Someone is Wrong on the Internet, and It's Me!

One word can change everything.

Take, for instance, my latest Sandman Meditations column at Gestalt Mash. It now begins with this note:

UPDATE: A portion of this essay is based on a misreading. Not just a questionable interpretation or one of my more idiosyncratic reveries — no, literally a misreading, and one I did not learn about until after my mistake was already public. Please see the note at the end.

As you'll see if you go and read the piece, my eyes were blind to the word "it" in a speech bubble. A little word, not the sort you might expect to cause major problems, a simple pronoun, no big deal.

But the presence or absence of that it determines the meaning not just of some events, but of the motivations of the protagonist of the story.

This is further confirmation of Mark Twain's great insight that "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning."

When the mistake was pointed out to me, my first reaction was, "No! It's not possible! I'm right, dammit!" I grabbed Fables & Reflections and went straight to the page where I knew the evidence of my righteousness waited. I noted the page and panel number, I started typing the exact words in the speech bubble ... and then saw it. Literally. It.

And then I laughed.

Because if you're going to be wrong in public, it's good to be flagrantly, obviously, and incontrovertibly wrong. That's my motto. I should write it on a t-shirt.

Or maybe I could write something simpler on a t-shirt: "It matters."

How to Be Proved Wrong

Now and then, those of us who write book reviews let our guard down and make generalized statements that could be proved wrong with a single exception. Sometimes we buffer such statements with qualifiers that technically relieve them of being pure generalizations, but I doubt many readers are fooled.

For instance, last year I wrote a somewhat less than positive review of Nisi Shawl's short story collection Filter House. I even said this:

While I find it easy to believe readers will experience Shawl's stories in different ways -- such is the case with any basically competent fiction -- I cannot imagine how a reader who is sensitive to literature's capabilities and possibilities could possibly say these stories offer much of a performance.

I certainly made a point of highlighting my subjectivity here: "I cannot imagine how...", but still. The intent is clear. I spent most of the review saying, in one way or another, that this book seemed to me the epitome of mediocre, and I tried to imply that it's inconceivable (INCONCEIVABLE!) that anyone would passionately disagree with such a rational perspective.

The greater the claims, the harder they fall... Within days, I had learned that Samuel Delany thought Filter House one of the best collections of science fiction stories published in the last decade or so. Delany and I have fairly different taste in fiction, but I deeply respect his readings of things, and even if I can't share his enthusiasm for a certain text, I've never felt like I couldn't understand what sparked and fueled that enthusiasm.

And now Filter House has been listed as one of the 7 best SF/Fantasy/Horror books of the year by Publisher's Weekly, and it has won a Tiptree Award.

While I will admit I still don't understand the acclaim, I have to say I was completely and utterly wrong -- dramatically, astoundingly, INCONCEIVABLY! wrong -- in thinking that it was an impossible book to see as an example of excellence. Plenty of very smart and sensitive readers have found it to be exactly that.