Came across "Potter Series Casts a Spell Over Entire Genre" story via SFCanada list, where S.W. Mayse, author of Merlin's Web and Awen (Welsh historical novel), posted the link. The article reports a 10-15% increase in book sales for heroic fantasy type fiction (Martin and Jordan in particular) and attributes it to the popularity of the Harry Potter books.

I have two thoughts about this. First, that writing and reading is a community affair not a commodity market, which means that the success of one author can spill over into success for others because the market grows. I seriously like that concept. It feels right to me. My second reaction is that finally people are showing signs of being fed up with doom, gloom and darkness and enjoying heroes again: heroes that sometimes fail, and stories with darker streaks than my generation encountered as young adults, but at the very least stories that do not frigging glorify "the dark side". That trend has always disturbed me. It reminds me of the syndrome in which victims identify with the abuser because they desire the powerful role not the weaker one, and thereby trumpets the morally discredited cry of "Might Makes Right". Which is bullshit. Might is just might. Right is something that history, and each and every one of us with the brains to tackle situational ethics from a wholistic point of view, still have the job of figuring out long after the bombs have dropped and the swords rusted.

As far as realism goes, and idea often touted as justification for the triumph of evil over good, I would like to register another "bullshit", for the record. That may be true in the short term but usually depends upon a betrayal of trust, for success. Like stealing, it works only so long as the victims have some trust left to be violated. In the long term, a society without shared values and trust-worthy operating assumptions, is nothing more than a society at the end of its rope. Plenty of injustice can cloak itself in those laws, justifying criticim, and power gets abused in the best of worlds, but productivity in a setting where no one can trust anyone else is pretty much nil. Unless, I suppose, the sort of labor to be performed is so unskilled that people can perform it out of sheer fear for their lives and in a chronic state of either terror or depression.

posted by Lynda at 08:50   comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 1 comments