By Ersatz Culture: Goodreads users attempting to rate Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, the recent winner of the 2024 Booker Prize are seeing the following error message:
Rating this book temporarily unavailable
This book has temporary limitations on submitting ratings and reviews. This may be because we’ve detected unusual behavior that doesn’t follow our review guidelines.
Social media posts (Bluesky, Twitter) indicate that this has been the case for at least a couple of days, with negative reviews due to the fact that the book has Russian characters apparently the cause.
From Bluesky:
From Twitter:
Examples of such reviews are below.
A glance at the statistics page for this book shows that the ratings and reviews (third and fourth columns in the table) for this book stopped incrementing for the most part around the 14th, with the preceding two days having greater than normal activity, but not massively so, especially given that both the Booker winner and Goodreads Choice nominee announcements occurred on the 12th.
[Thanks to Prograft on Weibo, the source of this story.]
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I’m sure making passive aggressive comments on a book review site will really make Putin and the oligarchs of the world really rethink their fascist strategies
:rolleyes:
Keyboard warriors are losers.
So Orbital is getting review bombed by individuals with an agenda that think anyone who writes a sympathetic character is a bad person indeed. Stupid idiots. Genre fiction has any number of Russian characters such as Susan Ivanova on Babylon 5. Will they now say that JMS is favoring the Russians because he wrote her into that series?
Good grief!
Also, to Reese, this is not the first time reviews have been disabled. They are often disabled when people pile on a book because of author behavior. It’s not a free speech issue. Users can still post their reviews on a blog or other personal site.
Aren they going to attack “Shadow and Bone” for its Russian influences next?
This, unfortunately, is what results when people can no longer be bothered to distinguish between the author and the fictional characters they create. Orwell gave us Winston Smith in 1984, but the dominant protagonist in Animal Farm is Napoleon.
Steve Green says This, unfortunately, is what results when people can no longer be bothered to distinguish between the author and the fictional characters they create.
I can’t remember it precisely but there’s a preface to a story by Niven in which he talks about a fan saying that he must have done something awful, maybe a murder, as in the story he described it ever so well.
Look on the bright side: the protagonist could have been an Israeli. Just imagine the things that would be said about that!
In the 1960s, Star Trek gave us Pavel Chekhov anhd Raumpatrouille Orion gave us Tamara Jagellowsk and no one complained. In the 1970s, the Marvel gave us Colossus and Black Widow (theoretically a 1960s character, but she was a villainess first) and no one complained.
But in 2024, we cannot have a sympathetic Russian character (or Israeli character) without attracting the sort of trolls who are offended by anything that does not demonise an entire nation.
I’m not sure what the commentary here is about. Is it either 1) objecting to Goodreads decision or 2) objecting to Ukrainian “trolls”?
If the first, I would agree. If the second, well …
If you are surprised by the violent reaction perhaps you don’t follow what’s happening in Ukraine right now. None of the quotes above are exaggerated or sensationalized. Russia is waging a war of terror and a war of extermination on the Ukrainian people. If you suffer sleep deprivation from nightly air raid sirens, if your husband has come home without a leg, if your son or daughter comes home in a bag, if your grandmother had to be dug out of the rubble of a once apartment building … you too might be somewhat sensitive to the portrayal of a fictional character waxing poetic about the country who believes you shouldn’t exist.
As far as current sympathetic depictions of Russians and Russia is concerned, perhaps “too soon” is an apt phrase.
As a minor point here, I’d also like to say that very often in Western literature Russian characters, Pavel Chekhov for instance, and Russian culture, Shadow and Bone, are lazily and gratuitously used. Any popular success is often due to the reading public’s unfamiliarity and, I dare say, ignorance of the history and culture of Eastern Europe. It is Edward Said’s “Orientalism” in a slightly different context.
“There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.” – Heinlein. Or Niven. Or Stirling. I’ve seen it attributed to all three.
Quatermain says “There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.” – Heinlein. Or Niven. Or Stirling. I’ve seen it attributed to all three.
Oh so true.
I’m very, very fond of Stirling’s Peshawar Lancers but I never assumed that it reflected his political beliefs.
Cat Eldridge: “I’m very, very fond of Stirling’s Peshawar Lancers but I never assumed that it reflected his political beliefs.”
On the other hand, I recall once reviewing a collection of short stories by a South American writer which was full of vile and grotesquely violent sexual imagery, and being absolutely certain these were coming straight from the author’s ‘heart’. The fact that he apparently disappeared in rather odd circumstances did support that theory.
Based on the criteria that Michael Burianyk gives above, very few countries in the world would be eligible to have a character reminisce fondly about them. The United States? Slavery and genocide. Most of Europe: ethnic cleansing, slavery, etc. Name a country that doesn’t have blood on its hands and I won’t believe you.
The war in Ukraine is a pointless tragedy, and Ukrainians are understandably bitter, but demanding that everyone else dehumanize the Russians collectively is absurd.
Cat:
Right? I fuckin’ love that book. I wish he had had written more in that universe instead of the Draka, which always seemed to be largely pointless edgelord nihilism and Gor pastiches. And as a bonus, the depiction of Russians in that universe (the Lancerverse) is enough to satisfy even the more ardent Ukrainian partisan.
According to The Guardian, “Orbital” has now gone to the top of the UK’s bestseller lists:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/20/samantha-harveys-booker-winning-orbital-tops-uk-bestseller-list
I am open to the possibility that some of the negative reviews are from folks generally trolling, just enjoying the fun of getting people worked up.
Quatermain exclaims Right? I fuckin’ love that book. I wish he had had written more in that universe instead of the Draka, which always seemed to be largely pointless edgelord nihilism and Gor pastiches. And as a bonus, the depiction of Russians in that universe (the Lancerverse) is enough to satisfy even the more ardent Ukrainian partisan.
Yeah I’d like to seen more but it wasn’t to be. If you listen to audiobooks, the narrated version voiced by Shaun Grindell is quite splendid.
There’s one additional story set there, “Shikari in Galveston”, published in Turtledove’s Worlds That Weren’t anthology but as the title tells you it isn’t set in India.
The possibility that some negative reviews are from trolls enjoying riling everyone up rather misses the whole point. As far as everyone else having their own grievances – well, you haven’t noticed?
The pont is that expecting Ukrainians, at this time, to graciously humanize a people who gleefully fulfil the orders of a mad wannabe emperor to exterminate them is naive at best.
For what it’s worth, the lockdown has been lifted today. Is it related to this post?
It seems that NO ratings or reviews have been removed, if we compare the (live) data breakdown against the snapshot in this post.
I dislike blanket condemnations of the citizens of an entire country, regardless which country it is. Vladimir Putin is a war criminal and a piece of shit, but that doesn’t mean every Russian citizen is a bad person.
I also understand that Ukrainians might not want to read about a sympathetic portrayal of a Russian person right now. However, it’s possible to just not read a book, if you find it offensive. Never mind that I’m pretty sure that a lot of the people leaving negative reviews on Goodreads about Orbital have never read the book, but somehow assume that review bombing a book by a British writer will really stick it to Putin.
I’m also fully aware that most Russian characters in Cold War era western pop culture like Pavel Chekhov or Tamara Jagellowsk or Colossus or Black Widow were clichés. That was always pretty obvious to me, especially considering a lot of these characters behaved like clichés and had cliched names that didn’t even follow Russian naming conventions. Not to mention that the people who created these characters clearly had no idea that the Soviet Union did not equal Russia.
However, in the middle of the Cold War, when there was a genuine risk of the Soviet Union nuking the US and western Europe, it was still possible to include sympathetic Russian characters, cliched as they were, in western pop culture alongside the numerous Russian villains that also permeated western pop culture at the time and were equally cliched. Now, doing the same thing will get you review bombed.
Cora Buhlert on November 20, 2024 at 11:12 pm said:
“Vladimir Putin is a war criminal and a piece of shit, but that doesn’t mean every Russian citizen is a bad person.”
A friend of mine in Kyiv just had his daughter born yesterday. While the air raid sirens are going off tonight, and they’re all huddling together in a bomb shelter or in the middle rooms of their apartment, I’m going to send him a message and tell him that the missile commanders, drone controllers and bomber pilots are not bad people and that he should have a more nuanced view of russian history and culture.
Ok, we have very different points of view on this. I will stop and, if you like, you can have the last word. I’ve had mine.
Michael Burianyk: Your sarcastic response brings me around to the conclusion that despite my personal support for Ukraine in items posted to this blog, if Trump (who I didn’t vote for) comes into office and cuts the legs from under U.S. support for Ukraine, as some suspect will happen, then I will be instantly added to your Bad Person list because I am a U.S. citizen. You being no fan of nuance or such.
My apologies. I didn’t intend to be sarcastic. I am very close to this issue and obviously look at it in different ways than most here. I will shut up.