(I struggled and struggled with that sentence to make it non-combatant and non-sanctimonious sounding, and I am not sure I succeeded. I'm not trying to confront people here or dazzle them with my righteousness)
But it also means that a lot of you have a great reading experience awaiting you. It's a fantastic book on many levels, besides addressing the very issue that we're talking about here. Quick setup: a modern middle-class black woman, married to a very nice white man, is suddenly pulled back in time to the person of her slave ancestor. She gets back, and it happens several more times. Each time she has horrible adventures, and uncovers more of the hostory of her family. She accomplishes some things, at a terrible cost. Her husband gets involved. It's a fast and gripping read.
I can't recommend Octavia Butler more, in general.
]]>So it may well be that there's either a UK/US divide, or that Kindred is largely read by different people to Butler's other work because they're not found together.
]]>Your comment doesn't sound combative to me - recommendations for books rarely do mind! But I feel less guilty about not having read a book that hasn't been published in the UK.
]]>The other and more controversial factor is the whole African-American cultural issue. Yes, there's an Anglo-Caribbean black community in the UK. But it's a much smaller proportion of the population than the African-American community in the USA, the historic experience of plantation slavery was quite different, the subsequent emigrant experience is way different, and so on. So the significance of a novel like Kindred is very different in the UK context than in the US market -- it's less relevant to the origin story of the audience.
(This is not an assertion that there is no interest in the history of slavery in the UK, or that the British market is intrinsically racist, or anything like that; merely that it's seen as stuff that happened to other peoples' ancestors, not our ancestors.)
]]>Of course I spend more time in 2nd hand bookshops so my view of what is available is a bit skewed by what has sold well in the past, but there are a lot of authors you just don't see much of in the UK.
]]>Likely because nobody thought of it, or if they did, they didn't want the communicator to become a "magic amulet" script problem.
Asimov once mentioned that writers had no problem visualizing computers the size of planets, but none of them had visualized the pocket calculator.
]]>What TRX said, of course, and a few other things.
The dramatic function was that it was a communicator; it let characters talk to each other. And since it's on a TV show, the prop's functions are what they need to be and what can be explained to the viewer in the available time. Notice that the very name is "communicator" - as soon as it's mentioned the viewer knows what this machine does. Over time it developed that there were other features. It contained a locating beacon, making it easy to lock on the transporter. (And it's a "transporter" not a "Barret Gate" or a "floople"; again the viewer knows what to expect.) At least once characters jury-rigged a sonic weapon.
Making it complicated would have been detrimental to the story. Notice that the gadgets used by Kirk and friends were all conceptually easy to understand: the phaser is a gun, the communicator is a radio, the tricorder detects stuff, the feeping things Dr McCoy waves over people are medical instruments.
]]>LD: I take pains with historical detail because otherwise, what's the point? But people get very pompous about all this. The Falco books were always intended to be light-hearted, almost spoofs. It's a joke to take a Forties-style gumshoe and put him two thousand years ago. And if I were to be really accurate linguistically I'd be writing in Latin – not even classical Latin but some street argot that we don't actually know. He does have attitudes people find modern, but they are grounded in fact: Juvenal's famous Satire against women shows all kinds of feisty dames. Seneca wrote a famous piece loathing the brutality of gladiatorial shows and the nasty types who went to watch. Slaves were supposed to be part of the 'familia', and should be treated as such. The legal definition of marriage was that two people decided to live together, that's all. http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/interview_view.aspx?interview_id=43
I liked Willis' "Blackout", but I couldn't finish the sequel. My favorite book of hers is "Bellwether." The little vignettes of historical fads and fashions at the beginning of each chapter make me want to invent a time machine just to go see where those things actually came from.
]]>We're also partway into the domestication of fallow deer as well.
]]>I seldom shoot red deer at more than 100m, and prefer my to take my shot at no more than fifty. However, I have the advantage of stalking in fairly heavy scrub and forest, so often the deer and I are basically on top of each other. I don't use sporting rifles, though, preferring peep sighted range rifles or issue infantry rifles pre-1945. Heart/lung shot is generally the most reliable, although if I'm at fifty metres or closer, I'll take a headshot.
]]>The title of this post feels perfectly reasonable, and it feels like it ought to be a really common trope, I'm just having trouble thinking of concrete examples. Well, not in grownup fiction, anyway; the Magic Treehouse books (a.k.a. "Jack and Annie") are surely time tourism if anything is, and so are some E. Nesbit and Edward Eager books, and it's not hard to think of some more time tourism kids books. But if time tourism actually is a common genre trope, I ought to be able to name a half dozen stories that are clearly part of the SF genre, and I can't. Which makes me wonder if I actually understood the original post as well as I thought I did; maybe "time tourism" doesn't mean the same thing to me as it does to everyone else.
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