Authors. Feh.

[cnoocy]

Apparently Ray Bradbury has been saying that Fahrenheit 451 is not a book about censorship, but one about television. And everyone is up in arms about it trying to prove that he once said different.

Can I just say it doesn't matter? If there was ever a clear piece of evidence that the author is not the ultimate authority on a work, it's right here. Stop paying attention to Bradbury and talk about the book. Talk about the book as an anti-censorship work. Don't rebut Bradbury in terms of his brain. It's kind of his turf, so it's not going to go well for you.

I notice that a lot of the people commenting on this are themselves authors, so maybe they have trouble letting go of their own, um, authority. If you're an author, learn to be one of many readers of the book you've written. Find and read Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's "Pharaoh's Daughter" because she's an author who gets it.

Comments

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, the first time I really noticed this was with Spider Robinson. I used to really like him (but then, I used to really like Heinlein, too), though with his Callahan's stories, I kind of felt he was starting to slip a little, and Callahan's Lady was a little much. Then he had a series of new Callahan's stories in Asimov's (I think), which I read--they were at the library, which was right across the street from my apartment at the time--and I thought, "Wow, hey, these are pretty good. Maybe he's back." When they were collected and expanded into a book, I got the book from the library, and there was this really, really clear point at which the collected stories, which had gone through the editor of Asimov's, stopped, and Robinson's freeform "I'll just write whatever the hell I want" started.

Sorry, that anecdote had no point. I just felt like telling it.

[aspartaimee.livejournal.com]

right. we see this in movies as well, like Peter Jackson's "King Kong." sure, LoTR worked, but that doesn't mean the man should go unchecked.