[007] The past is like another planet; they do things differently there.
[audio // English]
[There's the background noise of riffling pages while Lika is talking.]
Did you know there's an entire room devoted to storing physical media? Actual books! The text is on thin sheets, and they're all stacked and bound along one edge. You have to move your eyes and keep flipping the sheets over to advance the text ( Read more... )
[There's the background noise of riffling pages while Lika is talking.]
Did you know there's an entire room devoted to storing physical media? Actual books! The text is on thin sheets, and they're all stacked and bound along one edge. You have to move your eyes and keep flipping the sheets over to advance the text ( Read more... )
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You can touch these!
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Books that are old and fragile are usually duplicated and then the old copy is burned so it can pass on, at least where I'm from. Why would you keep a book you couldn't read? Not a lot of point there, and the poor thing's got to be so tired it isn't fair to keep it lingering on like that.
How have you spent your entire life without even touching a book? I feel sorry for the books on your world, it must be difficult being kept for so long with no one to read them...
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...Your animism is cute.
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Books respond fine if you know how to ask them; forcing them is cruel. That's a piece of a person's heart, you know, of course it takes up space, of course it doesn't always respond how you want it to. It's a book, not some kind of construct.
The level of heart in a book is different depending on who wrote it and why, just like the words themselves are. It doesn't mean it's worth forcing one to linger on well past its time without ever being read again like it's a good thing.
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You should make books! The Martians would love you!
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[Pause.]
That isn't important. You need to better acquaint yourself with books, Lady Lika. It isn't fair to you or to the books for you to be such strangers to each other.
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[Lika means producing a physical volume as a work of art, and is cheerfully unaware that her take on the particular medium is unlike anyone else's on the ship.]
...I have a book about tulips, a book by a person named Guy de Maupassant, and a book on, ah, "US foreign policy in the Canal Zone."
[She pronounces "US" like "us."]
I'm not sure what that last one means.
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[Long pause. Congratulations, that book title completely threw the rest of his argument out the window.]
Us Foreign Pol--I have no idea. And that grammar is terrible.
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[There's the noise of pages turning.]
Huh, I think it's an abbreviation for "United States." That was a Tellusian empire a few hundred years before the collapse.
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...Oh, you know, I went to the library the other day and I read something like that--
[There's a pause and the sound of Verrim moving things around, then pages turning. He brought a couple books back with him, that was one of them.]
"The United States of America." Stupidly long name. They made a lot of machines.
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[Her voice is patient, but she's clearly confused. Plagiarism is much, much harder in a universe where everyone can instantly look up the text, so the idea of improperly accepting acclaim is foreign to her--who'd be stupid enough to try?]
Yes. They straddled the transition between the Industrial Period and the Information Period, during the second phase of the Dark Ages.
[Lika has the half-lecturing, half-singsong tone she gets when she's relaying information from her helpmate.]
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Stealing is easy. Making something of your own is difficult.
[More pages turning, slowly, and he sounds contemplative and confused at the same time.]
I...have no idea what any of those periods are, but I'll assume they have something to do with the dirt world. The United States of America was on the dirt world, right?
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[She's confused. "Well-known" and "obscure" are just a helpmate query apart. And "mediation" in her world involves telepaths, which makes lying very difficult.]
Yes, the "dirt world."
[She laughs.]
It's all millennia before I was born.
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...I'm going to guess that by "license-holder" you mean the writer and you're just using different words. Do you need a license to write on your world?
Uh, if the writer didn't know their book was being sold without their consent and someone else was getting the credit, they couldn't subject the dispute to anything because they wouldn't know there was a dispute to make.
[Verrim's actually getting frustrated explaining this; how can it be THIS HARD to grasp plagiarism?]
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The "license-holder" is the person who holds the rights to distribute the work in question. It wouldn't necessarily be the writer. They could have passed the license on to someone else--it's a popular coming-of-age gift on Europa, for instance. But...say it's the writer for the sake of argument.
People would see the work, and they would talk about it, and any reasonably bright semantic analysis tool could trigger an alert to the original author. It would take days at the outside, in-system. Longer if it were trans-system, but it would still happen.
No one would try it; the rewards aren't worth the risk. ...Except, maybe as a meta-statement on the creative process....
[She trails off, intrigued by the artistic possibilities.]
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