What I Learned from the Worst Novelist in the English Language
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
Since Burrows already had some experience running against the establishment (his university administration) I expect that he was not particularly fazed by the negative review.
I suspect some of these people are bad faith in their criticisms simply because they're bitter their own work didn't take off.
https://i.imgur.com/M1m5LJX.png
yikes
> With nearly every Shongairi base on Earth destroyed, Thikair orders his remaining forces off the planet, while planning to outright destroy Earth from orbit. However, as the last fleeing units reach their ships, the Shongairi dreadnoughts suddenly destroy the rest of the warships, all but one. Thikair is confronted on his own ship by same enemy that had destroyed the bases and smashed his fleet: vampires, who need no air to breathe, and can travel as mist.
> Their leader, Mircea Basarab, is actually the immortal Vlad the Impaler, whom humans remember as Dracula. He and his kind have been hibernating, and kept hidden before the Shongairi's arrival forced them to "protect" the people of Earth by creating more vampires and build an army to eliminate the Shongairi. Thikair is told that the hijacked dreadnoughts are being sent to each of the Shongairi worlds to destroy their Empire. Thikair is slain by one of the vampires, Stephen Buchevsky, whose human family was killed by the initial bombardment. Humanity now possesses Shongairi and Hegemony technology from the Shongairi industrial ships, and is fully united under the newly established Terran Empire, becoming a mighty adversary to the Hegemony which had so casually sent the invaders against and innocent and unsuspecting world.
Haha!
You know, Cixin won the Hugo award? This fact alone should tell you that he cannot be the worst, not even close. A lot of people enjoyed his novels. You could argue that he's over rated and that's about that.
TBP is the worst novel I've ever read. Even his big ideas are terrible and absurd.
I doubt there's a single unique absolute worst novelist. But self-publishing has allowed people with no talent for English, never mind for fiction, to hawk their efforts through the Kindle Store and Wattpad.
The results vary from "That was... not great" to "OMGWTAF."
The article includes Gene Weingarten's demeaning characterisation to get clicks. That wouldn't be necessary if Barrett Swanson had listened to his better instincts, and built on his portrait of Robert Burrows as an earnest man of letters. Instead, he had a bet each way, perpetuating Gene Weingarten's cruel ruse as a straw man, and negating it.
Are you saying that in your way of thinking, newsworthiness only arises from a false, disparaging accusation?
It seems like a serious attempt to inform us about the humanity and abilities of Robert Burrows. The reason it tends more towards clickbait than necessary is obvious from the headline:
What I Learned From the Worst Novelist in the English Language
If the article was more of an attempt to rehabilitate Robert Burrows, who the author visited on his death bed to get the story, the headline might more candidly have been written as:
What I Learned From the "Worst Novelist in the English Language"
Swanson does encapsulate the insult in inverted commas, but not until para 19, when he writes:
There was something regal, something monumental, in his bearing, and though I knew otherwise, I found myself thinking, “There he is. The worst novelist in the English language.”
Was it really necessary, or beneficial to share that thought, if the point of the article is to debunk the insult?
You didn't even have to stretch for a charitable interpretation: the surface reading was perfectly decent. Instead you either thought they were making some ludicrous generalization about newsworthiness for all time, or found it rhetorically useful to seem to think that. In either case your comment provided negative value.