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Science Fiction Writers for Censorship

By on November 22, 2007 2

As I’ve mentioned before, while I (mostly) support the demands of the striking Hollywood writers, I don’t regard those demands as representing pre-contractual IP rights (since I don’t believe in IP). Rather, in my view their demands are ones that can become rights only via contract; I just think the contractual rights they’re negotiating for are ones that are on the whole fairer than the media companies’ proposal.

Verne spaceship Of course in our current culture of political confusion these distinct issues are bound to get muddled together. Hence I was interested to see this piece on AICN:

Mike Capobianco, president of the Science Fiction Writers of America (the organization that represents, well, I guess it’s self evident…) has released a solidarity statement endorsing the WGA’s strike against Big Media. But reading it over, am I the only one who noticed a very interesting subtext going on? See, this comes less than two weeks after the SFWA Copyright Exploratory Committee, which was hastily assembled following the disastrous cock-up that led to the dis-banding of the organization’s e-piracy committee, released its recommendations for dealing with digital rights management. As we recall, the misuse of the DMCA, not to mention the strong-arm tactics on behalf of even writers who had even released the material under creative commons license, ignited the blogosphere and had some people calling for the resignation of the SFWA’s leadership. (Which, granted, was a bit of an overkill.)

So when Capobianco talks about how “writers and other creators are having their work distributed digitally without seeing any benefit at all,” and how “these precedents will hurt creators as digital distribution [becomes] the predominant method for distributing and accessing content”, it almost feels like he’s not just talking about the WGA. Is he trying to lend a little bit of moral authority to SWFA’s anti-piracy actions by somehow tying it into the WGA’s struggle to keep the tradition of residuals alive in the information age? Is he maybe wagging the finger a little bit at the Scribds out there who are peer-to-peering SFWA members’ works without their approval? Probably not. I’m sure I’m just imagining.

Capobianco’s letter of support for the WGA is here. Material from the SFWA website relevant to the e-piracy flap is here, here, here, here, here, and here. For two opposing takes on the issue, see Cory Doctorow and Ursula LeGuin. (Am I the only one who finds it a bit ironic to see the author of The Dispossessed eager to restrict others’ freedom in the name of property rights?)

One interesting, perhaps non-coercive way to combat “piracy” is this one. It borders on fraud (representing inaccurate copies of copyrighted works as accurate), and I suspect it’s immoral, but if no consideration is exchanged it may not be unjust. What do you think?

Two Mad Kings

By on November 18, 2007 13

I could swear that I’d linked to these two marvelous lefty anti-authoritarian short stories before, but I can’t find any reference to them on my website, so maybe not.

every inch a king The first, a brief La Boétiean fable titled “The Actor and the King,” is by the enigmatic German anarcho-individualist novelist B. Traven a.k.a. Ret Marut (1890?-1969), best known today as the author of The Treasure of Sierra Madre and the Jungle novels. The second, variously titled “A King’s Lesson” and “An Old Story Retold,” is by the English art designer, fantasy novelist, and libertarian communist William Morris (1834-1896), best known today for News from Nowhere and The Wood Beyond the World. Enjoy!

We Apologise for A More Stressful Than Intended Marooning Experience

By on November 17, 2007 1

Currently in DC Comics’ Salvation Run event, which is part of its bigger Countdown to Final Crisis event, a secret government agency is rounding up supervillains without trial and relocating them on what the agency mistakenly believes is a safe and pleasant planet. (The agency has been duped by two figures we’ve only seen in shadow, though they look like Darkseid and Desaad to me.) In fact the planet is a hellish place where the supervillains have to fight a constant battle for survival. I’m betting that at some point they come back to Earth a trifle peeved.

Jules Verne - The Mysterious Island It’s rather odd timing for DC to be running this story, since it looks like a blatant rip-off of Marvel’s recent Planet Hulk story (with a dash of Civil War for the secret-supervillain-prison element). In Planet Hulk, a secret group of superheroes decides the Hulk is too dangerous to be allowed to roam the Earth freely, so they kidnap him and send him to what they mistakenly believe will be a safe and pleasant planet. Through some sort of glitch, the Hulk instead arrives on a hellish world where he has to fight a constant battle for survival. Plus he gets married, only to lose his wife to an explosion for which the superheroes who exiled him are made to appear responsible. Needless to say, the Hulk eventually makes it back to Earth a trifle peeved. (Of course the Hulk’s angry return, chronicled in World War Hulk, came just shortly after DC’s Black Adam’s angry rampage, likewise over a slain wife, in World War III; both were announced well ahead of time so I’m not sure who’s copying whom on that one.)

But both these stories are arguably drawing on an earlier Star Trek storyline, one that began in the original series episode “Space Seed” and was later continued in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Captain Kirk exiles genetically enhanced supervillain Khan Noonian Singh and his followers (veterans of the Eugenics Wars, which were initially supposed to be conventional wars in the late 20th century, then were retconned into being conventional wars in the 22nd century, only to be re-retconned into being covert struggles in the late 20th century ….) to what he mistakenly believes to be a safe and pleasant planet. Shortly after Kirk departs, an unforeseen astronomical catastrophe transforms the planet into a hellish place where Khan and his people have to fight a constant battle for survival. Khan even loses his wife, and when he finally gets off the planet he’s a trifle wrathful.

But maybe Jules Verne got there first. At the end of The Children of Captain Grant (better known to American audiences as In Search of the Castways), the novel’s chief villain, Thomas Ayrton, is exiled on a desert island. We meet him again later in The Mysterious Island (which serves as a sequel both to Children and to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), where we find that those who marooned him have underestimated, not the physical harshness of the island, but its psychological harshness; Ayrton has gone cuckoo from isolation. Once rescued and reassimilated into society, however, Ayrton turns out to be reformed rather than revengeful – so the parallel’s not especially close.

Ice Ice Beowulf

By on November 17, 2007 3

Beowulf Animated Epic I’m looking forward to the new Beowulf (which I’ll have a chance to see locally in 3-D), but I still have an unquenchable fondness for this beautiful 1998 animated version. Admittedly it’s just half an hour long and massively overpriced, but it’s more faithful to the original in both letter and spirit than any other version has been, and clearly more so than the new one will be. The new one is Robert E. Howard’s Beowulf, as it were, but the 1998 version is Tolkien’s Beowulf. (Or to put it another way, the new movie – with its “I am ripper, tearer, slasher, I am the teeth in the darkness, I am Beowulf!” business, has the roaring, swaggering feel of an Irish saga like Táin Bó Cúailnge, while the older version has the grimmer, more somber character of an Icelandic saga. An Icelandic hero wouldn’t say “I am ripper, tearer, slasher!”; he’d say something more understated, like “you’ll receive small thanks here.”)

In related news: for an mp3 of Tolkien reading his poem “The Hoard,” inspired by the Beowulf story, go to this page and choose the third file.

Isabel Paterson and Talbot Mundy?

By on November 16, 2007 0

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Against all fear; against the weight of what,
For lack of worse name, men miscall the law;
Against the tyranny of Creed, against the hot,
Foul creed of priest, and Superstition’s maw;
Against all men-made shackles, and a man-made Hell –
Alone – at last – unaided – I REBEL!
– Talbot Mundy

I’m pleased to see that Talbot Mundy’s excellent historical fantasy novel Tros of Samothrace, about 1st-century BCE Celtic tribes defending themselves against Roman invasion, is available online (though only in ASCII text – and, for copyright reasons I suspect, only on an Australian site). The book’s savage portrait of Julius Caesar is especially memorable. Robert E. Howard is known to have been influenced by Tros, but Mundy’s protagonist is considerably more complex, and his moral code more severe, than is generally the case with Howard’s heroes. (Mundy himself was an interesting character; check out his Wikipedia bio.)

The Dying Gaul Another writer about whose possible dependence on Mundy I wonder about is Isabel Paterson. In 1930 she released The Road of the Gods, the final entry (though first in fictional chronology) in the trilogy of historical romances that began with The Singing Season (1924) and The Fourth Queen (1926). The trilogy traces the adventures of a pair of lovers as they are reincarnated in different guises, names, and contexts across the centuries, from medieval Spain to Elizabethan England (though in fact it’s not clear whether Paterson planned all along for these to be the same characters reborn or whether this theme developed only with the third book). The Road of the Gods, like Tros of Samothrace, deals with the struggles of Northern tribes (Germanic rather than Celtic this time) against Roman expansion in the first century BCE. Although Tros wasn’t published as a book until 1938, it appeared in serialised form in 1925, so influence is possible – and Paterson would certainly have appreciated the novel’s anti-imperialist message and even its opening epigram, a spurious quotation from Taliesin:

These then are your liberties that ye inherit. If ye inherit sheep and oxen, ye protect those from the wolves. Ye know there are wolves, aye, and thieves also. Ye do not make yourselves ridiculous by saying neither wolf nor thief would rob you, but each to his own. Nevertheless, ye resent my warning. But I tell you, Liberty is alertness; those are one; they are the same thing. Your liberties are an offense to the slave, and to the enslaver also. Look ye to your liberties! Be watchful, and be ready to defend them. Envy, greed, conceit and ignorance, believing they are Virtue, see in undefended Liberty their opportunity to prove that violence is the grace of manhood.

Of course Paterson didn’t necessarily need to have been inspired by anyone else; still, the subject matter was unusual enough in that era (Stephen Cox, Paterson’s biographer, calls the choice of topic “unlikely” and “extraordinary”), Mundy was sufficiently widely known, and Paterson was sufficiently widely read, that a connection does not seem improbable.

Admittedly Paterson might instead have been influenced by William Morris’s much earlier treatment of these matters in his 1880s novels The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains, but stylistically Paterson seems much closer to Mundy than to Morris. (The real influence of the Morris books was on Tolkien, but that’s another story.)

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