I did not know who the Chartists were until a few years ago. From your difficulty believing in James' political views, I assumed that it was because you were not aware that there was a real historical group that held similar ones. Sorry about that. I didn't mean it as an insult, and it never occurred to me that you would take it as one.
Also, I'm assuming lots of people are following this discussion, and that they do not all know about the Chartists. Others have been commenting on it, and some of them haven't read the book. I don't assume that they all know about a fairly obscure, depending on your nationality, historical political movement. Hence, the link.
Anyone who doesn't think FIRE AND HEMLOCK, THE HOMEWARD BOUNDERS, WITCH WEEK, and CHARMED LIFE are among the best fantasy novels ever written, not to mention Diana Wynne Jones' best, has clearly lost their critical faculties. ;)
http://www.livejournal.com/users/calimac/21339.html#cutid1
First off, I'm not trying to force you to like F & N. You obviously don't. I'm only pointing out that people can legitimately disagree about the matters which you seem to feel that no reasonable person can reasonably disagree with you on.
Regarding capitalization, conversations, and discussions of sex, it's fine to agree to disagree, but you cannot claim that no one has answered your objections when both I and Sherwood Smith have offered extensive evidence to the contrary. You can say that you continue to disagree, but you can't say that no one has answered them.
Regarding James' politics, I still don't see why you think it's so implausible that a member of the upper class could be a Chartist. A character in a novel does not have to be an average representative of his social group, he just has to be _possible_.
As for the claim that if anything is unusual about a character, it should be explained early and often, I disagree. James is clearly an unusual person from the get-go, so if he has unusual politics, I do not need the author to immediately tell me why. I would assume that there will be an explanation when one would come up naturally, and in fact, there is. Also, what specific political positions does James hold which strike you as implausible for a Chartist?
Regarding the use of first names among friends who are not close relatives, I quote from LAHORE TO LUCKNOW: THE INDIAN MUTINY JOURNAL OF ARTHUR MOFFAT LANG, selected for being the closest to my reach and for no other reason.
"15 February, Jalalabad. Yesterday morning I walked with Taylor and Elliot Brownlow from Bani to Alam Bagh. We found the Engineers encamped on the right near Jalalabad. I found myself again amonst the jolly old set of Engineer officers. Immediately after breakfast Elliot and I walked over to Outram's headquarters and found Walter who was delighted to see us and came out to show us the front."
Elliot and Walter are Lang's friends, so he calls them by their first names. Taylor's just a fellow officer, so he's called by his last name.
James was a member of the Chartists, a radical political group, and that's where he came by his radical opinions. I'm not sure how much this comes up in the first 90 pages, but it's of crucial importance to the plot by the halfway point, at least.
The Chartists were a real group, by the way.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/protest_reform/chartist_01.shtml
First of all, I would a thousand times more have a beautifully written and convincing novel that isn't actually historically accurate or which is but raises the hackles of some readers by going against their preconceptions of what a time was really like, than one which is less well written but sticks grimly to what is widely believed to be true about the period.
It's fine if you don't like F & N or you don't think it's accurate, but it's ridiculous and insulting to say that no one can like it with their critical faculties intact.
I don't know much about England per se at the time period that F& N is set in, but I've read literally shelf-fulls of memoirs and diaries and letters by English people in India at or around that time, and nothing in F & N set off my "historically inaccurate" alarms. The style is very congruent with my own reading.
In fact, while it may be implausible for people to recount extremely detailed conversations in letters and diaries _as they actually occurred_, I assure you that diarists often did recreate dialogue from memory. At least, in India they did.
Regarding James, it is essential to James' character and to the plot that he is a member of a radical political group, and therefore it is quite plausible that he would have radical opinions.
As to the objections to him a) having sex with women outside of marriage, and b) writing about it, I don't find either of those to be implausible. Just because birth control was, at the very least, unreliable does not mean that nobody had sex outside of marriage, or affairs while married. Indeed, marriage is a perfect cover for getting pregnant.
Yes, sex could have serious consequences, and in many countries it still does. Does that stop people from having unprotected sex? Not at all. Is it possible to have sex without doing the sort of thing that could cause a pregnancy? Absolutely.
As for his (non-explicit) letter about it, Sherwood's point about people having their letters burned after their death also suggests to me that people might write about such things, and that such letters would be unlikely to ever circulate beyond their recipient. In addition, I think her point about Byron is perfectly valid; at any rate, the fact that James mentioned having sex, and wrote of it in a manner which struck me as period-appropriate, didn't cause my suspension of disbelief to so much as quiver.
The reason the children's book you cite are expensive is because they're picture books. Some of them also have page cut-outs and other non-standard formats. Picture books are more expensive than books without full-color pictures because pictures are more expensive to reproduce than prose. In a sense, they _are_ art books.
As for PAT THE BUNNY, not only is it a picture book, it's a "touch" book, with all sorts of different textures reproduced. Again, this format is more expensive to produce than a book made of nothing but paper, and that's why it's priced the way it is.
Finally, picture books are often good investments in terms of the time spent enjoying them to price ratio, because they're for very young children who, if they like them, will make their parents read them aloud every night for months on end.
Calimac, why don't you repost the arguments you made in your LJ here, so people can answer them here? It's a pain in the neck to flip back and forth, and confusing to anyone who's only reading here.
I think what Abigail might be getting at when she says that Harry Potter could be told as a story without the fantasy elements is that the plot is more similar to the basic boarding school story-- a boy or girl arrives at boarding school, makes friends, plays sports, has a conflict with a teacher and another student, optionally defeats an evil plot or saves someone's life, and then comes back the next year to do it all over again-- than to plots more common in fantasy, such as those structured around a quest or war or revolution.
However, that just makes Harry Potter a cross-genre series, similar to other fantasies which borrow their basic plots from mysteries or Mafia stories or romances. To rewrite it as a non-fantasy boarding school series would require re-plotting the whole story and rewriting almost every single sentence-- as much effort as it would take to remove the boarding school elements and rewrite it as an urban fantasy in which there is no Hogwarts.
Americans did not invent colonialism, and it's very much an issue in China Mieville's latest book, THE IRON COUNCIL.
I don't think the social concerns of fantasy are limited to the three you mention. FREEDOM AND NECESSITY (a brilliant and wonderful novel) is largely about the responsibility of activists in a corrupt society (that's not at all the only thing it's about); so is THE IRON COUNCIL.
You seem to lump gender roles and feminism into the category of what I would call fantasy of manners, but they are addressed in a completely different way and context in books by, say, Lois Bujold, Suzy McKee Charnas, Laurie Marks, or Tamora Pierce.
Where does Philip Pullman fit into your schema? Or Gene Wolfe? What about the social liberalism of many authors of urban fantasy, like Charles de Lint? How about British writers other than China, like Iain Banks or M. John Harrison or Mary Gentle, whose RATS AND GARGOYLES reads much like a precursor to PERDIDO STREET STATION?
Melissa, I'm Jewish (and very typically Eastern-European Jewish-looking) and I've never encountered anything like what Nancy described.
There have been a few times when some stranger I was chit-chatting with made a vague and mild anti-Semitic reference; I inform them in pleasant tones that I'm Jewish and listen to them backtrack to inform me that of course the reason Jews have a lot of money is that they're smart or value education, so they've earned it and deserve it. Unlike those... you know... those welfare cheats. (At which point I have to decide just how much consciousness-raising I'm in the mood for.)
That is to say, I've had people say ignorant things, but I've never had anyone react in a personally hostile manner after I've informed them who they're talking to. I found Nancy's post quite disturbing, and unlike anything I would ever expect to hear in Los Angeles.
Tolkien loathed race-mixing? What about Aragorn and Arwen? Elrond Half-Elven? Luthien and Beren?
Here's a draconian post-9/11 immigration enforcement story which is even more depressing. A sixteen-year-old boy who was illegally brought to the US by his mother when he was _three_ is about to get deported to Mexico, even though he is estranged from his only relative who lives there.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-salas9feb09,1,4949648.story?coll=la-home-local
Regarding entertainment visas, the last time I looked into them the application requires a detailed explanation of what sort of entertainment you're going to be doing. There is no way that Ibrahim Ferrer's visa just fell through the cracks in the system. The person who denied it had to have known exactly what he or she was doing.
I interpreted Will as meaning that his stance was essentially a religious one, meaning unswayable by debate, as well. Not having grown up in the US, it always startles me somewhat to be reminded just how current and passionate an issue the Civil War still is here. And people say Americans don't care about history.
On a completely side note, when Kevin quoted the bit about the black man wearing a swastika, etc, I thought, "Didn't Will Shetterly say that?" So though I can't remember where, it's probably either something he came up with or something he quoted.
Regarding swastikas, though you probably all know that the Nazis appropriated the symbol rather than inventing it, you may not all know that to this day they're all over India, not as a nyaa-nyaa-Hitler re-appropriation, but because they've always been there, as good luck charms, as religious symbols, as a reference to the sun.
Swastikas, swastikas, everywhere you go, painted on temples, printed on blouses, regular and reversed, even advertising "Swastik biscuits." I'm sure I could find one as a belt buckle, and when I do, Will's getting it.
When is _Shelter_ coming out? What's it about? And are you going to reprint Susan Palwick's wonderful first novel, _Flying in Place_?
I've thought about a small locked room with nothing in it but Osama bin Ladin tied to a chair, me, and a machete.
When a member of my family was murdered, in a case in which the prosecutor legally could have tacked "torture" onto the "special circumstances" of the case but chose not to, I had to change my seat at the trial because after a while I'd gotten too sure that from where I was, I could vault over the rail and snap the defendant's skinny little neck before anyone could stop me.
That could have been a death penalty case, but although all of us in the family _wanted_ the murderer dead, we decided, for various reasons, that it was not the right thing to pursue. He's now in jail for the rest of his miserable life.
(I don't put the death penalty on the same level as torture; my story is simply an illustration of similar choices surrounding a different issue.)
So I understand what people want to do to in revenge, although I doubt that many of the people now advocating torture would have the stomach for it if they had to do it themselves. But wanting something doesn't mean that it's righteous, or has practical value, or will make you feel better once you've done it. And pursuing your worst impulses can sure make you a worse person.
Torture is an evil act. Imagining it is human. Performing it puts us on the same moral ground as even the worst person we might inflict it on.
My uncle is gone, and I can't make his last moments easier than they were. But at least I know that the only killer in that courtroom was the defendant.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
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| 2004 | 13 |
| 2003 | 3 |
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