It was not as if I did not know about ‘trolls’, i.e. people
who go around the internet usually anonymously making offensive remarks about
anyone they choose. Quite often these
are well-known people. Recently I have
read some of the horrific stuff sent to Classical historian, Professor Mary
Beard, OBE and the pro-rape ‘communities’ that FaceBook refuses to remove
though it does take down pictures of a woman breastfeeding her child. Ordinary people also suffer trolling and
often lack the range of supporters to fight back. It is a form of bullying that clearly allows
some people to get a buzz about pushing down others. It is clear that there a individuals who
subscribe to an unacceptable view of what society should be, largely violent,
racist and anti-women, to shout out their views wherever they chose. Their view of society is so distorted that
they get angry at people who seek to instil any sense of humanity into the
debate. The ground is fertile, when
publications like ‘The Guardian’ and even specialist journals like the ‘Times
Higher Education’, as one regular reader of this blog pointed out, have
discussions in which commentators just attack the abilities and knowledge of
each other in offensive terms, you almost appear to be half-way to the really
outrageous stuff from the outset.
In some, perhaps many, cases trolling appears to stem from a
sense of inadequacy. As the person
cannot run an interesting blog or write a novel, they feel no-one else should
be allowed to enjoy the success of doing so.
In many cases, like the specific one I discuss below, they seek to
assert their superiority by being a better ‘train spotter’ than others and
insisting that their spotting of minutiae is important. In the past such people were confined to
their clubs of like-minded people. At
worst you would encounter them like the Harry Enfield character telling you ‘you
don’t want to be doing that’. They were tiresome
but avoidable. On the internet they are
less easily avoidable and when ratings and sales are important and these days
are not allowed to be independent of ‘feedback’ they have a destructive
edge. It is the revenge of the geek,
they now hold the power online and they are not satisfied even with smearing
your reputation, they want you to suffer and to be seen to suffer. It is like a drug that they have to keep
coming back to.
In this posting, I am not going to take on the whole
trolling community, but am going to focus on those who impinge most on what I
do. As a blogger I have been very
fortunate that I have not received the kind of attacks so many do, especially
women blogging. Running the blog we have
the control to delete comments that offend us and can respond immediately. Such facility tends to be lacking when you
move on to selling e-books, in my case, via Amazon. I have commented on previous postings about
the negative comments I have received so will not revisit those. I have removed almost all the alternate
history books which attracted this attention.
However, looking around other writers’ books I have seen a common
pattern. The one that was sent to me by
the regular was ‘The Nanking War’ (2009) by Ryan McCall. This book has been available as a paperback
and now as an e-book on Amazon.com the generic and US version of the
company. The book considers a war
breaking out between the USA and Japan over the Rape of Nanking [Nanjing] in
1937. As readers know, I like alternate
history fiction and essays, so this attracted my attention, especially as it
neither started from ‘what if Hitler had won the Second World War?’ nor ‘what
if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War?’ the basis nowadays of a
large number of books.
The review on Amazon.com gave it a 1-star. What was interesting was that the structure
of the review was almost identical to one I had received for ‘His Majesty’s
Dictator’. This is unsurprising given
that these troll-reviewers are pretty small in number and unimaginative. It started by saying the ‘I found Mr.
McCall's writing to be technically correct and the story is well edited.’ They usually put in a positive, though
editing, something the trolls can wheedle out small errors from is often a
target. The reviewer then complains that
the story fails because even though it is alternate history ‘that history must
be grounded in some sort of reality for the reader to suspend disbelief.’ Fine.
Now, personally I would challenge this book on the fact that the USA did
very little in response to the Rape of Nanjing and in fact did very little in
response to the sinking of the USS ‘Patay’ by the Japanese or their invasion of
central China. Even after the bombing of
Pearl Harbor, more than four years later, it was not clear that the USA would
enter the war.
What grounds does the troll-reviewer condemn this book? I quote:
‘Mr. McCall chooses
1937 as the time frame for his story therefore he needs to ground the reality
of his story to that year. For example, McCall arms the U.S. Marines in Nanking
War with magazine-fed Winchester rifles. In 1937, U.S. Marines assigned to
China were issued Springfield 1903, bolt action rifles. McCall's lack of
understanding of military rank structure also hurts the story. He claims the
Marine Lieutenant was a squad leader. Marine Lieutenants were and are platoon
leaders not squad leaders.’
It is on this basis that the reviewer gives the book
1-star. This means it will not be
recommended to people searching for alternate history and given that sales end
once you have a 2-star review, he might as well take the book off sale. As my correspondent highlights, these minor
details would be overlooked by most readers anyway. In addition, given that it is alternate history,
what is to say that the USA would not have issued different rifles? The US Marines in China were a garrison force
not one going to war. In addition, many
officers who have gone into combat have ended up taking different roles as a
result of local circumstances. A further
point is, if the reviewer felt these small issues utterly undermined the book,
then s/he could have written to the author.
You can amend and republish a book written in English in under 12 hours
on Amazon, sometimes far quicker than this.
Of course, the objective of the reviewer is not to alert
readers to minor errors or show that the book is no good. Ironically these trolls often laud the good
aspects of a book and then make judgements on minor points as if any spelling
or grammar mistake or any technical detail which does not fit their memory is
enough to damn an entire book. On this
basis, Ian Fleming’s James Bond series with their erroneous technical details
about guns and geographical locations should not be in print. The same goes for work by Henning Mankel and
Philip Kerr. Even Robert Conroy and
Harry Turtledove that the reviewer recommends instead, have made such minor ‘mistakes’
in their work. There is no capacity for
the author to diverge from what is perceived to be the ‘truth’ despite writing
fiction. It goes for genres as a whole
too. I had ‘His Majesty’s Dictator’
rated 1-star not for the quality of the book, but simply because the troll-reviewer
felt that there was no demand for a 1940s pastiche. He had made a judgement for the entire
reading population about what they might like to read and sought to censor a
whole genre.
I accept that books may be poorly written and this should be
highlighted to readers. However, the
utter condemnation of a novel simply because of minor, easily altered aspects
or the type of novel it happens to be, is unproductive. It utterly crushes innovation. Authors of the 1960s and 1970s could not have
moved on contemporary writing if they had been open to the kind of attacks
writers of nowadays face. It seems that
there are particular approaches, with nerdy attention to passing details that
are the only acceptable books. I guess
this is why there are no many novels dealing with Islamist terrorist attacks as
these appeal to the mindset of the trolls.
I wondered if there was a way to deal with
troll-reviewers. I have no desire to
write the kind of books they insist upon and yet do want to get my work out
there. Ultimately, I think once I have
got my career back on track, assuming that ever happens and I do not slide even
further, then I will make my work free once more. For now, however, I welcome the little bits
of income and what they can buy for me and the ones I love. ‘The Guardian’ provided some anti-troll
guidance: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jun/12/how-to-deal-with-trolls
However, what was suggested to me was that more of us need
to become ‘goats’. The term might not be
an attractive one, but apparently comes from the fairy tale, ‘The Billy Goats
Gruff’ about a trio of goats who trick and then butt off a troll that lives
under a bridge they have to cross. You
have to have a strong stomach as I guess the trolls will turn on you if you
goat. I have seen people who have challenged
such reviews patronised as naïve and ignorant.
However, you have to believe that you are right and remember that some
poor author has spent months, perhaps years, writing a piece of work. While some writers may need to enhance their
skills, no-one intentionally puts up a shoddy, rushed book. However, all of this effort can be destroyed
by someone bored for ten minutes or less, over their lunch break, who wants to
boost their own ego by kicking someone else.
Yes, if the book is bad, then a critical review is
fine. However, it needs to be
constructive and not simply bury a book because it does not cover some niggly
detail or is a different kind of book to what the reviewer wants. I have heard that writers of gay fiction get
this all the time. Despite labelling it
as ‘gay fiction’ which you can do on Amazon and having covers which suggest the
content, they get virulent complaints from male readers who feel they have been
‘tricked into reading this filth’.
Challenge reviewers. It seems easier for people in general to comment on reviews on Amazon than it is for the writer to respond to them. If
the book has some minor errors, then it probably deserves a 3- or a 4-star
rating, not to be condemned forever on the basis of these. Challenge reviewers who argue that no-one
will want that genre. That is not a
question of quality, that is a question of consumer choice. If it gets a 1-star, then of course, no-one
will go near it. However, a writer can
quickly tell which genres do not sell, they need no reviewer to tell them
that. Challenge reviewers who make
patronising judgements especially on the age, gender or nationality of the
writer. A lot of great fiction would not
have come about if writers had faced these prejudices so extensively in the
past century. There was prejudice, but
there is no place for it now. The
internet is supposed to be free to speak and express ideas and self-publishing
is an element of that now. However, if
trolls are free to shut down innovation and a range of authors, we are
effectively seeing amateur censorship, intolerable in large parts of the world.
I am going to be using my own goats in an attempt to get
back at troll-reviewers. Thus, I would
encourage you to get out there goating for other writers, starting with poor
Ryan McCall if you can spot no-one else just yet. Be proud, be a goat!
2 comments:
I keep meaning to try one of your Braucher novellas; the synopses put me in mind of Philip Kerr and Marek Krajewski (which latter you might like to investigate).
Speaking of alternate history, by the way, have you encountered Jeff Greenfield's book "Then Everything Changed"? It's solely alternative US histories based on political divergences, so might not be to the taste of all.
Mike, yes, I started writing the Braucher stories back in the 1990s. The appearance of Kerr's work put me off continuing with them, though his stories are set in Berlin a decade after mine. Then in the early 2000s a number of other authors wrote detective fiction set in Weimar Germany so I felt the market was saturated. It probably is, and I have sold very few copies of those stories.
I have not read any of Krajewski's books. I am years behind on my reading. I have read most of Kerr's Bernie Gunther books even though they have now moved from Germany to Latin America in the second batch of publishing.
No, I have not encountered Greenfield's book, so thank you for the recommendation. I have discovered that alternate history is one of the hardest genres to write in as people get so angry about it and like to parade their knowledge of minutiae by writing virulent dismissals of both your ideas and the way you present them. As a result I have now abandoned trying to write for that genre, it is not good for my mental health.
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