Wednesday 27 March 2019

What is Good?

The future of all books, to be sold on a secondhand stall.

And not only that, but what is remembered?

The latter question is probably more important than the former, because if writer's and or their works are not remembered, then no matter how good they may or may not be, no one will read them.

A thought triggered after I came across an article bemoaning the fact that bookshops don't stock new authors. 

In the past, works have been lost for lots of different reasons. Fires, earthquakes, and other disasters have played their part. I posit that in the future that quantity will also play a part in works being lost, for the simple reason that so much more is being written now than was written even just a hundred years ago.

I propose Pollard's Law:
Ninety-nine percent of everything written, and the names of their creator's, will be forgotten, lost in time.
Besides that, what is good is down to the assessment of others yet to come. Or if you prefer, what is good is a matter of taste, and tastes change. Patricia Wrede has a piece here, but there are many other writers who have said similar things too.

So, looking back over the last week what have I been doing?

I've gotten back my draft of The Bureau with a list of corrections: errors and omissions that need to be addressed.

In the meantime, I'm writing a creation myth for an alien race that appears in my next novel, Two Moons, which is tasking me. That's it for now, catch you on the bounce.
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2 comments:

  1. RogerBW28 March 2019 at 18:44

    To crush your enemies, see their books driven before you, hear the lamentation of their publishers?

    I work on a slightly different principle: any piece of data tends ultimately to be either available to nobody or available to everybody. The Internet Archive is being backed up across a bunch of places; it would be really hard to destroy that. On a smaller scale, Project Gutenberg will fit on pretty much any modern laptop. But commercial books that are locked up behind a paywall, or some other sort of DRM, or just some fancy format… they can simply vanish, become completely unusable, unindexable, gone.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1.  Ashley29 March 2019 at 18:42

      True, but there will be so much stored that choosing what to read will mean most will go unread.

      Delete

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