Exit, Pursued by a Bee
An interesting set of questions has arisen with the release this weekend of a new review of my Exit, Pursued by a Bee. I’d noticed a reviewer’s name, Tony Williams, crop up many times in the scifi
forums and so I approached him. He, like me is a British author and reviewer. He said he’d review Exit if I reviewed his scifi book, Scales. His book, like mine, has an admittedly preposterous premise at the beginning but then procedes to follow with the logical consequences. I love this kind of scifi. It is the what if scenario. Example: what if gravity suddenly acted upwards for an hour each day? Ridiculous but once being made a given, the rest can be logical and very interesting! I wrote Exit in that kind of vein.
It wasn’t meant to be humour book even though the irony of some scenes had to be given their head. The problem is some readers only then see humour and then write a review along Mr Bean lines. It didn’t help that the blurb for Exit was written by a reader / editor who mainly saw humour in the book. Others see the advanced physics in the Quantum Mechanics of time decoherences and realize that the physicist in the book says nothing a real theoretical physicist wouldn’t. This should be the case anyway since I researched those aspects muchly. I have a Masters in Science, am a Fellow of a Royal Society and best of all, married a theoretical physicist! hah – the irony seeps in again…
For those of you who have been kind enough to buy and read Exit (still only the price of cheap fast meal for the ebook and not much more for paperback) then peep at the contentious review that is up at
http://forum.sfreader.com/default.aspx?f=7&m=85751&p=1
Perhaps you would think that it is a good review and that I am being too sensitive. You can add comments if you freely register.
A warning to our newbie writers here, who have yet to launch a book. It is interesting because we spend maybe two years researching, writing, revising with the aid of crit groups, editing and polishing a book. Then we release it like a fledgling sparrow into the swiping paws of hungry cats. We hope spadge survives, find friends and reproduce, but one wrong gust of wind and it’s down and gone.
Hopefully I can create maelstrom of argument at that and other review sites to at least generate sales!
Geoff Nelder
