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LitBits: The Politics of Author/Work Separation

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I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot recently, firstly for some obvious reasons (a certain movie) and secondly because of some of the things I’ve been discussing with my students in my American Literature course.  And one of the questions that keeps coming up for me is this:  how do we know when we have crossed the line by holding a writer accountable for the controversial things they write? As an example, I am currently teaching Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Wild Meat and Bully Burgers.  This particular novel is not all that controversial, though it certainly has its issues, but her later book, Blu’s Hanging, was the cause of much controversy in 1997/1998.  The Asian American Studies National Book Award she received was later annulled after public outcry; many critics and academics have written about the incident since.[1]  One of the problems Asian American (and other) critics had with the book was its representation of Filipinos in Hawai’i (they are dirty, morally questionable, violent, and/or pedophiles) and the complete absence of indigenous Hawaiians in the novel.  Effectively, critics charged Yamanaka with failing to self-censor herself in a stereotypical context; in

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Out-Brutalling the Last Guy: “Grim and gritty, yes … but make sure it’s doing some honest work” by K.V. Johansen

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I’ve written some reasonably grim stuff. The hero of Blackdog does tend to go for the throat on the battlefield and the assassin hero in my forthcoming series, Marakand, has a past that is decidedly Not Nice (his present just gets worse). Violence, horror, fear, pain, death — these are all part of epic fantasy, which almost by definition is going to deal with war at some point along the way and will certainly throw its characters into nasty situations, both as active doers of deeds and as suffering victims. Sometimes detailed physical description is what you need to do what the story needs done. Sometimes it isn’t. When it is, the detailed physical description alone shouldn’t be the point of the exercise. I was talking about this just last night with the Spouse, and then, while procrastinating on Twitter this morning, I wandered into a conversation with Juliet E. McKenna and Tom Lloyd that touched on the same ideas. This led me to wonder if, as we see the increased brutality inflicted in books praised as some kind of standard that is supposed to be achieved, we fantasy writers don’t sometimes get the feeling that we’d

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Movie Review: Mama (2013)

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One of the things I enjoy about horror is its connection with fairy tales. Anyone who has actually read Grimm’s Fairy Tales is aware of this association. It’s one of the reasons why Andrés Muschietti’s 2013 film, Mama, attracted me. The story has a mundane, if tragic start fed to the audience in the form of a car radio news story — a dramatic stock market downturn results in the suicides of several members of a prominent investment firm. The abandoned car is parked in front of a beautiful house and there is a gunshot. The camera pans closer and the next scene is of a little girl named Victoria dressed for school. Her one-year-old sister is in her crib nearby. Their father arrives. His clothing is speckled with blood. Victoria asks, as all Fairy Tale heroines do, all the right questions, but her father, who is insane with grief, brushes her questions aside. He collects the girls and drives off into the wilderness with them. The car wrecks in the snow and they end up in an abandoned cabin, which is, naturally, haunted. Their

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Business Time: Ebooks are here to stay. Now what?

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Hello, my business-savvy Skiffy and Fanty folk. Continuing on the thread of talking about the business side of publishing, I wanted to spend today talking about digital distribution, both generally and more specifically. Ebooks are really new as far as the publishing business is concerned. They’ve been around longer than they’ve been important, and now that they’re important, things have been changing very quickly. Ebooks have gone from 19% of Unit Sales in Science Fiction in 2010 to around 43% by latest reports (my ‘now’ data is from early 2013). And these days, we don’t just read ebooks on e-ink readers or on our computers. We have tablets and mobile phones. I still prefer to read physical books when I can, but I’ve gotten great use out of my e-ink reader, thanks to the fact that it doesn’t contribute as much to eye strain (I spend a *lot* of time looking at glowing screens). Oyster is a ebook service that’s trying to apply the Netflix model to books. For a monthly subscription rate of $9.95, members can read an unlimited selection of the ebooks Oyster has in their library on iPhone and iPad. The selection is currently limited, but only in the way that Netflix’s selection was limited when it

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Mining the Genre Asteroid–Brave New World

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“Oh, Brave New World, that has such people in it”–Miranda, The Tempest, Act 5 Scene 1 Published in 1932, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a seminal dystopian novel. The time is the 26th century, although the A.D. calendar is no longer used. Instead, the year is 632 After Ford, for Henry Ford is the model, the hero, the prophet for this seeming paradise of infantile games and recreation, uncomplicated work, and of course, drug-inspired holidays from reality. Happiness is the greatest good. Into this ‘Eden’, inadvertently, comes a serpent in the form of John, a ‘savage’ from a reservation isolated from modern society, whose fateful encounter with the society of this Brave New World provides much of  the dramatic tension of the novel.

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