Literary bullies and Bibles

Chris Harrison’s Visualizing the Bible site has some fascinating graphs — Bible cross-references (it’s amazing how interconnected the books of the Bible are), a Biblical social network (ever wondered how popular David and Solomon really were? ;)), and the distribution of Biblical people and places. Thanks to Rikker for the heads-up.

Changing topics, fresh off the wire from the LibraryThing blog, we have Take our files, raw. Basically, they’re opening even the design of the site to user contributions. (I don’t think this means that they’ll automatically just use whatever people come up with, of course. But it does mean that if someone designs something better, there’s a good chance they’ll use it.) Kudos, LT. Good move.

And completing today’s line-up we have Shannon Hale’s post yesterday on the sub-humanization of non-mainstream genres, particularly children’s books:

In one way I’d expect the genre people to understand us, to be more conscious of the follies of trying to sub-humanize any other genre. I’d expect them to be slower to condemn, having been in the same boat since forever. But then again, maybe that’s the root of why they lash out. It’s a classic bully response — people have picked on me, so I’m going to pick on you.

No, I can’t try to understand. It’s the writer in me, trying to figure out the character behind the action in order to understand and not condemn. I can’t pretend to understand, but I just think it’s a shame.

Which reminds me — in that LTUE session I went to yesterday, Orson Scott Card said that science fiction is effectively dead. Why, you ask? Because everything that made science fiction special is now in the toolkit of mainstream, literary fiction, he said. I don’t know if I buy that, but it’s an interesting thought.

It sounds like Card assumes science fiction has to be on the fringe because until now it has been defined by the ways it lies outside the mainstream. However, I think you could say that although sci-fi’s inclusion in the mainstream blurs the lines between genres, it also makes sci-fi more alive than ever.

That does make sense of his statement, now that I think about it. And I agree with both you and Card — sci-fi is both dead and alive. :) As a genre, it’s dying, but as a concept, as a way of storytelling, as milieu and everything else that makes it what it is, it’s quite alive. It’s just becoming part of the bigger world. Its parts are being harvested and re-used in the mainstream machine. I think I’ll stop now. :P