In the February 1979 issue, Joanna Russ wrote a column raking over the “barren ground” of current fantasy (and, especially, heroic fantasy). Her comments generated dozens of letters of vehement disagreement (some were published in the July issue), and the column below was written in response to those letters.

Critics seem to find it necessary, at least once in a career, to write a statement defending criticism per se. Shaw, Pauline Kael, Eric Bentley, and James Blish have all done it. That I'm doing it too doesn't prove I'm in the same league, but it does indicate the persistence of the issues involved and that they occur outside, as well as inside, science fiction.

I have tried to speak to general issues rather than “defend” my own criticism. Issues are, in any case, more important than personalities, although there is a (small) section of fandom which sees in aesthetic or political disagreement nothing but personal squabbling motivated by envy. It's not for me to judge how good my criticism is; if enough readers think it's bad, and the editor thinks so too, presumably he'll stop printing it, although writing book reviews (except for places like The New York Times) is underpaid, overworked, and a labor of love. The problem is usually to recruit reviewers, not discourage them.

Here are some of the complaints that keep coming up:

1. Don't shove your politics into your reviews. Just review the books.

I will – when the authors keep politics out of their stories. But they never do; in fact, it seems absolutely impossible to write anything without immediately making all sorts of assumptions about what human nature is, what good and bad behavior consists of, what men ought to be, what women ought to be, which states of mind and character are valuable, which are the opposite, and so on. Once fiction gets beyond the level of minimal technical competence, a reviewer must address these judgments of value. Generally readers don't notice the presence of familiar value judgments in stories, but do notice (and object to) unfamiliar ones as “political”. Hence arises the insistence (in itself a very vehement, political judgment) that art and politics have nothing to do with one another, that artists ought to be “above” politics, and that a critic making political comments about fiction is importing something foreign into an essentially neutral area.