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.
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Re: Rape vs. Ravishment vs. Smut
Date: 2003-07-06 06:08 pm (UTC)(I'm impressed you managed to read through my stream of consciousness there. Been practicing on Joyce? *g*)
Bingo, and total agreement. **glares too**
And yeah, sex as power--and the interplay of sex and power--is a very interesting dynamic, and one that really fascinates me. My emotional reaction to the various relationships in the Pern books is more, I think, that they're bad not just because they're abrogations of female personhood (looking at when they were written and who was writing them, and how naive the characterizations in those books are as a whole) but also because they're oversimplified and disingenuous.
On the other hand, when I started reading SFF (as a wee bairn) Lessa was one of the stronger female characters out there. The other things I was reading at the same time--what, 1977, 1978 or so? must have been, because I clearly remember when White Dragon came out, my mom bought it in hardcover (something she never did), and I was disappointed because I couldn't get into it, having devoured the then-extant four books--my other options were Heinlein, Asimov, Piers Anthony, ROger Zelazny (Amber novels) Andre Norton (who had mostly male protags, iirc), and so on.
Remember: Downbelow Station was still three years away. Titan was a year in the future. (to name two books with better female characters) Dragonflight, by contrast, was already ten years old, having been published in 1968. Good girls *really* didn't, back in the day, and if they did they promptly fell in love and got married.
This was the bad old days, the era of the Gor series, God help us, and in my childish estimation Lessa and Menolly were up there with Jirel of Joiry. *g* So I think as a certain type of period piece, it's still got validity: I'm not sure you can judge it by today's standards. (Not that I've read them since I turned 12 or 13, I think)
Anyway, all that history aside, what bothers me more is that that she-really-wanted-it still shows up in fiction today. And a lot. More often in my slush than in published whaddevah, but in the published whaddevah, too.
Re: Rape vs. Ravishment vs. Smut
Date: 2003-07-06 06:31 pm (UTC)Actually, my clearest memory of reading Freud is of being INFURIATED when he trots that out in Dora. It's stuck with me so well that it no longer requires thought.
Freud could be brilliant, but never about women.
I agree, too, that historical context makes a world of difference. For its time, Dragonflight is ground-breaking (although my god her characterization sucks). Now it's ugly and embarrassing. People should not be doing that in their fiction now, and if they are, they should have lemon juice poured in their paper-cuts.
Which, to loop this neatly back around to the original topic, is another reason they shouldn't be repackaging those books as YA fiction now. Because they're dated, and because the ways in which they are dated are not merely quaint, but actually pernicious.
Re: Rape vs. Ravishment vs. Smut
Date: 2003-07-06 06:37 pm (UTC)Embarassing is a good word, I think.
Re: Rape vs. Ravishment vs. Smut
Date: 2003-07-07 08:30 am (UTC)I also suffered from a severe lack of girl's parts in fiction when growing up, and I read the McCaffrey about the same time you did, in fact I specifically remember reading the novella "Weyr Search" in a Year's Best from the library in the summer of 1977 when I read the entire library in alphabetical order, and then borrowing the first two from my step-mother when I met her in the autumn of 1978, and reading Dragonquest first because I thought I'd read Dragonflight, only I hadn't. So yes.
Re: Rape vs. Ravishment vs. Smut
Date: 2003-07-07 08:42 am (UTC)F'lar had tumbled every man in the Weyr, efficiently and easily.
This is apropos of nothing in particular, but makes me smirk.
Re: Rape vs. Ravishment vs. Smut
Date: 2003-07-07 09:12 am (UTC)They may not understand all of it, but they will learn.
It seems like most of us turned out all right. Er. More or less. *g*