The Wisdom of Isaac Asimov

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

The Wisdom of Isaac Asimov

A few days ago was Isaac Asimov’s 99th birthday. (Rather, his official birthday. He knew he was born between Oct 4, 1919 and Jan 2, 1920, and since he hated the idea of being old, he took the latest date possible as his birthday.) One of the comments on a blog I was reading that day about the Good Doctor was the following:

“Story that Isaac told: Isaac sat in on a class where the professor was teaching about one of his stories.  He approached the professor after the class and said, ‘That story doesn’t mean that at all. I should know. I wrote it.’  And the professor looked at him and said, ‘So?’

And at that moment, Isaac said, he realized that the professor was right.  No matter what the author intended, what the reader got out of it was what was really there.”

If only JKR had his wisdom. I suggest that the official motto of DTCL should be the following:

Saith Isaac Asimov: No matter what the author intends, what the reader gets out of the story is what is really there.

P.S. Don’t stop commenting on sunnyskywalker’s thread below just because I’ve started a new one. The intricacies of the Fidelius Charm are entirely worth a thorough thrashing out.

Comments

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

The Children's Cooperative Book Center has been collecting statistics on characters of color ... So part of the "diversity is everywhere!" feeling is actually optical illusion ...

That's not the case in my limited experience. I haven't personally read much YA since HP though; I've kept up with the latest 'Young Wizards' by Diane Duane (who is ticking the boxes enthusiastically) and ... that might be it?

I also come across various reviews here and there and can't help but notice the egregious 'tick the boxes' in many of those cases, but also for the minorities across the other dimensions other than that of race - i.e. sexual orientation, religion and so forth.

JKR's environment then and now was not actually that different -

No, I don't buy that. The 'LGBTQ+XYZABC' acronym didn't exist twenty years ago. The phrase 'non binary' didn't make sense twenty years ago. Homosexual marriage was illegal and homosexuality was largely seen in a negative light twenty years ago. At least in mainstream media. That is most definitely not the case these days. And while there were groups pushing those issues in the 90's when HP was written the DIVERSTIY! push was nothing like the mainstream effort it is today.

[sunnyskywalker]

in my limited experience

Well, that's kind of the point of doing a broader survey, isn't it? Everyone's personal experiences are necessarily limited, and human brains are frankly terrible at drawing accurate statistical conclusions based on our impressions.

I'm not saying it's exactly the same, but there's a lot more lack of diversity and a lot less general support for diversity than Tumblr and Twitter would have you believe, is what I mean. The people JKR hangs out with on a day to day basis are probably her own age, and haven't changed in sweeping, massively transformative ways.

Not to mention, there was a lot more diversity in old stories than we give People Back Then credit for. Loki was arguably gender-fluid (he once gave birth to a horse while in mare form, e.g.). The Round Table included the Saracen brothers Sir Palamedes, Sir Safir, and Sir Segwarides; the black Sir Morien; and Parzival's older half-brother Feirefiz, who was mixed-race and had black-and-white patched skin (which sounds wild, but is kind of possible with vitilogo or chimerism). I really doubt medieval folks were ticking off 21st-century boxes. No one was going, "Guys, we have to add gender identity to Norse myths and make the Round Table more diverse so people centuries in the future will approve of it!" They had their own reasons for telling those stories. It's modern readers' faults if we edit diversity out of older stories in our imaginations.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to add, since, like you, I'm a fan of the Young Wizards:

Those books were always diverse, from the word go. From the very first book, they included a working-class (and very possibly mixed race, though definitely Irish American) girl, a Latino boy, and a gay couple. From the first book! In the 1980s!

And I think Duane was writing what she saw. One of the gay men was based on someone she knew, I believe, and she set the books in modern-day Long Island, a fairly diverse area.

I do think that new writers (like me) make a conscious effort to show diversity in their stories these days. This is not a bad thing! And sunnyskywalker is right; children's lit is still overwhelmingly white in spite of the new voices.