cjh@csin.UUCP (Chip Hitchcock) (02/03/84)
In response to your message of Mon Jan 23 04:29:22 1984: My, but you're cute when you flame! You [look] just like Harlan Ellison, even if "Creighton" is about the most unJewish name I've seen on the net. Now that I've got your attention? I don't claim to have a writing daemon, although I have exorcised things through writing (my particular daemon is music, and I haven't tried to compose anything in quite a while because the gap between what I can write and what I can perform is so great). But I wonder how you feel about editors (especially considering that any editor that publishes you will probably have already worked over more books than you will put out in a lifetime, and will assume that your work needs same). Perhaps it's the thought of not having final say over changes that are published under your name? If so, you'd better set the type yourself as it's the only way you'll get veto power. I'm not completely unsympathetic, but I know enough history to know that talent and temperament aren't linked (even if they aren't mutually exclusive). Let me give you another slant closer to the reason this argument started. When I taught a course in science fiction a few years ago, I tried to emphasize a point that regular/fulltime teachers (I was a chemist becoming a computer-pusher) mostly can't or won't touch---that SF is a living, contemporary art form, not a fossil that holds still while you pick at apart from a safe (temporal) distance. One of the ways I did this was to show how many of the works were written with the prejudices and assumptions of a particular audience in mind, and ask the class to look for the assumptions of both audience and author. (Of course, this doesn't apply just to SF---it's very instructive (some would say absolutely necessary) to read Shakespeare this way.) Many of the deepest of these biases have to do with gender; the effect on the reader of changing of pronouns in Le Guin's THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS is a classic example (but consider the impact of the chapter that opens "The king was pregnant"), although there are many others --- imagine the implausibility of the plot line of Clare Booth's THE WOMEN applied to men. One of the values of books is the chance they offer us to examine ourselves against an external yardstick---not simply "How would I react in this situation" but "Why do I react this way to [this situation]/[these people]?" (Unless you're in complete [political] accord with the author, you can find yourself disagreeing with, at the least, the positive or negative light in which the author presents given characters.) If a work is not completely trivial, almost any plausible method of casting new light on it is worth trying (and if exchanging male and female is not plausible, either the work is too concerned with plumbing or it has irretrievable biases to be watched for). I don't think there was much support put forward for indiscriminate reversals, or for publishing such revisionist versions as the sole "correct" version of a work; but the illumination to be gained from such reversals, the new depths (or lack thereof) to be found, are undeniable.