An Authorized Fanfic Re-Visioning of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

Last week Cory Doctorow posted a review of JULIA, by Sandra Newman, which coincidentally I've just finished reading.

Novel-Writing Machines

Newman's novel is an authorized retelling of Orwell's dystopian classic from the viewpoint of Julia, the protagonist Winston Smith's lover. As Doctorow mentions, Winston thinks of the Party as omniscient and omnipotent -- "Big Brother is watching you." Viewing this society through Julia's experience, we realize it's as corrupt and inefficient as the bureaucracy of any other dictatorship. She knows how to take advantage of cracks in the system, for instance with bribery and tricks such as getting a break from her job by signing out under the category "Sickness: Menstrual." (After all, nobody checks up on that excuse.) As a mechanic who maintains novel-writing machines in the Fiction department of the Ministry of Truth, she has the skills to fix other things as well, e.g., the perpetually clogging lavatories in her dormitory. She's valued for her abilities and enjoys her work. She also enjoys frequent sexual flings despite her membership in the Anti-Sex League. I wondered how women who take those risks, aside from the danger of getting arrested for sexcrime, avoid pregnancy given that contraception is illegal. Well, there's a dodge for that, too. Many single women who suspect they're in the early stages of pregnancy seek artsem (artificial insemination). If they've actually conceived already, they're covered; if not, the procedure didn't "take." And it seems to be common knowledge that some women volunteering to bear children for the Party are already pregnant. Newman's perspective flip opens up Orwell's fictional world from these and many other angles. Everybody knows the proper behavior, language, and facial expressions necessary to stay out of trouble, and for most of them it seems to be mainly an act. In one of the few relaxed scenes, workers joke about the intricacies of Newspeak. Julia excuses her linguistic mistakes with the claim that she isn't a bit intellectual, which is true. Winston's fascination with forbidden political, philosophical, and literary topics bores her, although she maintains a facade of enthralled interest.

JULIA answers questions many readers of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR may puzzle over. Why does she initiate a love affair with Winston, a rather stuffy man twenty years her senior? Does Big Brother, as an individual, literally exist? (Yes.) Is there really an anti-Party underground, and was its demonized alleged leader, Goldstein, a real person? (Yes.) Is Oceania really at war? Yes, we witness the bombed sections of London, though we never find out if the enemy is Eurasia, Eastasia, or neither. We also learn about the lives of the proles, including the thriving black market with which Julia regularly deals. Newman's work delves into potential features of Orwell's fictional world that he either didn't consider or deliberately left outside the frame of his narrative.

Cory Doctorow reasonably classifies this type of novel as fanfic, or as he defines it, "writing stories about other stories that you hate or love or just can't get out of your head." Whether an amateur or professional publication, fanfic expresses the drive to explore shadowed or underdeveloped areas of canonical works, or speculate on how the world of the original looks from the perspective of a different character. ROSENKRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD, which he also mentions, is a prime example of the latter.

Similarly, WIDE SARGASSO SEA, by Jean Rhys, a prequel to JANE EYRE, creates a personality and a backstory for Bertha, Rochester's deranged first wife. In Rhys's re-imagining, Bertha isn't even the name she goes by; Rochester calls her that for the sake of respectability. They arrive in Britain near the end of WIDE SARGASSO SEA. Rhys explores the question of whether she was ever in fact "mad" before being taken from her Caribbean home to England and relegated to nearly solitary confinement in a suite of upstairs rooms (not, contrary to popular impression, the attic).

Doctorow also refers to THE WIND DONE GONE, which a court decreed to be a "parody" of GONE WITH THE WIND. It really isn't, but that classification served as a defense against a charge of plagiarism. When I read THE WIND DONE GONE, I was mildly surprised that Mitchell's estate claimed copyright infringement at all. Alice Randall's book doesn't literally retell the classic novel. It tells the story of the enslaved narrator, Cynara, mixed-race daughter of Mammy and half-sister of Scarlett, with transformative references to the events of GONE WITH THE WIND. None of the white people from the latter are named in THE WIND DONE GONE. Cynara gives Mitchell's characters satirical nicknames, e.g. "Planter" and "Lady" for Scarlett's parents, "Mealy Mouth" for Melanie, "Dreamy Gentleman" for Ashley (I love that one). Scarlett is simply "the Other" or "Her."

Then there's GRENDEL, by John Gardner, wherein the monster reveals his side of the events in BEOWULF. Of course, creating variations on works in the public domain doesn't risk legal problems.

My own all-time favorite professionally published fanfic, the book I'd always wanted to write, is Fred Saberhagen's THE DRACULA TAPE (1975), a retelling of DRACULA in which the Count himself sets the record straight.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Gender Pronouns

Several years ago at a con session on the fantastic Pixar movie INSIDE OUT, starring personified emotions, someone in the audience asked why characters representing feelings had to be identified as male or female. Why did they need genders at all? The answer didn't occur to me until later: English doesn't have a neuter pronoun for a living, sapient creature. Since the characters of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust in the film couldn't be called "it," they had to be labeled either "he" or "she." French, Spanish, etc. classify all nouns as masculine or feminine, not just those that refer to living creatures, with pronouns to match. Some other languages such as German and Latin have masculine, feminine, and neuter. However, as I discovered more recently, this requirement to distinguish the sexes by grammatical gender isn't universal among Earth languages.

I was surprised to learn that many languages have no gender pronouns to identify male and female, e.g, Tagalog, Turkish, Estonian, and some Chinese dialects, among others. Some have grammatical gender categorized by traits other than biological sex, such as animate and inanimate. Here's the Wikipedia article on this topic:

Genderless Languages

The Wikipedia page on the broad subject of gender-neutral pronouns in languages with sex-linked gender distinctions, such as English:

Gender Neutrality in Languages with Gendered Pronouns

A detailed overview of grammatical gender, citing several examples that classify nouns according to criteria other than biological sex:

Grammatical Gender

An English speaker's mind is apt to be boggled by the vast number of personal pronouns in Japanese (mine certainly was upon my first exposure to this fact). Many are distinguished by degrees of formality. Not only third-person but first-person pronouns often have masculine or feminine connotations. Some are used predominantly by a particular sex but not always. And some are gender-neutral.

Japanese Pronouns

I don't hold with the Newspeak premise in NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR that language controls thought. (And I don't think many professional linguists nowadays accept that position.) However, available vocabulary does make it easier or harder to talk about certain concepts. I do wonder how American society might be different if English had no gender-specific pronouns. Would people who identify as nonbinary have an easier time if they didn't have to choose invented pronouns or the awkward singular "they"? Would transgender people have it easier if relieved of one difficulty, persuading others to refer to them by their preferred pronouns instead of the "dead" ones? I wonder how language affects such issues in countries with gender-neutral personal pronouns.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Creative Fakelore for Fun and Enlightenment

The January-February 2022 issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER includes an article by statistical ecologist Charles G. M. Paxton, narrating his experiment of creating an imaginary water monster to masquerade as an authentic legend. He was inspired by an account of an eighteenth-century ghost in London that turned out to be a hoax promulgated in the 1970s. Paxton wondered whether his lake monster could gain similar credence. One intriguing thing about this experiement, to me, is that not only did his invented sightings get retold as genuine by multiple sources, new reports of alleged historical sightings sprang up, independent of any effort on his part.

He decided to create, not a generic sea serpent like Nessie in Loch Ness, but a "monstrous aquatic humanoid." He located it in two freshwater lakes in England's Lake District that, as far as he knew, had no existing tradition of monster lore. Paxton named this creature Eachy and devised a false etymology for the word. He also invented a nonexistent book to cite as a source. After he had an article about Eachy uploaded to Wikipedia, references to the monster began to spread. Although the Wikipedia article on Eachy no longer exists, the Cryptid Wiki has a straightforward page on him or it as a real piece of folklore:

Eachy

The Cryptid Wiki piece mentions the earliest reported appearance of Eachy having occurred in 1873, an imaginary "fact" taken directly from Paxton's material. Moreover, in 2007 the monster sneaked into an actual nonfiction book, a cryptozoology guide by Ronan Coghlan. By January of 2008, Eachy T-shirts were being sold on the internet by someone unconnected to Paxton. At the time the Wikipedia Eachy page was deleted in 2019, it held the status of second-longest surviving hoax on that site.

What do we learn from this story? Paxton proposes that "the tale of the Eachy tells us the dangers of how Wikipedia can be subject to manipulation." As he mentions, however, in more recent years Wikipedia has tightened its standards and introduced more safeguards. On a broader scale, the Eachy hoax demonstrates the danger of how easily recorded history can be distorted or even fabricated from nothing, then accepted as fact. An important caution I'd note, as Paxton also alludes to, is the hazard of uncritically believing what appear to be multiple sources when in truth they're bouncing the same "facts" around in a self-referential echo chamber, repeating what they've picked up from previous sources in endless circularity. That phenomenon can be seen in a field I'm somewhat familiar with, scholarship on Bram Stoker's DRACULA. For instance, after an early biography suggested that Stoker might have died from complications of syphilis, numerous authors since then (in both nonfiction and novels) have accepted without question the truth of the assumption, "Bram Stoker had syphilis, which influenced the writing of DRACULA." The tale of Eachy also reinforces the obvious warning not to believe everything you read on the internet or even in books.

It's fascinating to me that a legend can be invented, disseminated, and perceived as authentic so quickly. Some authorities believe the story of Sawney Bean, the alleged patriarch of a sixteenth-century Scottish cannibal family, first reported in the NEWGATE CALENDAR centuries after the supposed events and repeated as fact in numerous publications since, was just such a fictional legend. And Sawney Bean's tale became deeply rooted in the public imagination long before the internet. In our contemporary electronic age, the chilling scenario in Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR comes to mind. If history is whatever is written, what happens when history becomes so easy to rewrite? That's one good reason why, even if it ever became possible to digitize and make available on the web every book in existence, we should still hang onto the physical books. Ink on paper can't be altered at whim like bytes in an electronic file.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

All, Right Now

If my title suggests an uplifting song about seduction and reassurance by the British rock group FREE, check out the deliberate comma.

Today's theme is urgency or immediacy.

SUBMIT ASAP

 

Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House is accepting submissions of complete, unagented works.

For more information on which genres are of interest, and on what to do, and how, follow this link: https://authorspublish.com/berkley-an-imprint-of-peguin-random-house-accepting-submissions-through-january-9th/

For those who completed a novel during NaNoWriMo, this is great timing.

COMING TO A HEAD IN MARYLAND … COMPULSORY LICENSES FOR EBOOKS

 Maryland would force authors to license their ebooks to libraries at a price that Maryland politicians --and those who fund them-- like. Compulsory licenses have previously only applied to songwriters, but times change with technology.

Read the warning from a well written musicians' blog:

https://musictechpolicy.com/2021/12/10/the-revenge-of-the-internet-archive-google-and-the-metashills-lead-the-long-march-through-state-houses-to-weaken-copyright/

The MTP blog contains a quote from an anonymous librarian excoriating the Internet Archive. The quote is music to a copyright enthusiast's ears.

"You claim [the Archive is a] charitable organization. Charitable organizations provide money from their own funds to those in need or they collect donations of money or property, voluntarily offered by the original owners, to distribute to those in need. Taking from others despite their objections and offering the stolen material to those in need does not fall into the description of a charitable organization. It is, as has been pointed out, looting.

Your activity undermines the copyright system for your own benefit and in the financial interests of some of the wealthiest corporations in history. As has been said, the Internet Archive is not a public service but a pirate website. You are not here to help others- you are helping yourself to others’ property. It’s unfortunate that your supporters can’t admit this, or don’t realize it."

The quote is older, but entertainment value sometimes trumps other considerations.

Here is a link to a publishers' lawsuit against Maryland: 

https://publishers.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/AAP-v.-Maryland.pdf

 

It is alleged that a similar copyright grab is on the governor’s desk in New York.

 

The Authors Guild has issued a strong statement as of December 9th.

https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/support-for-aaps-lawsuit-to-enjoin-marylands-library-ebook-licensing-law/

 

 

MUSIC FAIRNESS ACT... still time to act.

The free-thinking bipartisan team of a Democrat from Florida and a Republican from California introduced the American Music Fairness Act (AMFA), H.R. 4130 to help ensure that songwriters are fairly compensated when terrestrial AM/FM radio stations play their music. 

Other industrialized countries around the world make sure that their songwriters are paid, but owing to the current American laws, American songwriters cannot even be compensated by foreign countries when their work is exploited by foreign radio stations. 

The CopyrightAlliance.org calls on all creators to contact their Representative in Congress to urge their support for the American Music Fairness Act. They've made it easy. Just click on this link, fill out the brief form, and the CopyrightAlliance's campaign will automatically contact your Congressional representatives with an email—which is pre-written for your convenience—requesting their support.

https://p2a.co/fUuhVCp

KILL TWO BIRDS (to coin a phrase)

This is my adaptation of the Copyright Alliance's template, in which I also mentioned my dismay at the Maryland and alleged New York copyright grabs.

“I write to encourage you to support the American Music Fairness Act (AMFA), H.R. 4130, and give recognition to a terrestrial public performance right for sound recordings in the United States. Unlike the United States, most countries in the world require their AM/FM radio stations to compensate copyright owners of sound recordings when those works are played over the air. The USA does not do that, so, due to a system of reciprocity, this means that American copyright owners are prevented from being paid when their sound recordings are played over the air in other countries as well. The AMFA would fix this by establishing a terrestrial public performance right for sound recordings, and bringing U.S. copyright law in line with other industrialized nations around the world.

As an author, I know firsthand that the livelihoods of creative professionals depend on our right to be adequately and fairly compensated for our work. So, I am asking you today to show your support for creators like me by supporting and co-sponsoring the AMFA.

Moreover, the precedents and principles are important. It looks like the State of Maryland, and also perhaps the State of New York are proposing to create compulsory ebook licensing laws that would force unwilling authors to allow “libraries” to publish and distribute ebook copies of in-copyright works without the author having any input into terms or compensation.

Thank you for your assistance and support.”

Sometimes, one has to spit into the wind. 

If you are having trouble seeing Older Posts on the home page, look for a pink text link for More or Older Posts to the lower right of the Comments box.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ 

http://www.spacesnark.com/

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday