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This blog is the work of an educated civilian, not of an expert in the fields discussed.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Fictional Musings

Someone asked me to pick up a romance novel and another one caught my eye with a catchy title and all.  It amazes me on some level that there are so many books out there, so many television programs and so forth.  More so since there is so much overlap.  Like there are a ton of shows that are basically mystery related.  There might be a hook of some sort (Hawaii, spy, goofball, legal, medical thriller etc.), but that is basically what a ton of stuff out there amounts to.  Toss in reality, really, it must be over a third.

So, you know, a great mixture of value and on some level, an ironic limited range. This is unfortunate -- it's like the Star Trek series.  There is just so much to examine there, and they did (not even going into the novels) cover a lot of ground.  But, the whole thing tended to amount to a sort of space western format. The future looked not that different in various away, except apparently the lack of seat-belts.  A major point of sci fi is to examine various perspectives that really tend to address current concerns though another world is purported to be involved. See, e.g., 1984.

I have seen every episode of the original series and all the movies up to the seventh (and the first second go around of Star Trek ... didn't really like it), so lest there be misunderstanding, realize these shows DID cover some good ground. I'm all for that sort of thing.  In the 1990s, e.g., Reboot, then on the cusp of computer animation, was a cartoon program that had some pretty serious themes. It has been noted that soap operas have covered lots of ground as have romance novels overall.

The one I picked up, e.g., concerned a rape victim. Among the overall typical romance plot (small town sheriffs seem a typical archetype), that is a pretty serious matter. In fact, the book had another incident of sexual violence, to me in a somewhat gratuitous fashion (a bit of what I call "not earning" the upsetting material). Toss in teen issues, family issues and some other material, rather busy really.  The most common bit of fiction probably has various interesting subtexts, if not always intentional.  Various people have covered this ground, which is not only appropriate to interpreting literature or something.  I find it overall pretty interesting.

Anyway, the book was decent, nothing special. So, won't name it, leaving this to be a generic discussion. It was part of a (book) series of loosely interconnected plots, written by different authors. [I only read this one.] Probably a typical deal (Star Trek fiction has many authors) and it's interesting to look how the various characters and such are handled differently in each case.

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