The content of her characters was Re: Nebula awards prelim ballot posted

[pippin_999]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., Andrew MacIan 
<andrew_macian at y...> wrote:

> The substantial argument, presuming there is one, is
> that their is a specific award for YA/children's lit
> in the competition....and that is only one, beside
> taste/artistic merit, that holds any water for me.
> 
> Also, as mentioned in a post to John, Hugos are pretty
> market sensitive, and that might well have a major
> part in this, too.

None of the great names Rowling is said to fall short of were 
nominated for last year's Hugo. I haven't read  the other two 
nominated books, and it doesn't seem anyone else has either, 
though I have read Clarke, Asimov, Herbert, Card, Gibson and 
Pullman. 

As far as taste/artistic merit goes, IMO, the only one of the above 
who compares to JKR for sheer magnetic story-telling power is 
Herbert. I'll allow that compared to the masters, JKR's world 
building is slapdash on occasion and her sentence structure 
can be sloppy. OTOH, she has surmounted one of the major 
weaknesses of the genre. She writes dialogue that is  both 
memorable and credible as conversation. I honestly can't say 
that about any of the others, though I've read some of them till the 
covers crumbled. 
	

Granted, the whole  "kid grows up to be a hero with the aid of 
magical powers" plot is  considered more suitable for children.  
Time, that magician, will indeed transform our children into  
older, more capable and more attractive beings, if we are patient 
and they  but  faithful and brave.  If Goblet of Fire was only  about 
that, it might be considered a children's book. As adults we 
cannot look for any such magic,  and if we wish to be 
transformed further we must do it ourselves. But I think the HP 
books are about something more, something that ties in with 
Ebony's Martin Luther King post. 


MLK's dream was that his children would live in a world where 
they would be judged on the content of their characters. How we 
were supposed to go about determining the content of anyone's 
character, absent experience, MLK did not explain. As Tabouli 
points out, cultural clues don't work in the case of someone from 
a different culture.


How do we decide whom to trust? If we want to build a more 
equable world, we can't rely on the network of people we already 
know because that's exclusionary.  We can't rely on 
appearances, because they are misleading. It might be helpful if 
we had a device  like the Sorting Hat, which looks inside your 
head and tells what you are. Or would it? Would we label some 
character traits as "bad" when the truth is more complex?   

Rowling obviously intends her adult readers to ask such 
questions, and they are absolutely beyond the scope of the child 
reader, who can't quite understand why Quirrel was the villain 
and not Snape. 

Pippin