Sunday, March 17, 2013

Stupid is as Stupid Reviews

Normally, I just blow off negative reviews, but sometimes a reviewer says something that is so staggeringly ignorant or blindingly stupid as to make me beat my head against the wall.  This stupidity is particularly irritating when it is combined with a one star rating that meanigfully affects the average rating of the book, lowering its ranking on the top rated books page, reducing its exposure, and reducing my ability to support my family through my writing.

Here's the review I'm talking about:


1.0 out of 5 stars Aubrey and Maturin meet alien bats from outer space, March 16, 2013

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: To Honor You Call Us (Man of War) (Kindle Edition)
The recipe of this book is quite simple. Take O'Brian's work, dice and mince it, add a little bit of C.S. Forester, mix together with 15 pounds of military sci fi cliches, sprinkle with young adult flavor and freeze in deep space.

The book is bad. To understand how bad it is just two samples:
1. Pitch and yaw of a presumably advanced space ship is controlled from the bridge by a specially dedicated crew member. I'm wondering if he uses a rudder to do the controlling part. How did 1st WW pilots managed the same task without an extra helper? Yeah, and commands are passed by voice, just like on Sophies's bridge.
2. The said advanced space ship (you know, anti gravity, superluminal travel, etc., etc., etc.,)keeps wood "to shore up bulkheads and build temporary compartments and fixtures".
When I stopped laughing after encountering this fixture, I quit reading.

P.S. The number of 5 star reviews of this book is mind boggling. I know, there are some worse Sci Fi books around, but one will have to look very hard to find them. 


Now, let's examine in detail what a blithering idiot this guy is.  First, he is incredulous that the ship is steered by a dedicated crew member in the ship's control center using some kind of hand controller  (the snarky joke about the "rudder" is just idiotic--the ship's maneuvering thrusters, reaction control system, and inertial guidance system are all clearly described in one book or the other).  I just love how people give two seconds' thought to something and think they know more than someone who has researched it and thought about it for months.

Think about it this way.  What's the closest analog to the Cumberland in our world?  Simple--a nuclear submarine.  It's a large, heavy vessel steering in three dimensions through a hostile environment.  Submarines often need to make extremely precise maneuvers under control accurate to within fractions of a degree, just like a warship would be in space.  The Cumberland is much more like a submarine than the light, nimble, one man airplane that the reviewer refers to.  How are nuclear submarines steered?  Well, here's a picture taken in 2008 from the Control Room of the USS Ohio, a high-tech, nuclear powered warship that moves in a three dimensional environment.  




Look familiar?  It should.  The way the ships in our books are controlled is patterned on the way one controls a nuclear submarine, except that on Union warships the controls are connected to a fly by wire system that translates the crewmen's movements into appropriate actions by maneuvering thrusters, propulsion thrusters, intertial control mechanisms, etc.  It is reasonable, though by no means certain, that the control interface will be no different in ten years, or in three hundred.  The same function needs to be performed, under tight control from a chief (who normally is positioned where that silver bar is between the two guys at the controls).  The point of structuring our control interface the way we did was to establish continuity between the Navy you see in this picture and the one in the books.  While our prediction of the future in this regard is not guaranteed to be accurate, it is reasonable both technologically and dramatically.  It is certainly not a decision that is worthy of scorn and laughter from the ignorant.

All of which is not to say that Chief LeBlanc doesn't have the capability to enter a course change directly into his console, command the ship to come to a new heading by clicking on a box that says something like"Come to new heading" and then enter something like 145/212 on his keypad and have the ship come about.  Or, that he couldn't program a series of course changes that could be executed at a keystroke.  However, just because he can do that doesn't mean that, in a service that reveres tradition and that is suspicious of change, most course changes wouldn't be made by human beings under human control.  Again, course changes could easily be entered digitally on submarines and aircraft carriers today, but we generally steer them with yokes and big brass wheels.  Tradition.  If you don't get that, then you don't get Navy.

Second, he gets a laugh at commands being passed by voice.  Huh?  These guys are only a few feet away from each other--what are they going to do, send an email?  Voice commands are easily given, require no computer inteface, easy to understand, and easy to verify.  Using a voice link to speak to people in distant parts of the ship is also reasonable.  We have computers, email, text, and other means of electronic communicaiton on our naval vessels, but orders for immediate execution are passed by voice channel.  Why?  It's easy, clear, immediate, and provides a means for an instant acknowledgement.  Further, it doesn't require interfacing with a keyboard or similar input device--you just punch up the channel and start talking.  Why is it unreasonable to assume we would be doing that into the indefinite future--I note that virtually every science fiction book I have ever read of this type has people talking to each other over some kind of intercom.

Third, he guffaws at the idea that the ship would keep wood on board "to shore up bulkheads and build temporary compartments and fixtures."  Given that the most advanced ships in every navy in the world do just that right now, including the high-tech Virginia class attack submarines we are building and launching at this very moment, I don't see why this is so laughable.  With what are they going to use to do these things in 300 years rather than wood?  Metal, which requires special tools to cut and machine and fasten?  Polymer that is brittle at low temperatures and melts at high?  Carbon fiber that requires special tools to work and needs to be assembled with special fasteners and adhesives?  Or wood that any idiot can saw and nail together in the dark or the cold or in any other emergency?  Hmmmmm.  While it is possible that wood may not be used in the year 2315, it is not an implausible or laughable decision.

Essentially, this review writer demonstrates that he knows nothing about how things are done on high-tech naval vessels currently, so he is spectacularly ill-equipped to make any judgment about how they will be done in 300 years.  I'm also amused that the reviewer didn't finish the book.  I find it hard to imagine the kind of staggering, Olympian arrogance that it takes to write and publish for all the world to see a review of a book that you haven't even read completely, much less to offer views on the technology discussed in the book when you don't know squat about the current technology on which the book is based.  Why would someone who knows so little and who hasn't even read the whole book think that any opinion he has on the subject would ever be of any value to any other person under any circumstances.  He suffers from delusions of relevance--he thinks his opinion carries some weight when it carries none.

I've looked at this guy's reviews on Amazon.  He seems to make a habit of giving one and two star reviews to books that are rated highly by other readers, perhaps to gratify his contrarian impulses, and also of reviewing books that he hasn't finished reading.  I have reported the review as being "abusive" given that he didn't finish the book.

Oh, one more thing, there aren't any "bats" in the book.  People who can't tell bats from rats shouldn't be writing book reviews.   

Bottom line, if you don't like the book, you don't like the book.  Tastes differ.  Given readers might not like the way the plot develops, or they way the dialog is written, the writing style, the tone, or any number of other things about the book.  I get that, and dealing with that reality is part of what one goes through when one publishes a book and makes it available to literally the entire world.  Fortunately, it seems that many thousands of people love these books (given that the second book is selling as briskly as the first--telling me people like the first one and are buying the second).  But, I don't get why a reader would simply jump to the conclusion that we're stupid and that basic things like how the ship is controlled weren't the subject of serious through and mental development.  We've been thinking about this stuff for years.  I have been mentally working on the issue since 1966 and, over the decades, have even talked with pilots, submariners, aeronautical engineers, two men who worked in NASA mission control Staff Support Rooms in the Gemini and Apollo programs, "human factors engineers," and James McDivitt (Gemini-Apollo Astronaut and former head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office)(McDivitt is a U of Michigan alumnus and spoke on campus when I was a student there) about how a future large space warship would be controlled in three dimensions.  The UNANIMOUS answer was something along the lines of "I'm sure it would be something like the way submarines are controlled now" or, "given the difficulty in precisely controlling pitch, yaw, and roll with the same controller, you'd have to put two guys on two different yokes."   They all said that small fighers would probably be controlled with a stick like current fighter aircraft but that large "space battleships" would be steered like submarines are today.

So, we might be wrong about this, but the answer we came up with isn't stupid.


6 comments:

jh85 said...

Don't take it personally. I know its a little like someone calling your child an idiot especially if your child has always been praised for his intelligence, but if enough people mark the review unhelpful then no one will pay attention to it. As a matter of fact I'll go do that now

H. Paul Honsinger, Military Science Fiction Author and Retired Attorney said...

Thanks. Like I said, I understand if people don't like it--taste is taste and I don't expect to appeal to everyone. But, treated as though I am stupid or ignorant, particularly by soneone whose knowledge of the relevant subject matter clearly is far less than mine pisses me off. And, thanks for marking the review as unhelpful. I see that others have done so as well.

David Sievert said...

As I am a dinosaur and don't have twitter or facebook, I guess I am not allowed to give 5 stars on Amazon.
HERE ARE MY 5 STARS FOR BOTH BOOKS*****
I am glad for your publishing deal but so, so sad for me as I wanted to read the final book NOW>
I also want to hear the Doctor call a malingering sailor a GOMER (get out of my emergency room!!).
As a retired AF officer doing anesthesia, he is a refreshing "anti-hero".
Of course, my opinions are most likey flavored by the fact I started my AF career loading nuclear bombs on bombers. I don't think it has affected me..much.
Keep up the great work and hurry up.

Jon G. said...

As a Submariner I love these books. I was on the USS Pasadena SSN752 when she was stationed in San Diego. The parallels between these books and the submarine fleet are spooky. Instead of the young boys being sent on Easter egg hunts we sent the NUBs (non-usefull bodies) out to do the same type of thing for EXACTLY the same reasons. The drills, cleaning at the expense of training.... all of it is spot on.

H. Paul Honsinger, Military Science Fiction Author and Retired Attorney said...

Jon, thank you for your comment. I was very surprised to read about the NUBs being sent on something that very like the Easter Egg Hunts that my midshipmen go through because I thought I was inventing something completely original. I've read a bunch of books about submarines and I've got some uncles who served on them in the 60s but a lot of the procedures and training details for the Cumberland are stuff that I devised as reasonable extrapolations and interpolations. I suppose that once a person gets into the mind set of how these things are done, then the invented procedures are going to be consistent with the way things are really done, more often than not. Still, it was a surprise.

Jon G. said...

Generally training is administrated the same throughout the submarine fleet. Not every command is the same in how it is implemented. It depends on how imaginative the crew is. The mid shift is where a watch section will do anything to stay awake. They will send a nub back to the engine room to touch a power panel that he couldn't remember the name of and they will tell him to take the most circuitous route just because they can. Or send him to find a hydraulic valve that only a certain watch stander would know of and they can't ask for help. This would force the nub to get a piping tab and research it. If he didn't find it during his watch he would have to report where he found it the first thing next watch.