They say that it's a mistake to reply to critics, but editor Lou Anders has a long post on the Pyr blog thinking about some issues raised by Norman Spinrad in a book-review column from the October/November Asimov's.

For me, I'm already happy calling River of Gods a masterpiece, but of course we will need to see what the future thinks of it.

And I don't think there's anyone who actually likes the idea of chopping books into segments (like sausage) for publication, but sometimes it's the only thing that makes economic sense. Of course. I can afford to be sanguine about it, since the SFBC has a major line in sticking those big books back together. (So, thinking about it some more, it might actually be in my interest to promote book-fragments for trade publishers, since it helps me out. Hmm. Intriguing....)