I think it's worth expressing support once more for the traditional American idea of copyright. It's American, it's traditional, I like it a lot: it's 28 years, renewable for another 28 years if you're still alive and still care. It acknowledges copyright as valuable and real but different from other things. It worked for Mark Twain and it worked for Robert Heinlein, it let things go back into the soup of story, it wasn't broken and I don't see why people thought they needed to fix it. After having given a lot of thought to this, I can't see a better or fairer way of doing it.
Bring back traditional American copyright!
Marilee: Sasha lost the dragon zipper-pull some time ago when he left the coat it was fixed to on a train. He still has the spaceship one AFAIK, but I haven't actually seen it in a little while, now he's so grown up and sophisticated.
I recently read Kipling's "They" for the first time, and realized that it is the inspiration for a large part of both "Burnt Norton" and _The Children of Green Knowe_.
There's glory for you.
I'm glad it's going to be easily available.
I also thought "Sergeant Chip" was an incredibly strong story -- it was one of my Hugo nominations.
I haven't read any of your other selections, but if they're good enough to go with those two, it's looking pretty good to me.
Unfortunately, my teen has turned into a little "I have read 16 Cherryh novels in the last month, don't bother me with kid stuff, gimme spaceships and the smell of oil" snob. It won't last. At least, I hope it won't last!
Jim Gardner -- there's a slight but discernable difference between "Talking specific figures is tacky..." and "Thou shalt not reveal thy advance!"
I think Tobias's poll is very interesting, I'm looking forward to seeing it get more data.
Greg: This isn't about people making money, it's about people creating things.
People who have created things have the right to make whatever money there is to be made from them, and also the right not to see other people mess about with them, while they are alive -- or at least it should be their choice.
This applies as much to Jack Williamson at eighty-seven as it does when he was twenty.
I'm sure he's made plenty of money in the forty-plus years his early work has been in print -- but if someone wanted to make a movie of one of them tomorrow, he ought to have the right to say yes or no, and the right to some money from that.
I like Charlie's suggestion, and I think ten years after death is plenty.
I once investigated the position, in Britain, of saying in one's will that all one's work becomes public domain at death, and discovered that there doesn't seem to be one.
Also, I quite like the traditional old US system of having an automatic 28 year renewable copyright period -- if you're alive and care, you renew, if not, it goes back into the soup of stories.
I'm half-way through Nicholas Mosley's biography of his father RULES OF THE GAME, which is giving me nightmares. I suppose I could classify it as post-research for FARTHING.
In search of comfort reading, I've just picked up Cherryh's Atevi books for a re-read. I'll finish the Mosley, but I think I'll let last night's dream fade a bit first.
Oh, well said Reimer Behrends!
I'm going to borrow that angle on Voltaire's statement, if you don't mind.
Of all the many things I never thought I'd see, and have seen in the last four years, not the least shocking is Teresa, beyond words at being censored.
Vaccinations are one of those things where it might in fact be better for your individual child not to have them, but it's better for everyone for everyone to have them.
Randall, if you want to see what life is like without vaccinations, I recommend visiting a third world country -- though without taking your innocent babies.
All the schools Sasha's ever been to, in Britain and in Canada, have required evidence of vaccinations -- and I think this is entirely appropriate.
Marilee: almost everyone I know in the entire US is liberal. It's so hard to blame the whole repressive apparatus on just Joel and Pete that I decided there must be a sampling error somewhere...
Mitch -- Yes. If you're setting anything in Britain, assume it's the same size as the US, with huge invisible psychological gulfs between places. Britain's only six hundred miles long, but people tend to have the attitude that going twenty miles in a direction they don't go all the time is actually a long way and to be thought about. Living in Lancaster, I'd go down to South Wales all the time, to see my aunt. But if you asked me to go to Newcastle (which is probably a hundred miles, I don't even know, maybe less) but possible on regular and reliable trains with only one change (in Carlisle) and which I could probably reach in two or three hours -- well, I'd hesitate, because I've never been there, and it would seem as far away as the moon.
As for being C.20 people -- there's a lovely comment in John Fowles _The French Lieutenant's Woman_ (one of the best Victorian novels written in the C.20 in my opinion) in which he says words to the effect of "It's sometimes possible to recognize a face or an expression from a previous age, but never, of course, from a future one." He's saying Sarah is like a C.20 woman, and acting for the same reasons, because people in the end are in fact people. I've thought about that "expressions from a future age" thing a lot with reference to SF. We know -- or think we know, don't forget Tiffany -- the expressions, the range of expressions, that we'd expect to see from previous centuries. What will the future think ours are -- and what might theirs be?
I don't know who Calimac is, but Sturgeonslawyer has a LJ as well.
I have an LJ name, "Papersky" which I regard as being the name of my LJ, the same way "Electrolite" is the name of your blog. I find the LJ cutesy pseudonymity mildly annoying, and though identifying one's actual friends by clues like their preferences in dictionaries can occasionally be fun, it can also mean I have no idea if someone is someone I know or not. I have my name on my info page. This does mean that my LJ is the second hit on my name in Google, which means I have to consider how public it is and not post obsessing about the pimple on my nose, but in the end that's probably a good thing.
Sturgeonslawyer -- I'm not unfamiliar with history myself, and I have read F&N without seeing the problems with it that Calimac does. I do have some problems with the characters' American sense of the size of Britain and the ease of moving about in it, which is something no US author but John M. Ford has ever got right. I also have some issues with the end, which is outside of what Calimac has read. What Calimac's been saying -- well, as Ken MacLeod pointed out, James is a friend of Engels. Consider Engels's life.
It isn't possible to write an authentic Victorian novel now. There isn't even any point in trying. Anything written now is modern and postmodern by definition, it's written outside that world and looking at it from our perspective. It's still possible to be true to the period, and I think Brust and Bull did their best to do that and generally succeeded.
Calimac has a perfect right not to like the book, though not to deride other people's intellect for liking it, but do I think however many times he has been right in the past and however much history he knows, I still think he's suffering from the Tiffany problem here.
I think Calimac's problems with F&N are part of a thing I call the Tiffany problem.
Tiffany is a legitimate medieval name, an Anglicization of Theophania. It's recorded as early as the thirteenth century, and it's reasonable to assume that Theophanias in the twelfth century were probably called Tiffany at home.
Nevertheless, any alert and astute twenty-first century reader of a novel set in England in the thirteenth century is going to throw it across the room if they run across the limpid blue-eyes and tripping feet of Tiffany, because they know it's a really dumb anachronism. The fact that they're wrong doesn't matter a hoot -- they know it, and all the footnotes and scholarly tomes in the world won't make them pick the book up again. They're never going to forgive such a stupid and obvious error, even if it's their own.
It's hard enough to be authentic, without worrying about current perceptions, though it is a good idea to keep a wary eye out for wild Tiffanies.
If not for Greer Gilman I'd have used "scampering" in a play purporting to be Elizabethan English, and "scampering" (who know?) is actually an eighteenth century word.
It's pretty much irrelevant whether he's racist, or what he said is racist; that's a side issue. He's trying to spin it that way, he's trying to apologize for being racist, but that's not the point.
What's really horrifying is that he's a Republican talking openly about suppressing the votes of his opponents.
Whether they're white or black or polka dotted with tentacles, he wants to suppress them because they're going to exercise their legal democratic right to vote against him.
Are your ears bleeding yet?
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| 2005 | 6 |
| 2004 | 11 |
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