The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Kylni:

A bit belated, but thank you everyone, and particularly Barbara Gordon for help with the book identification! Two hours is pretty impressive.

I've also bookmarked all those search sites for future reference. I'm sure they'll come in handy.

You have no idea how much my mind is eased by knowing what that book is, though. All these years, some corner of my brain was distraught...

I know of no better place than a Making Light Open Thread to call for help identifying a SF-ish book, so here goes:

The book in question is children's or YA book. Key bits of the plot:

There were colored rings that floated around everywhere - large enough that they a person could walk through them. They would teleport you somewhere else, and possibly transform you into some form that would find the environment there hospitable. Some of these rings would take you down the street, some to a different planet. The color was a hint as to the type of place - blue and green were pretty safe; a red ring took them to a tiny bubble of safety on a planet of lye-mud. There were black rings that were mysterious.

Most people couldn't see or use these rings, and possibly some who could couldn't see the colors. The protagonist could, of course, and also could possibly control the ring's movement to some extent. He had a group of friends that could see them too, and I'm fairly certain they had adventures.

At some point they were kidnapped(?) and stranded on an island that rings didn't come by, though they saw flashes of them in the distance. Then they found a black ring underwater, farther down than they could dive and still get back to the surface.

I probably read this book in the early-mid 90's, and I've tried without success to identify it a few times since then. However, an acquaintance of mine just asked if anyone knew about it, and between us we managed to come up with the above plot bits, which is a lot more than I've managed before. But of course, no title. She would have read it '80-82ish, and she says she has the impression it was older.

Surely someone here can help us out?

Also, it must be getting late, because my close-reading skills are suffering. I did re-skim the original post to make sure it wasn't going to look like I was insulting anyone, and I caught "Fanfiction" in the title and a couple of uses of "fanfic," though yes, the two-word version is in there as well.

And looking at FicWad again, while the header says what I stated above, just below that it says "fanfiction and original fiction."

Maybe it's a matter of context?

In any case, I better get to bed, before I fail at this conversation any further.

I didn't mean it in a negative way. I just mean that everyone I know who writes fanfiction regularly - at least in the anime/game part of fandom, which is where I hang out, though I don't remember noticing major differences in my forays into TV fandom - says "fanfic" habitually (or occasionally just "fic", or "fanfiction" if they're feeling elucidative). And I just noticed the other day when talking to a non-fanfic-writer friend that it looked odd when he spelled it "fan fiction."

And I feel like any archive run by actual authors, or people who interact with fanfic authors on a regular basis, would have used the compound word. That's all.

...And I may just be completely insane anyway, as it looks like my archive of choice when I'm not on LJ, FicWad, says "fan fiction," though it may be for parallelism - "original and fan fiction."

So really I may not have a point at all! Just an observation of dubious value.

Maybe I'm the only one, but after several years in fandom, anyone who not only spells "fan fiction" out, but uses a space (As FanLib does both on their site and in their ad), immediately screams "not in fandom" to me.

I suspect that any audience they gain is not going to be people who are in fandom now, but rather new people who stumble across it. This depresses me, because these people will then think that it is representative, while most anyone who writes quality fiction is likely going to stay the hell away.

Ran quite a few pieces of my fanfiction, they all came out decidedly male. Was thinking, like several people above, "oh, well, I always come out male on these things."

Then I realized everything I'd stuck in was either slash fic or otherwise from a male PoV, so I stuck in a few pieces from a female PoV, and they all came out definitely female. Which is interesting, since I really don't notice my voice being that much different between them.

My blog posts, on the other hand, go both ways, seemingly based on my mood. *shrug* I may have to go with the "works much better for fiction than non" thing... except that I don't think PoV was exactly what they were going for?

In the line of fantasy storytelling, the first thing that comes to mind to me is Death Note (anime and manga).

The premise is that the protagonist, Light, a genius student, acquires a notebook which has the power to kill anyone whose name it written in it. He eventually decides to use it to 'cleanse' the world of criminals. (Who needs to be killed is decided by him, of course.)

Of course, it quickly becomes clear that Light is a deeply creepy sociopath with a god complex. But I was poking around at some forums for a translation group and was shocked to see a thread titled, "Are Light's actions just?" Only the first few episodes of the anime were out, and he hadn't he'd killed any really innocent people yet. But it was still disturbing to see that there was even the question.

Interestingly, the genius detective who goes after Light uses fairly immoral methods as well - using a criminal as bait for Light to kill, unconstitutionally bugging his house, and eventually torture.

Really interesting stuff, and I think the way people react to it can say a lot.

Having studied at Berkeley in the past decade, I can tell you that the campanile playlist is eclectic, to say the least.

Having studied at Berkeley in the past week, I can second that. They've played the Beatles' "When I'm 64" this semester, for sure.

One of my friends took the campanile playing class her freshman year. It was pretty cool.

I can tell you they play at noon at 6pm. You may be right about 8am, too, but in my three years here so far I believe I've managed to avoid ever being on campus that early.

Answers.com appears to have an interesting discussion of the topic in their slash fiction article. Lots of good info. In particular:

Due to increasing population and prevalence of slash on the internet in recent years, some have begun to use "slash" as a generic term for any erotic fan fiction, whether it describes heterosexual or homosexual relationships. This has sparked mild concern among writers of heterosexual fan fiction. This concern is sometimes based in bigotry and intolerance of homosexuality, and manifests itself as offense at the notion of being compared to homosexual subject matter. It has also caused concern for slash writers who believe, that while it can be erotic, slash is not by definition so, and believe that defining erotic fic alone as slash takes the word away from all ages suitable homoromantic fanfic, and may cause confusion, when the quite unambiguous words 'erotica', 'adult', and 'porn' already exist.

Which implies that 'slash' as a designator for all erotic fiction is actually a recent phenomenon.

Paula Helm Murray:

Arg, that's horrible. Totally aside from the fact that slash and explicit content are things where you definitely should be told what you're getting into, to use her art in that way without telling her is just... callous and nasty. If you ever get your hands on a time machine, I'll join you in the smacking.

John M. Ford:

The thing is, I've been in online slash fandom for four or five years now, and I've never seen 'slash' used to mean anything but "based around a homosexual relationship, sexual or not, 'canon' or not."

It is, of course, possible that I've just managed to avoid everyone who uses it any other way; but it seems unlikely. It's also possible that that's just how the term has settled in recent years - it's been around since the '70's, so maybe it had slightly different connotations then. But still - four or five years seems enough time to consider it the current official usage.

People use '/' for writing pairings of any kind, of course, but the term 'slash' is different. (As a side note - I've also never seen anything used to distinguish between pairings which are present in the source work and those that aren't - the latter is more popular to write, of course, but there's not any notation difference I've ever seen.)

There is, I suppose, a possibility that I've been overly influenced by the anime fandom term, 'yaoi,' which has slightly different connotations. (Another fun thing anime fandom does occasionally is use '+' or 'x' instead of '/', with '+' implying affection/a relationship and 'x' implying actual sex. [This is particularly fun in Gundam Wing fandom, where character names are abbreviated as numbers - "You'll never look at multiplication tables the same way again!"])

Still, I'd be interested to see any example of usage of the term 'slash' (particularly in the past 5ish years) that differs from what I mentioned above.

Also: "Virgule fiction" made me snicker.

James D. Macdonald:

Heh. Alright - if it makes you feel better, I picked his quote because of the explicitness of his misunderstanding, rather than any particular esteem I have for him personally. (Which I wouldn't feel qualified to comment on, anyway.)

"Intelligent and interested" was a general statement meant to make it clear that I wasn't implying that everyone with an incorrect conception was just being obtuse or deliberately ignorant.

I'm still relatively new here, so I don't want to spark any conflict inadvertently...

So, the most recent post on scamming agents managed to prompt me to look at that list of things TNH's said about writing. I made my way back to the entry on fanfiction. I'd read it before (months ago, when I first discovered Making Light and was trawling the archives as an amazing source of interesting, insightful things to read) but I found it interesting to look over again. I'm in fandom, and I greatly appreciated the post and the discussion in the comments, then as now.

However, rereading bits of it, I'm reminded of the thing that nagged at me when I was reading it the first time. That is, that people in the discussion seemed to be using two different definitions of slash fanfiction. The two categories overlap, but they're definitely not the same. They are:

1) Fanfiction involving explicit sex scenes; and
2) Fanfiction involving a male/male relationship.

Slash is definitely defined as (2), there's no question about it. No one knows why. (Okay, I can relate the classic story of how it started with Kirk/Spock; but that doesn't explain why it's only used for male homosexual relationships. People write, say, Buffy/Angel as well. But it's not called slash.)

Slash can have graphic sex or not. So can femslash, the slightly less original term for the female equivalent. So can het, the term used for heterosexual relationships if you're moving in circles where that's not assumed to be the default.

There are certainly issues to be discussed in response to both homosexual relationships and explicit sex in fanfiction, but they're not the same issues, and calling the latter 'slash' only confuses the issue.

It's really an exercise in switching your mental conceptions back and forth to read through the comments to that thread.

On the one hand, you've got fandom people using the terminology with the ease they've become accustomed to - Ellen Fremedon says "there is a lot of badly written, poorly motivated slash *and hetfic*" - and on the other hand you've got non-fandom people, intelligent and interested but mistaken about what 'slash' means. Jonathan Vos Post explicitly mentions "purely homosexual slash and purely heterosexual slash," but the way others phrase their statements implies they have the same idea.

Nowhere that I can see was the definition clarified, which I find somewhat mind boggling. Hopefully someone who was a regular at the time can tell me that I just missed it?

[Yes, this post is very out of left field. But that's what open threads are for, right?]

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