As pointed out on FB

[james_davis_nicoll]

Regarding Jemisin's The Fifth Season:

What a waste of time. I very disappointed in this book---no characters, no plot, not even pages! It turns out it doesn't actually exist at this point, and not for another year, so trying to read it now is fruitless. How are these other people rating it at 4 or more? WTF?

Comments

[roman-dochkin.livejournal.com]

Что-то пошло не так/Something goes wrong.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

Well, that sounds interesting. I'll probably buy it.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I really dislike the five-star reviews people give something they haven't seen or read. Happens a lot on Amazon with MST3K sets (and the BNFs who do this will cause you as much trouble as they can if you dare suggest they actually, you know, WATCH the set before reviewing it).

More to the topic at hand, I ran into this on Goodreads recently when I was writing my own book review and desperate to find someone else who had read the book, which hadn't dropped yet. I notice some of the reviews for Wolf in White Van actually asked how many five-star reviews there could be given the book wasn't going to drop for a few weeks.

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

MST3K sets seem a little different than a not yet released book, though. There is additional material, but it's basically episodes of the TV show that have been out there for years.

I mean, I agree that it's still wrong, but it seems pretty different than a book you haven't read at all.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I disagree, because MST3K sets have a history with both Shout! and Rhino to be missing pieces of the movie, missing host segments, have sound sync problems, and other technical issues.

I get that they're "reviewing" the episodes the set will contain but the tapes have been circulating for the better part of two decades, we KNOW what the episodes are like. What we need are reviews for the actual presentation and content, not a bunch of self-appointed BNFs who just want to get there first and artificially inflate the rating of their favorite show.

And the best I can tell, Goodreads reviews prior to release and from people who didn't get an ARC of the book are the same.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

I have to agree.... now, I think I will create some imaginary books and put them up for reviews..

[bedii.livejournal.com]

Will you be changing your name to Frederic R. Ewing, then?

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

I would go with Kilgore Trout, but someone did write Venus on the Half Shell.. sigh. But I do adore imaginary books within books.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

But I do adore imaginary books within books.

There used to be a site called The Invisible Library that listed books that only exist in other books, but it seems to have fractured into a bunch of blogs.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

There was another site that tracked fictional curators and archives, but it was never as cool as I wanted it to be and now I think it's defunct.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

oh *drat* I was going to get all cute n fluffy over that sort of site...

[bedii.livejournal.com]

If you think that I, Libertine wasn't written as a book, then Theodore Sturgeon and Kelly Freas, who illustrated the cover, must have had a hell of a projective hallucination facility.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

even sadder, are real books that dont match up with the reviews and the cover blurbs.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

How lem-esque?

Nah, doesn't have the same ring to it as kafkaesque, and sounds a lot more like some kind of miniature terrasque.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Actually it's Borgesesque, but that's even worse. Borgesy.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Borgesiousy?

[krfsm.livejournal.com]

Borgesuoise?

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

this is starting to sound like a Monty Python exchange..

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Bearing in mind that my Spanish is extremely limited, so I may have misunderstood my sources, the Spanish adjective for Borgesian appears to be Borgiano (there are arguments about why it is not Borgesiano that turn on intricacies I cannot follow).

[eub.livejournal.com]

It's utterly borgeous.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

In Goodreads parlance, "lem" is a verb meaning "to give up on a book." Comes from the Sword and Laser book club, where the group leader once decided to pick a Lem novel but chose one of his most abstruse novels (Memoirs Found in a Bathtub). The co-leader mentioned that she couldn't finish it, and other posters picked up on it and started saying they "lemmed" other books.

[carbonel]

Funny. On the Delphi Trivia forum, "lem" is a verb meaning to copy someone else's answers. (In the trivia game, all correct answers given before time count for points, and it's okay to copy.) I comes from the alleged behavior of lemmings following each other off the cliff, because people are almost as likely to copy a wrong answer as a correct one. (There used to be a "Liar's Points" game, where the one who gave an incorrect answer got points for the number of people who copied her. But that game is long gone.)

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Heh. That was my first Lem (at the age of eleven? twelve?) and I couldn't make head or tail of it. Bounced off it completely.

Come to think of it, I haven't read any of Lem's work since. I must remedy that.

[harimad.livejournal.com]

I didn't read the reviews - perhaps they had Advance Reader Copies (ARCs)? Some publishers, such as Baen, now sell the damn things.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

There are only three reviews and twenty-one ratings, which increases the suspicion that they're grading in anticipation. Though it's only a suspicion.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

One of the comments explicitly says they're excited by the synopsis and can't wait, which is presumably what they're rating it on.

Silly yes, but without silly people where would genre fiction be?

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

That comment had "user marked this as to-read", which seems legit. Didn't see a rating attached to it.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

This is a recurrent problem on Goodreads. A lot of people, apparently, don't know how to put something on their to-read shelf and give it a star rating instead. But the site can't disable reviews for unreleased books because many of the top reviewers receive ARCs, and a lot of mid-list titles end up hitting store shelves before their official release date.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

For a few years, Amazon listed a book by Jo Walton that had been cancelled. I tried a couple of times to get them to remove it, and eventually gave up -- I couldn't find a website that I could refer them to about the cancellation, and that was apparently the only documentation they'd take. So I gave the book a 5-star rating, and a "review" which said that the book did not exist and never would exist, citing a conversation I'd had with the author.

It appears that they have finally deleted the entry from their database.