I'm a bit surprised at some of the replies here, especially the ones that seem to support Davis. I mean:
- Someone writes a book
- Someone else writes a harsh review
- The author files a formal ethics complaint against the reviewer
...and some people here support the
author in that conflict?
I thought it was a truth universially acknowledged that reviews are for readers, not for authors, and that it's extremely bad form for an author to complain about negative reviews (no matter how (un)reasonable those reviews are), and even worse to try to punish the reviewer.
Frankly, the fact that the ad hoc ethics committee of RWA (not to be confused with the normal etichs committee, which was bypassed in this case) didn't dismiss that complaint outright, is a pretty good indication that something's rotten in the board of RWA.
I'm also surprised that some of you seem to think that if a book describes a racist society, the book must necessarily be racist. That's not a very well thought out stance, to put it mildly. In "Gone with the wind" slaves are happy, and after the civil war, good slaves stay with their former owners, while bad slaves are uppity at best, and criminal at worst, resulting in the white gentlemen having to form KKK to defend the white ladies. That's light years away from the depiction in books with more realistic descriptions of the same time period, like "Roots", "Kindred", or "Dread Nation", to take a few.