice Itzy had mentioned the book at all, which is about what I expected from him.

Who Is The New Clarke?

And the man asking that question, in yesterday's New York Times, is...our own Dave Itzkoff!

(Did he think he could hide from us by appearing in a different section of the paper?)

Itzy phoned up a representative handful of current SF writers -- Charles Stross, Walter Jon Williams, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Ian McDonald -- and asked them about current scientific trends and SFnal prediction. All said reasonable things, although the backhanded compliment of Bacigaulpi's "In a lot of ways, Clarke was writing honest SF for his time" is awfully close to the perennial radical's lament of how everyone in this history of the universe was less intellectually advanced than the speaker is now. (I've liked several of Bacigalupi's stories a lot, but every time I read his comments about the field I get less and less interested in what seems to be more and more intense axe-grinding.)

The article's premise is on shaky grounds, though -- it's the old saw about SF, and in particular Clarke's work, being primarily about predicting the future. That never was true for any good SF past the very earliest Gernsback era, and it's less true of Clarke than most. Clarke never wrote a future history, and very few of his stories were particularly predictive.

Did Childhood's End "predict" that devil-shaped aliens would transform our children?

Did Rendezvous With Rama "predict" that giant enigmatic alien starships would use our solar system as an interstellar rest stop?

I suppose it's too early to say whether the "predictions" in Against the Fall of Night/The City and the Stars came true, so we can give him a pass there.

There's no space elevator yet, so I guess that makes The Fountains of Paradise "wrong."

Commentors are encouraged to post their own ideas of what particular Clarke works "predicted" and whether they came true or not.

Really, the predictiveness of a story has nothing to do with whether it's good SF, or good in any other way. It may be what non-SF readers cling onto as "what SF does," but that just proves that they don't know much about SF.

And that nicely returns to my first point -- let me repeat that the author of that article is one Dave Itzkoff.

Exactly.

A Momentous Occasion

Rejoice! For we now know of another category of books on which Dave Itzkoff will pontificate without any real knowledge!

This week's New York Times Book Review sees the belated return of Itzkoff's "Across the Universe Column" -- last seen in the December 16th issue with a puff piece about presidential candidates -- with his first actual review in that space since July 24th. And what has he been doing with his reading time since then? Surely he's embarked on some major project -- perhaps reading the entire "Wheel of Time" saga or preparing to weigh in on the recent reissue of Dhalgren? No, sadly, this is not the case.

Itzkoff has read two short and breezy Young Adult novels, both of which were actually published before he filed that July 24th column. (Un Lun Dun, China Mievile's flawed but interesting first YA novel, was published in February of 2007 and has just been released in paperback, and InterWorld, a basically generic entertainment by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves, was published in late June.)

But wait! Not content to read YA books, Itzkoff feels the need to trash the entire idea of writing for young readers in his first paragraph:

As someone whose subway rides tend to resemble scenes from an “Evil Dead” movie, in which I am Bruce Campbell dodging zombies who have had all traces of their humanity sucked out of them by a sinister book — not the “Necronomicon,” but “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” — I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers. I suppose J. K. Rowling could give me 1.12 billion reasons in favor of it: get your formula just right and you can enjoy worldwide sales, film and television options, vibrating-toy-broom licensing fees, Chinese-language bootlegs of your work, a kind of limited immortality (L. Frank Baum who?) and — finally — genuine grown-up readers. But where’s the artistic satisfaction? Where’s the dignity?

I'm sure one of the many fine writers of books for people not yet adult -- perhaps Justine Larbalestier or Tamora Pierce, to name only two who are also bloggers -- will heap the appropriate load of scorn on Itzkoff's utterly wrong and bizarre premise, so I'm content just to point and laugh. Look at the funny monkey! He thinks he has a clue what he's talking about! Caper, funny little monkey!

It's disappointing, after such a promising start, to find that Itzkoff's actual critical points are thinner and less incendiary. He liked Un Lun Dun, as I did, and so gives it mild praise. (Along the way, he's completely forgotten his lede, because he approvingly mentions Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl -- two fine writers now entirely remembered for their great books for young readers. Typical of Itzkoff to overlook the fact that he slagged them, and their entire field of literature, at the top of his review.)

He's less positive towards Interworld, which is a lesser book. (It was originally planned as a screenplay, and that origin is apparent -- it's an entertaining adventure story for boys with some subtext about identity, but not much more.)

Perhaps the problem is that Itzkoff has a whole page to fill, and, given that he's only read two fairly short books in six months, he doesn't have much actual content to fill that space with. So once again I will suggest a tightening of Itzkoff's assigned space. One word every decade would about do it.

In Which I Note The Times Has a Good Horror Reviewer and Twist That Fact To My Own Ends

There's a long column on horror in this weekend's New York Times Book Review by Terrence Rafferty. Rafferty has nice things to say about Joe Hill's superb collection 20th Century Ghosts, and also covers a few books I haven't read myself. (Plus Marilyn Stasio's very regular mystery column, though that's substantially shorter. Stasio, among other things, covers the new book by the great Loren Estelman.)

And our man Itzkoff? Not seen since his December 16th column about what vaguely-remembered SF books the various presidential candidates should be reading. His last review was of William Gibson's Spook Country on August 26th.

There's no reason to believe Sam Tanenhaus reads my blog, but, if he happens to be ego-surfing and comes here -- Sam, get rid of Itzkoff. He's not doing anything at all for you. And, at this point, who could tell the difference if you canned him?

A Very Itzkoff Christmas

Our hard-working New York Times SF correspondent, the renowned Dave Itzkoff, has a new column in this week's Book Review. Sadly, I haven't seen it in print, because my carrier decided not to deliver my paper yesterday.

But I have, through the modern miracle of the Internet, read that column, and I can now continue my relentless program of Itzkofff watching.

Once again, Itzkoff manages to file a column without actually reading any new SF books, though he does get a few points for being intermittently amusing. This column proposes SFnal books and stories that all of the major candidates for US President in 2008 (and a few others) should read, for mostly snarky reasons. I like snark, but this belongs on the op-ed page, not in the Book Review. It particularly doesn't belong when one realizes the last time Itzkoff filed an "Across the Universe" column was on June 24th (when he reviewed the Library of America Philip K. Dick volume, Four Novels of the 1960s, a book that more cynical commentators might suggest Itzkoff did not even have to read to review).

Blowing off half a year and then not doing the reading is what a layabout does at a minor state college, not the expected behavior of a columnist for The New York Times Book Review. Itzkoff has always been embarrassing, but this is his worst behavior so far.

Itzkoff is now worse than no SF reviewer for the Times; he's taking space that could otherwise be used for better purposes. Even a blank white page would be more useful than an Itzkoff SF "review." It's time for the man to admit he knows nothing about modern SF, and concentrate on writing about music, which he actually does seem to understand. And it's time for Sam Tannenhaus to either can the "Around the Universe" column entirely, or find someone who is more qualified to write it. That shouldn't be hard; I must know two dozen people personally who could do a better job than Itzkoff.

Itzkoff Pops

David Itzkoff returned to the New York Times Book Review this weekend, with a full-page installment of his column...Pop Culture Chronicle. In it, he reviews five books about popular culture, in one way or another.

This is the point where I should have a snarky comment about how Itzkoff should put his nose to the grindstone and read/review a bunch of SFF books, but -- given that I've spent the last three weeks on Hornswoggler's Estleman Loren Project -- I don't think I could be that big of a hypocrite.

At least we know he's still around at the NYTBR, and maybe the next week or two will bring us some SFnal reviews to make fun of.

Itzkoff on Gibson

Our Man Itzkoff returns to the New York Times Book Review this weekend, with a full-page review of William Gibson's new novel Spook Country. I haven't yet read Spook Country -- I still haven't read Pattern Recognition, and Spook is a sequel to that -- so I can't say if I agree with Itzkoff's judgments on it. But Itzkoff doesn't make any laughably sweeping pronouncements along the way, which I guess counts as a win for his side.

And we see once again that having been a SF writer is not necessarily a detriment to one's being seriously reviewed in the pages of the NYTBR, but one should have already given up the dirty genre stuff if one wants to be taken seriously.

A lesson for us all.

Iztkoff Is Invincible!

It's not officially an "Across the Universe" column, but the Itzkoff had a related review in this weekend's New York Times Book Review: he covered Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible. (My ComicMix review. Amazon shill link.)

I don't particularly disagree with him this time, or think he's said anything notably dumb, so I'll just note the existence of this review, wonder if if foreshadows a new, more useful Itzkoff, and move on.

Everybody (Itzkoff's Back)

So my favorite SF/F reviewer in The New York Times has resurfaced, with a full-page look at the new Library of America book of Philip K. Dick's work, Four Novels of the 1960s, in the June 24th issue of the Book Review. Itzkoff clearly knows Dick's work well, and thus, this time, he's actually doing what he was hired to do -- being an expert on this esoteric "science fiction" stuff and explaining it to the general readership of the NYTBR in a way that they can take seriously.

I do find it interesting that the line-up of Four Novels of the 1960s is nearly identical to that of a book I edited for a Special Fabulous Book Club some years back -- Counterfeit Unrealities -- with the replacement of my A Scanner Darkly with The Man in the High Castle (Since the aforementioned publishing operation already had High Castle in print at that point in another edition.) Amusingly, Itzkoff doesn't like Ubik in this book, and wishes it was replaced with Scanner Darkly, even though that is a novel from the 1970s and would ruin the title.

I'm not complaining about Itzkoff's content this time; he doesn't say anything I strongly disagree with. Spending an entire page on an expensive, mostly library-aimed LoA volume, on the other hand, is not the way I wish he was spending his time. Since this month alone sees the publication of Liz Williams's Precious Dragon, Jay Lake's Mainspring, Tobias S. Buckell's Ragamuffin, and Dozois & Strahan's The New Space Opera (among many other things), I have to see the focus on Dick as a preference for safely dead (and even more safely canonical) SF writers rather than the quirky live ones about whom he would have to have an original opinion. And I really don't see the purpose to having a SF columnist who reviews one book every other month at best; it's almost better to be completely ignored than that.

Reports From Far Foreign Shores

It would be petty and churlish of me to complain that the latest Dave Itzkoff "Across the Universe" column in The New York Times Book Review only reviews little-known books from presses that don't do much SFF; this issue of the Book Review is devoted to fiction in translation -- always of minor appeal in the self-obsessed USA -- and so Itzkoff's column reviews five books originally written in languages that are not English.

(But I will wonder about the Book Review wandering into theme-issue territory; isn't that more the work of the Wizards and FHMs of this world? What next, the bikini babes of the deconstructionists?)

Anyway, Itzkoff manfully dug up some not-completely irrelevant books (Straight To Darkness, edited by Asamatsu Ken, from Japan; Babylon Babies by Maurice G. Dantec, from France; A Game of Perfection by Elisabeth Vonarburg, from Francophone Canada; Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko and Valdimir Vasiliev, from Russia; and Seven Touches of Music, by Zoran Zivkovic, from Serbia) and said plausible things about them. I could wish that he reviewed books of wider interest to the field (and to the wider world), but this was a directed result to begin with, so that was not possible.

I haven't read, or even seen, any of these books, so I can't comment on his critical judgments. (Though the Japanese books looks interesting to me.) He doesn't say anything that looks clearly wrong-headed, as he has done at times in the past. So this is about what you would hope for in a SF column from a major metropolitan newspaper: it covers a few books decently, and doesn't leave a mess on the floor.

If Itzkoff's columns were generally like this one, I'd have to stop making fun of him; I'm not sure if that would be a good or bad outcome. (It would be less entertaining for me, though probably better for the world and SF in general -- but I of course esteem myself more highly than I do the world.)

A Comparison

I was reading The New York Times Book Review this morning, and I came across this "Crime" column by Marilyn Stasio, in which she reviews four books.

And that got me thinking.

Now, this is completely unfair -- I admit that freely -- but Stasio has had two columns (the other was in the March 11th issue) since Dave Itzkoff's last "Across the Universe" column (also in the March 11th issue). And Stasio (each column half the length of that epic Itzkoff exploration into SETI) has managed to thoughtfully review 11 books in roughly the same space as Itzkoff took to review...well, none.

So, here's my question: is there any chance we can trade? I have no reason to believe Ms. Stasio knows anything about SF, but that doesn't seem to be a NYTBR requirement to begin with. And she certainly knows how to review books, which would be a nice change.

Itkzoff on SETI, Part Two

Following up this morning's post...

Now that I've had a chance to read the whole thing through, I have to admit that it's a decent, if superficial, article on the SETI Institute. (The connection to science fiction, or any literature, is still extremely tenuous -- he calls Robyn Asimov for a quote about her father and mentions that the head of the SETI Institute published one SF story eight years ago.) I still have no idea why this is in the Book Review, or how this counts as a column reviewing SF books.

I should point out that Michael Crichton is in no way part of "the science fiction community," mostly by his own choice. (paragraph 3)

Actually, poking through the article again, it really doesn't tell us anything about the SETI project -- how it operates, what it's done in the past and is planning to do in the future, its methodology, or anything having to do with the science -- Itzkoff just throws out some comparisons with books he's read and a few quick quotes about unimportant subjects from whoever would take his calls. The article takes a vaguely pro-SETI stance, but on the basis that a belief in intelligent aliens is needed to keep reading SF, which is bizarre at best and a possible symptom of organic brain damage at worst.

I'm at a loss. I don't know why this thing was written, and I don't know why the Times Book Review published it. It's certainly not reviewing any book, and, once again, I have to ask why they're devoting this much space to mediocre, uninformed ramblings. As I think I've said several times by now, I didn't always agree with Gerald Jonas's reviews, but he at least knew how to read a SF book and say coherent things about it afterward. Itzkoff has had trouble with the latter from the beginning, and now seems to be bobbling even the former.