Xander: We just saw the zebras mating! Thank you, very exciting... Willow: It was like the Heimlich, with stripes!

'Him'


Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.

There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."


Volans - May 06, 2008 11:46:14 am PDT #5713 of 28348
move out and draw fire

OSC than I say that they see a lot of sublimated homosexual subtext in his writing.

OOOhhhh yeah. With a heaping helping of pedophila. The book about the golden-haired boy singer made me really worry if being Mormon was causing OSC to repress a little too much.

OSC was being sarcastic, saying that anyone can claim anything is plagerism. Gaiman, who I always thought did get a bit plagarized (Harry Potter is lots like Tim Hunter), seems to be taking the high road and being quite decent about it all.

I think mostly it's just that JKR is astronomically rich, and seems to be beating someone up for money. The fact that that someone is a fan makes it worse.


Typo Boy - May 06, 2008 12:24:54 pm PDT #5714 of 28348
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.

I think mostly it's just that JKR is astronomically rich, and seems to be beating someone up for money. The fact that that someone is a fan makes it worse.

Well the fan in question seems to be a major league asshole. Took a lot of peoples work and a (claimed) non-profit site and turned it into a for-profit exercise. The other end of that stick is that lexicons are one area where "Fair use" really does including really large amounts of source material. The law on this I don't know. Gaiman seems to think it a legal grey area. My position is that grey areas in copyright law should generally be settled in terms of putting things into public domain. Creative work builds on other creative work. The more we shrink the creative commons the more we slow the long term ability to progress technically or artistically.

Copyright is a lot more rigorous than in was in 1968. Real compensation for most artists has not noticeably increased . I don't think the rate of artistic and technical innovation has increased either. Not that we have not had a lot of innovation. But I don't think strengthening copyright law accelerated it in any way. (To be clear I don't think anything accelerated. We are not progressing any faster than in 1968; progress continued; the rate of change did not increase.)


megan walker - May 06, 2008 12:31:14 pm PDT #5715 of 28348
"What kind of magical sunshine and lollipop world do you live in? Because you need to be medicated."-SFist

I think mostly it's just that JKR is astronomically rich, and seems to be beating someone up for money. The fact that that someone is a fan makes it worse.

Also, the fact that she admits to having used the site herself when she was too lazy to look something up does not win her any sympathy points from me.


Ginger - May 06, 2008 6:27:30 pm PDT #5716 of 28348
"It didn't taste good. It tasted soooo horrible. It tasted like....a vodka martini." - Matilda

From Paul Krugman's blog:

I’m startled at Brad DeLong’s ignorance: he thinks there’s something new about science fiction novels where the science in question is economics.

This theme actually goes back a long way. I once stumbled across Robert Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, a very early novel that’s actually inspired by the then-popular doctrine of secular stagnation, which argued that rising savings and declining investment opportunities would lead to persistent problems in getting people to spend enough.

Oh, by the way — it’s a terrible novel, though not as bad a novel as The Internecine Project is a movie. Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes novels, on the other hand, are economic science fiction worth reading.

Update: Several commenters mentioned Issac Asimov’s Foundation novels. It’s somewhat embarrassing, but that’s how I got into economics: I wanted to be a psychohistorian when I grew up, and economics was as close as I could get.

I kind of love the idea that Krugman wanted to be a psychohistorian.


§ ita § - May 06, 2008 6:33:31 pm PDT #5717 of 28348
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

Ah, psychohistory. The idea of this was seductive to me too. But I got no follow through.


Typo Boy - May 06, 2008 6:43:34 pm PDT #5718 of 28348
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.

Paul Krugman has good taste in Science Fiction. Beyond This Horizon may have been the worst written Heinlein novel ever. The worst Heinlein novel ever Farnham's Freehold was marginally better written, but horribly offensive beyond anything else Heinlein ever wrote.


§ ita § - May 06, 2008 6:54:00 pm PDT #5719 of 28348
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

TB, I can't make that last sentence make sense.


Typo Boy - May 06, 2008 6:58:20 pm PDT #5720 of 28348
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.

Hope the editing improved it. Farnham's Freehold was better written in that the prose was marginally better, the characterization was marginally better, the plot was marginally more believable. But it had some stuff that was really offensive. Given that the prose and so on was still awful, even if not so awful as BTH, the extreme ick factor outweighed everything else, and made it the worse novel - even if it had slightly better (but still awful) prose and so on.


Laga - May 06, 2008 7:32:59 pm PDT #5721 of 28348
You should know I'm a big deal in the Resistance.

I loved Farnham's Freehold when I was in my teens and eating up everything Heinlein ever wrote. Perhaps I should revisit it. And then again maybe not.


Typo Boy - May 06, 2008 7:43:04 pm PDT #5722 of 28348
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.

I've been reluctant to go into specifics. If you like I'll email you offline.