Originality and the Zeitgeist

[sartorias]

I went to pinch hit as a sub today (hey, I desperately need that fifty smackeroos) and came home to zip through the bazillion posts gathered while I was gone. Stumbled to a halt when I came across this post by Charles Butler as the latest in the blog of a group of writers for kids, "An Awfully Big Blog Adventure."

Comments

[mallory_blog]

Sliding slightly sideways here - in order to examine what is informing my writing I took a children's lit class this semester to see what it is that I read back in the day - in particular I was looking at old stuff because I'm old. It was shocking for me. Reading as a child was more like injesting a book whole I tried to read the library out of books (and did so with a library branch) - a majority of the works in that library system were white-centric and male-centric and lets be fair here - they were often trope. I gobbled them

[sartorias]

It's interesting to me to track reactions to books I considered innovative for whatever reason, that stand still as the cultural tide moves past.

There was a very enlightening discussion somewhere here a year or two back about Anne McAffrey's first Dragon book, what was it, Dragonrider? So many of the titles are similar. Anyway, when it first came out, it seems refreshing and innovative--Lessa got to be head of something, she stood up to the men, she wasn't slapped down for desire, etc. She went from a domestic drudge to freedom!

Segue up thirty years later, and young women are complaining about how she's emotionally retarded and annoyingly d domesticated, while the men get all the fun...what's more, she's raped, and likes it.

[gauroth]

I read that book when it first came out and was bowled over because, as you say, Lessa went from being the lowest of the low to being an important person. At the time, this was both radical and empowering and a little shocking - girls weren't meant to be like that! They certainly weren't like that in my beloved Tolkien

[sartorias]

Yep! Definitely.

[shveta_thakrar]

Not just that--what always troubled me, aside from the aforementioned rape--she also immediately forgot what being a drudge was like and didn't teach anyone else any compassion. I remember being outraged!

I was never a fan of those books. *grin*

[mallory_blog]

I had a very similar experience with "A Womanly Talent", an Anne McCaffrey short story originally published in 1969. I read it as a teenager sometime in the late 1980s in the collection To Ride Pegasus. The story is about a woman who tests positive for telekinetic abilities, except that she doesn't seem to be able to manifest those abilities. So she is content to play wife and mother to a husband who of course has active abilities. Eventually she gives birth to a baby girl and it turns out that she has the ability to telekinetically manipulate genes, the womanly talent of the title, whereas the men have ability to push spaceships through the space by telekinesis. I didn't care for the story, because I didn't think the ability to manipulate genes was all that great, particularly since the woman never did anything more than create a blonde and blue-eyed baby. And besides, the boys got much cooler abilities, since they were able to sent whole rockets through space or solve crimes by telepathic and telekinetic abilities

[sartorias]

Oh yes. There are some stories that have aged FAST.