It’s hardly fair to call EY Egan’s ‘biggest fan’, but this is nonetheless amusing. The actual disrecommendation for the book was a little hard to find buried in all the clever analysis:
the novel never delivers the emotional impact that it promises. Ned Beauman in SFX calls it a “tepid meditation on fatherhood and Middle Eastern democracy,” which is a fair summary. Egan’s characterisation is simply not good enough to support the story he wants to tell.
I based this description on Yudkowsky’s comments here, where he says of Permutation City, “This is simply the best science-fiction book ever written [...] It is, in short, my all-time favorite.”
I’m not sure what use “biggest fan” would have as a term, if it meant that. We would rarely ever want to look at or talk about the biggest fans of almost anything. To like something more than anyone else, you have to be weird. Per The Winner’s Curse, to get to the top, they’ll usually need to have made a mistake somewhere in their estimation of it, to like it a bit more than anyone should.
Perhaps if “fandom” should come to mean “understanding”. You do have to like something quite a bit to come to understand it very well (though many will claim to understand a thing they dislike better than the people who like it, they are generally recognisably wrong)
It’s hardly fair to call EY Egan’s ‘biggest fan’, but this is nonetheless amusing. The actual disrecommendation for the book was a little hard to find buried in all the clever analysis:
I based this description on Yudkowsky’s comments here, where he says of Permutation City, “This is simply the best science-fiction book ever written [...] It is, in short, my all-time favorite.”
That makes Egan the thing Yudkowsky is the biggest fan of. It does not make Yudkowsky to be Egan’s biggest fan.
“Biggest fan” here is hyperbole for “a very big fan”.
I’m not sure what use “biggest fan” would have as a term, if it meant that. We would rarely ever want to look at or talk about the biggest fans of almost anything. To like something more than anyone else, you have to be weird. Per The Winner’s Curse, to get to the top, they’ll usually need to have made a mistake somewhere in their estimation of it, to like it a bit more than anyone should.
Perhaps if “fandom” should come to mean “understanding”. You do have to like something quite a bit to come to understand it very well (though many will claim to understand a thing they dislike better than the people who like it, they are generally recognisably wrong)