new abhorrent trend: a rant
Jul. 6th, 2003 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyThey've started (and notice, please, that impersonal "they" *g*) revising and repackaging popular but uninspired adult sf/f as children's fiction.
When I saw Anne McCaffrey had done it with Dragonflight, I shrugged it off (I gave up on my erstwhile worship of McCaffrey a long time ago), but this weekend, I saw that now Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman have gotten in on the act. Dragons of Autumn Twilight has become A Rumor of Dragons, intended for the 9-12 age bracket.
I find this offensive on several levels. One is simply that it irks me that they've found a way to spin yet more money out of the incredibly tired Dragonlance and Pern franchises. (And even at that, I don't mind this nearly as much as I mind the annotated editions of Dragonlance that have started coming out, but those are beyond abhorrent.) And it irritates me beyond belief that they're doing this instead of rereleasing McCaffrey's Harper Hall books, which are YA, and are relatively good YA to boot. But mostly what bugs me is that I was twelve when I read Dragonlance and The Dragonriders of Pern. Okay, sure, I was an annoyingly bright and over-motivated little pixie, but these were not challenging books. The prose is competent at best, the narrative structure is plebeian and straightforward, and the vocabulary is neither erudite, abstruse, nor sesquipedalian.
There's no Anglo-Saxon swearing (although this makes me realize that both sets of books would be immeasurably improved if the heroes said "Fuck!" once in a while); the violence is cartoony at best in Dragonlance, and there isn't any sex that I can remember. The Dragonriders of Pern has some rather questionable sexual politics (speaking of both sex and violence), but the answer there isn't to excise the sex: it's to change the politics. But that would require actual work, which is clearly not the point of this exercise.
There's nothing that I can think of in any of those books (all nine Dragonlance that I read--Chronicles, Legends, and Tales--and anything Anne McCaffrey's ever written, except for that very dubious marshmallow-core porn stuff) that is unsuitable for 9 to 12 year olds. Granted, I may have liberal standards, but it's not like Dragonlance and Pern have been getting banned left and right for gratuitous and offensive language or adult situations. There is no point to this, except to dumb down already stupid books and make more money off them.
And the icing on the cake is that these are not books that I would pick, personally, as books to promote for younger readers--or any readers. The Dragonriders of Pern I consider interesting as a historical artifact, but they don't wear well. And Dragonlance ... when there's so much good older sf/f to push (and so much of it is already YA), it seems stupid, pointless, and willfully destructive of the genre and its readership to make these third-rate books into travesties, both of themselves (insofar as one can argue that they had any integrity to begin with--and I did love Dragonlance when I was twelve) and of the entire category of YA fiction. It's disrespectful both to the books and to the children who read them.
I know why they're doing it--because they can--but frankly it pisses me off.
When I saw Anne McCaffrey had done it with Dragonflight, I shrugged it off (I gave up on my erstwhile worship of McCaffrey a long time ago), but this weekend, I saw that now Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman have gotten in on the act. Dragons of Autumn Twilight has become A Rumor of Dragons, intended for the 9-12 age bracket.
I find this offensive on several levels. One is simply that it irks me that they've found a way to spin yet more money out of the incredibly tired Dragonlance and Pern franchises. (And even at that, I don't mind this nearly as much as I mind the annotated editions of Dragonlance that have started coming out, but those are beyond abhorrent.) And it irritates me beyond belief that they're doing this instead of rereleasing McCaffrey's Harper Hall books, which are YA, and are relatively good YA to boot. But mostly what bugs me is that I was twelve when I read Dragonlance and The Dragonriders of Pern. Okay, sure, I was an annoyingly bright and over-motivated little pixie, but these were not challenging books. The prose is competent at best, the narrative structure is plebeian and straightforward, and the vocabulary is neither erudite, abstruse, nor sesquipedalian.
There's no Anglo-Saxon swearing (although this makes me realize that both sets of books would be immeasurably improved if the heroes said "Fuck!" once in a while); the violence is cartoony at best in Dragonlance, and there isn't any sex that I can remember. The Dragonriders of Pern has some rather questionable sexual politics (speaking of both sex and violence), but the answer there isn't to excise the sex: it's to change the politics. But that would require actual work, which is clearly not the point of this exercise.
There's nothing that I can think of in any of those books (all nine Dragonlance that I read--Chronicles, Legends, and Tales--and anything Anne McCaffrey's ever written, except for that very dubious marshmallow-core porn stuff) that is unsuitable for 9 to 12 year olds. Granted, I may have liberal standards, but it's not like Dragonlance and Pern have been getting banned left and right for gratuitous and offensive language or adult situations. There is no point to this, except to dumb down already stupid books and make more money off them.
And the icing on the cake is that these are not books that I would pick, personally, as books to promote for younger readers--or any readers. The Dragonriders of Pern I consider interesting as a historical artifact, but they don't wear well. And Dragonlance ... when there's so much good older sf/f to push (and so much of it is already YA), it seems stupid, pointless, and willfully destructive of the genre and its readership to make these third-rate books into travesties, both of themselves (insofar as one can argue that they had any integrity to begin with--and I did love Dragonlance when I was twelve) and of the entire category of YA fiction. It's disrespectful both to the books and to the children who read them.
I know why they're doing it--because they can--but frankly it pisses me off.
