Reviewers on Reviewing: Positivity, Negativity or the Secret Third Thing (Criticism)

In 2025, ARB contributor Roseanna Pendlebury arranged a series of roundtables with SFF reviewers, originally intended for Nerds of a Feather. For some involved publishing reasons, this wound up being a better fit at ARB, and so, thanks to Roseanna & the roundtable participants, we are able to present these four discussions. Hopefully more to come in the future! These discussions have been lightly edited for clarity. * * * Roseanna Pendlebury: Next up in our Reviewers on Reviewing project we are talking to Runalong Womble, Forestofglory, Molly Templeton, and Jake Casella Brookins. All of them have a wealth of experience in reviewing and criticism across a wide variety of venues, genres and media, and today we will hopefully draw on that to discuss what is a recurring hot button issue in SFF criticism: negativity. The core question for this roundtable is how do you balance positivity and negativity in your writing, what benefits and drawbacks are there to different approaches, what do…