Month: May 2014

by Doctor Science

The NY Times reports that students at a number of colleges are starting to request “trigger warnings” for classroom material. The story has been picked up all over the place, and articles and posts about it either say trigger warnings are censorship (and therefore bad), or the comments do.

This is bollocks. Trigger warnings aren’t censorship, they’re the opposite.

I can state this with some authority because I’ve actually seen trigger warnings used, in a variety of online settings, over a long period of time. Unlike the vast majority of recent commenters, I actually know what I’m talking about.

Regular readers here will have noticed that I use trigger warnings when I’m discussing rape and/or abuse. It’s so usual and customary in fanfic-dominated parts of the Internet that I hadn’t really noticed I was doing something that needed explanation, but now that the custom seems to be breaking out into the wider public I’ll explain why I use warnings and how college courses could benefit from them.

Fanfic writers and readers have been arguing about story warnings for a long time; other communities should take advantage of our hard-earned experience. In fact, I wonder if the students who are speaking up about this learned about such warnings in fandom, on Tumblr, or elsewhere on the Internet.

I’m cutting here as a trigger warning, because talking about the warnings means talking about the topics: rape, assault, PTSD, and vile and demeaning language.

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by Doctor Science

There are two American novels that have had unparalleled influence. Not “literary influence”, in the sense of influencing other writers, but works that have had a real effect on how many Americans think and act, and thus on the course of society and history itself.

For the 19th century, I’m obviously talking about Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. I’m afraid that for the 20th century, well, in the immortal words of John Rogers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Alas for American culture: Tolkien was British.

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by Doctor Science

In our discussion of the Hugo nominees we talked a little about Larry Niven’s Ringworld, which won the Hugo, Nebula *and* Locus awards — but not necessarily because it’s a good *story* (in the sense of “plot”). What makes Ringworld an sf classic is the world-building.

World-building as a term is normally used only to talk about sf & fantasy, but it’s a perfectly valid concept and source of literary joy, something that people read for.

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