I feel bad for the Department of Mysteries. The DA totally destroyed, like, hundreds of prophecies! What if they were important?!

I was thinking recently about how Harriet Vane is a total authorial self-insert, and yet is also totally awesome and not a Mary Sue.

My going theory is that Dorothy Sayers herself is so awesome that inserting herself into the story just carried the awesome along with her. Well, and also Harriet is flawed and fairly realistic, but I like the awesomeness theory better.

I always wanted to smack Harriet and tell her to get over her ruined self.

I feel bad for the Department of Mysteries. The DA totally destroyed, like, hundreds of prophecies! What if they were important?!

But prophecies are... I was going to claim that they were useless, except in HP, the existence of the prophecy was in fact what gave rise to the fulfillment of the prophecy. Which is also what happened in Oedipus. So perhaps the point of prophecies is to be self-fulfilling.

That said, I don't think that storing them away secretly (where only those who are mentioned in them can find out what they say) is a particularly useful thing to do. Would it have made a difference if Voldemort knew the second half of Harry's prophecy? Not really, because he knew enough to want to kill Harry. I don't think it would have changed what he did.

I kind of prefer prophecies that are just hanging out there and nobody really knows what they mean until after they're fulfilled, like Burnham Wood to Dunsinane, or No Mortal Man May Kill Me. Eowyn didn't know about the prophecy, after all.

Thinking about it, I'm wondering what the metaphorical function of a prophecy is. It's not just a narrative trope, but stands for The Knowledge Whose Meaning Is Just Out of Grasp. In a way it's sort of crystalizing the narrative process which is driven by What Happens Next. The prophecy is sort of the plot development just over the horizon.

Terrance Rafferty, who does a terrible job of writing about sf in the NY Times, writes about the state of zombie literature [link] I don't think he read the right books, which is par for the course.

Also, everyone knows zombies arose in response to Fox News.

My friend's book is in that! That being The Reapers are the Angels.

Before I went to go work on the ship, my friend gave me her copy of A Soldier of the Great War to borrow, as I'd liked Winter's Tale so much. I didn't have a lot of time to read on the ship, and it was a LOT of book to get through, so it didn't become a top priority.

I finally finished it! I didn't love it quite as much as I loved Winter's Tale, but wow, Mark Helprin can certainly tell a story.

Has anyone else read it?

Also, everyone knows zombies arose in response to Fox News.

I hadn't really thought about it like that, but you're right!

Real life places that inspired literary classics.