Controversies and a Squee

Let me start by wishing everyone who celebrates it a Happy Easter this Sunday morning. Be safe and enjoy family and friends.

Now down to business. This week has seen a couple of controversies in the world of publishing. The first began last Sunday night with the 60 Minutes broadcast. One of the stories centered on the facts of Greg Mortenson's best selling "memoir" Three Cups of Tea. In case you missed the story or the follow-up articles, questions have been raised about the accuracy of some of the claims Mortenson made in the book, including whether he actually became separated from his group and wandered into the small village on his own, needing medical assistance and the villagers nursed him back to health. Another part of the book that was questioned was Mortenson's claim he'd been kidnapped by the Taliban. The 60 Minutes piece also raised questions about how much of the money raised by Mortenson's charity -- monies that are supposed to be used to build schools in Afghanistan and other areas -- is put to use.

I don't know whether the inconsistencies raised by 60 Minutes are the result of conscious fabrication by Mortenson and his co-author, editing issues or what. But it does point out a problem that isn't new when it comes to memoirs. Who bears the responsibility for fact-checking and for determining if the book is a non-fiction memoir or a fictionalized memoir?

Remember this isn't the first time this sort of situation has arisen. Oprah got burned by James Frey and his book A Million Little Lies. There was Matt McCarthy’s Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit. When the so-called facts in the book were challenged, “Carolyn Coleburn, the vice president and director of publicity for Viking, which is an imprint of Penguin Group USA, said, “We rely on our authors to tell the truth and fact-check.” Herman Rosenblatt’s memoir, Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived was cancelled after it was revealed that, while he was a Holocaust survivor, he’d fabricated the details of how he met his wife. There are a number of others, including Clifford Irving's supposed bio of Howard Hughes.

I detailed some of the responses to the 60 Minutes piece here. One response that came out after I initially wrote about the episode reminds us that the real scandal here -- if there is a scandal -- lies not with the publishing industry but with the charity. While that is true, at least to a degree, the fact that this sort of problem continues in publishing is a scandal. Publishers have to take some responsibility for ensuring that the book they are selling to the public as a non-fiction memoir is just that -- non-fiction. It would have been very easy for Viking to contact some of the people named in the book to see if what Mortenson claimed happened did and in the way he detailed. They need to take to heart this comment from Ta-Nehisi Coates from The Atlantic: "At some point, publishers are going to have to start fact-checking memoirs. At least a little bit. No disrespect to my editors, but I know having done a memoir, that it is shockingly easy to create fiction and claim that it's real."

But that wasn't the only controversy of the week. After it was announced that Jennifer Egan had won the Pulitzer, the shine was tarnished some -- not by critics decrying that her book shouldn't have won, but by Egan herself. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Egan took what appears to be a potshot at genre fiction and the authors who write it. Also, she has an opportunity to condemn plagiarism and doesn't; in fact, she appears to tacitly give a hat tip to it -- as long as you do it to the right authors.

Over the past year, there’s been a debate about female and male writers and how they come off in the press. Franzen made clear that “Freedom” was going to be important, while others say that Allegra Goodman was too quiet about “The Cookbook Collector.” Do you think female writers have to start proclaiming, “OK, my book is going to be the book of the century”?

Anyone can say anything, that’s easy. My focus is less on the need for women to trumpet their own achievements than to shoot high and achieve a lot. What I want to see is young, ambitious writers. And there are tons of them. Look at “The Tiger’s Wife.” There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models? I’m not saying you should say you’ve never done anything good, but I don’t go around saying I’ve written the book of the century. My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower.

For more on this, I recommend you check out this post at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Read the post all the way to the end...it seems this isn't the first time Egan has taken shot at the author of The Tiger's Wife and the fact she didn't plagiarize the right sort of authors.

Finally, a squee. Nocturnal Origins, which has been available as an e-book is now available in print. You can order it from Amazon and it will soon be available through B&N and elsewhere. If you want to get it at your local bookstore, it should be available for them to order within the next few days.

So just where did that come from?

"Am I a plagiarist?"
It's a question which I think every honest author thinks somewhere down the line (the dishonest ones I assume know they are, and lie about it). I recall an unlikely Indian name in a 1970 sf novel. It stuck in my head. Years later I came across it another sf book (which bore no relation to the first book in content) I asked an Indian friend of mine - he said it was so implausible it had to be a made-up name. One British, one American Author - both people I respect, both people who would be shocked at the idea of idea-theft, let alone plagiarism. I think it was a name that stuck in your head, whereas the book was non-memorable to be honest, and was purely accidental (in both cases the character was a minor redshirt). But I think if we had to be truthful withour selves all our work (and I mean ALL of us) builds on the foundations of past sf/fantasy. The genre has its own conventions and shaping influences - it's why the work of some the 'literati' who pour scorn on sf and then write it, claiming that 'it's not science fiction' often read rather like 1930's fan-fic with literary pretentions. (Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood spring to mind - actually, Margaret, Squids in Space represent less than 0.0001% of the sf books I've read. Precisely 2 books, one of which, Mother of Demons, where the squids are not in space, is a better philosophical / sociological piece of sf than just about anything else written in the last 40 years) And - with the exception of sf-writers who have developed that terrible ailment Literaripretentitus themselves - only read and enjoyed by the sort of reader who would never lower themselves to sf. In other words, unsophisticated sf-readers without a background in the conventions of the genre, so they think these works good and original. I suppose this might imply that someone who came at this afresh from a non-sf background might produce something new and exciting. I've seen a few non-readers attempts over the years. (I used to be a fairly active member of Critters.) In most cases it is very easy to ID the movie/TV series that they were drawn from - or the youthful brush with HG Wells or Verne or a cheap pulp story. (You can't escape some form of sf. It is pervasive, often in the worst form.) Where I think there really are some exciting possibilities is where writers learn the conventions and foundation of the genre, but also cross-fertilise from others (yes, unlike Ms. Winterson and Atwood, I think one can learn and adapt a great deal from other genres, and one should read a fair selection from them, rather than sneer from ignorance. Each of them has value. Romance, Mystery, Horror, even modern literary novels. To believe otherwise is akin to xenophobia, which is fine for stupid bigots, but not really something to aspire to). Or where they draw a different cultural background into the mixture. We've seen a little Japanese and Chinese creeping into fantasy particularly, but I think the sleeping giant is probably India, where English is widely read and understood, and is often a first language, but the culture is as unique as European or Chinese or African - without the language wall.

Anyway - I've strayed from what got me onto this topic - I was working on a proposal for a fantasy story... and getting the cald grue. It all worked. It actually seemed to be fitting into a pre-ordained path. I knew precisely where the story was going.
It's an unusual aspect of a very well-known mythology- but we know it from its derivative or its medieval derivative of that derivative version, and the authors that went there went down one layer, not two (at least as far as I know). But I felt I was borrowing a narrative from something else I'd read. When Kate gets here, her even more extensive knowledge of fantasy than mine is in for a grilling. I've had this before - where I thought I had a great idea and story line and several people told me 'that's Stargate' - which I had not at that stage come across. What I had come across and been influenced by is what I suspect was at least one of the original seeds for that - ONE STEP FROM EARTH.

So: how do you stop yourself from doing this? I'm a mass of the imprints of several hundred thousand books inside that gurgling splurting grey goo I call my brain. They muddle and mix and churn. And, duh, sometimes I swear because of the influences you find yourself 'channeling' other writers (I wrote something - far less well - than Sir Terry Pratchett, that he published 10 years after I'd written it. No. He DID NOT STEAL MY IDEA. We just obviously had some of the same influences. I was pleased.) And do others of you channel yourselves deliberately down a style and voice by immersing in that author or authors? (ie for the WIZARD of KARRES - I read (surprise) nothing but James H Schmitz, for several weeks before and for the duration. For DRAGON'S RING, I 'coloured' myself with Scott Rohan, Zelazny, Beagle, Nix and DWJ, for SLOW TRAIN, Heinlein (duh, surprise) Clarke, Niven, Simak and Harry Harrison's CAPTIVE UNIVERSE)

Plagiarism and Axolotl Roadkill

Why do authors plagiarise?

Traditionally, there were two reasons:

1. They couldn't write but had a fantasy of being an author, and

2. They could write but writing is hard work and it is far easier, and quicker if you are chasing a deadline, to copy someone else's work.







Sometimes both reasons apply.

See:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/738lfddv.asp

Then a few years ago in 2006, a new phenomena emerged. It started with a teen chick-lite book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life".

This was written by Kaavya Viswanathan, a daughter in a high-achieving Indian family. She was pushed very hard to go to an Ivy League University, attending various booster courses for gifted children, eventually ending up with IvyWise who apparently process children to get them into the aforesaid Ivy League. Ivywise passed her on to a book packager, Alloy Entertainment who helped her 'conceptualise' her novel in return for a 50% cut.

It was duly published but within three weeks accusations of plagiarism surfaced. Chunks were lifted from the work of Megan McCafferty, Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot, TD Hidier, and even Salman Rushdie.

Kaavya's book was a composite. This has become increasingly a problem in the academic world. The cut and paste generation seems to have trouble understanding that a quote must be a quote, not just lifted and incorporated in one's own work. The question arises whether Kaavya really understood what she was doing.

A similar situation has just arisen in Europe. Helene Hegemann, 17, has just published a novel, Axolotl Roadkill, about the debauchery of the Berlin club scene. And a cracking good read it is, resulting in it being shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Fair. Like Kaavya, Helene come from a high-achieving family - her father is professor of Dramaturgy (wot us plebs call playwriting) at, wait for it, Leipzig.

The problem is that chunks of the novel turn out to have been lifted without credit from a novel called Strobo.

Helene has an interesting new defence against a plagiarism charge. She was not plagiarising but 'mixing', 'entering into a dialogue with the original author', indulging in 'intertexuality' - after all, says Helene, there is no such thing as originality.

Strabos publishers disagree, as do their lawyers, who have extracted a fee.

However, the book is selling and she is still up for the Leipzig literary award, who apparently know all about the copying but discount it as a modern art form. In contrast, Kyaava's book was withdrawn - the poor girl has been forced to retrain as a lawyer.

Is this what the ancient Leipzig University (founded 1409) teaches its students? Is the East German rot that deep?

Am I a dinosaur? Is it just me or is this just plain wrong?