Just saw Itzkoff's most recent sf review in the New York Times, in which he makes the bold and controversial claim that "Dune" was really good but the stuff Herbert's son has written isn't so good.

In any case, something did hit me. I'd thought so before, and a quick search through his earlier archived columns during his very brief run so far as NYT sf reviewer confirms it.

Itzkoff has praised lots of dead, classic writers, and been generally down on various living writers (indeed, his first column after taking over the spot was widely criticized for making negative generalizations about the state of the field), but all of the living, working sf writers who he's praised in his handful of columns to date--and I do mean literally every single one of them--have one thing in common that I can tell:

They're all Clarion West graduates.

Unless I've missed ones, the currently active writers whose stuff he's written positive reviews of are David Marusek, Christopher Rowe, Benjamin Rosenbaum and Justina Robson. Not a non-Clarionite or even a Clarion East grad in the lot of them.

That's just plain weird.

So....what's going on there? Do Neile and Leslie have a Dave Itzkoff voodoo doll somewhere? Or maybe incriminating photos of some kind they're blackmailing him with? Is "Dave Itzkoff" a psuedonym for someone in the CW community?

Inquiring minds want to know.