Rose has been reviewing books for Publishers Weekly since 2002, and became the speculative fiction reviews editor in 2007. She has reviewed books in several other venues including Strange Horizons, Lambda Book Report, and ChiZine. She is also the Dissociative Editor for The Annals of Improbable Research.

Josh is the director of marketing for Fantasy Magazine. He’s been active in the speculative fiction fandom community since 1990, and has been formally contributing to Genreville since September 1, 2009. One of his first posts explored different portrayals of queerness in speculative fiction in honor of Outer Alliance Pride Day.

Rose and Josh live in New York. They keep personal blogs at rosefox.livejournal.com and sinboy.livejournal.com, and also maintain a twitter feed for Genreville at twitter.com/genreville.

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How and when did Genreville come into being, and how did Josh end up on board?

Rose: My boss wanted an SF/F/H blog; I offered to write one. It became too much for me and I let it trail off. When Brian Kenney took over as editorial director of PW, he asked me about reviving it and I said Josh and I could do it together if he would pay us as freelancers. It’s worked out very well.

Josh was always my not-very-secret co-author, of course. I think half my posts made reference to him before we formally got him his own login.

Has it ever been awkward reviewing books by personal acquaintances?

R: Occasionally, but I’ve never lost a friend over it or anything like that. They understand that I’m a critic, my job and reputation depend on my impartiality, and I’m going to be honest about their work regardless of my personal feelings about them. I think this is such a small, incestuous industry that we all cut one another a little slack; they know that anyone reviewing their work is likely to be an acquaintance or a friend, so they’re braced for it, while I get a good reminder to review the work rather than the author.

Josh: It can be awkward to review a book by a friend, but mostly I’ve been in control of what books I review.  It’s possible one will come up in our book club, and I won’t like it.  But if that’s the case, I’d have to expect that anyone worth being a friend to can handle it if they’re friends with a reviewer who didn’t like a book they wrote.  If they’re not able to maintain that level of distance, I’m probably better off not being close friends.

What are some of your favorite and least favorite tropes? Are there any types of stories that will keep you reading longer just because of a specific plot point or character type? What about dealbreakers that make you put a book down?

R: I love a good detective story. I love shocks that are shocking the second or third time through, when I go in knowing whodunit or what terrible fate lies in wait and I still find myself holding my breath as the story unfolds. I love believable romance and believable sex. I am, as so many of us are, a sucker for queer characters whose lives or personalities are anything like my own; I’ll even settle for lousy representation over no representation.

I have no patience for stories that use abuse, torture, or rape solely as a means of creating atmosphere or developing character. I have no patience for plots that are advanced by people being repeatedly, preventably foolish or unethical, though really good character development or horror atmosphere can make this barely tolerable. As Marissa Lingen recently pointed out about “Button, Button”, most of us would have responded to the “get lots of money by killing a stranger” set-up with “Uh, no thanks, and I’m calling the cops now”.

I find most happy endings boring, and I especially dislike them in horror stories. Cliffhangers make me growl. I care a lot about endings, really. I have invested my time into the book or story, and the ending is a big part of the payoff. If I don’t feel that it was worth the investment, I will be grumpy.

I despise the notion of love being enough to bring someone back from the dead; I have dealt with the deaths of many people I love, and I will not stand for the implication that it was my fault for not loving them enough to keep them alive or resurrect them. That one is a flee-the-theater/throw-the-book dealbreaker for me.

J: I’m partial to both the deeply philosophical book, and the rock-em-sock-em action book.  I like the traditional underdog hero, and sometimes get bored by traditional gender roles like square jawed manly men or women who need men to complete them.

I’ll put a book down first and foremost if it bores me, and if I have no real concern for or interest in anyone major in the book.  I don’t have to like a character, but I should care what happens to them one way or another.  Like Rose, I think a plot that’s moved along by people being catastrophically stupid is uninteresting.

Tell us about the Genreville book club. How does it work, and who can join in?

R: Anyone can join! Every month, we put up a poll listing all the books coming out the following month that have been reviewed in PW‘s SF/F/H section, and we ask people to vote on the ones they want to discuss. The poll is open for a week, and anyone can vote who’s interested in discussing the book. Then people have a month to read the book, and we spend a week discussing different aspects of it. It’s really not a “club” at all, at least in the sense of restricted membership, and we get different readers participating every month.

J: I’m  enjoying what we did with Rosemary and Rue.  I got off track with Boneshaker trying to read through a [different] particularly boring book that took me four days to decide it just wasn’t worth it.  I’m certain our next choice will be one I’ll plow through, and we’ll get to collaborate again.  Rose sees things I don’t, and vice versa, so the different points of view are fun.

Do you have any queer speculative fiction recommendations for us?

R: Wholeheartedly recommended: Chris Moriarty‘s Spin State and Spin Control (hard SF). Lee Thomas’s The Dust of Wonderland (horror). Nicole Kimberling‘s Turnskin (humorous fantasy).

Recommended with caveats: Jo Walton’s Small Change alternate histories (Farthing, Ha’penny, Half a Crown) have a lovely gay protagonist, but his story is pretty tragic. One of the heroines of Jim Hines‘s kick-ass princess series (The Stepsister Scheme, The Mermaid’s Madness, more forthcoming) is a lesbian, and the first book kind of sucks for her but I hear the later ones are/will be better about that. Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s A Companion to Wolves is fun if you’re into slashy quasi-consensual gay orgies orchestrated by telepathic animal companions.

J: Other than Rose‘s recommendations, I’m partial to Cat Valente’s Palimpsest, which has a lot of bisexuality, including male bisexuality something that’s ignored in a lot of queer F/SF.

R: Ooh, yes, seconded.

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Thanks, Rose and Josh! Join us next friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Genreville!