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Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
Aug. 3rd, 2006 04:37 pmSequel to The Eyre Affair. Literary Detective Thursday Next is dealing with her sudden fame, pregnancy, the eradication of her husband from the timeline in order to force her to work for megacorp Goliath by going into books, the thing where someone is trying to kill her, her training as a Jurisfiction (hee) agent to ensure the integrity of books, and the impending end of the world.
Weird, fun, metafictional. Thursday slides in and out of books and her brand of reality, and there are some great little touches like communication via textual footnotes between people in fiction and people in reality. Mostly, these books are a big conglomeration of “hey, isn’t this neat?” saved by the fact that actually, yes, most of the things really are pretty freaking neat (though I say again, WTF with the random vampire subplot?).
I do want to say, though, that these books are a perfect exemplar of the ways our IP and copyright systems are broken. Thursday does her Jurisfiction apprenticeship with Miss Havisham, and every other “real” fictional character she interacts with is in the public domain. I should also point out that these characters are explicitly extra-textual, with lives and personas outside the pages of the books they hail from – Fforde’s Miss Havisham drives motorboats, enjoys high-speed chases, and wears running shoes. But Fforde’s publisher would never permit him to work in a character who isn’t in the public domain, as it would be economically prohibitive even just to use a well-known name, irregardless of the personality attached. Fforde, being no fool, likely knows better than to even try. And if that isn’t a chilling effect, I don’t know what is.
Weird, fun, metafictional. Thursday slides in and out of books and her brand of reality, and there are some great little touches like communication via textual footnotes between people in fiction and people in reality. Mostly, these books are a big conglomeration of “hey, isn’t this neat?” saved by the fact that actually, yes, most of the things really are pretty freaking neat (though I say again, WTF with the random vampire subplot?).
I do want to say, though, that these books are a perfect exemplar of the ways our IP and copyright systems are broken. Thursday does her Jurisfiction apprenticeship with Miss Havisham, and every other “real” fictional character she interacts with is in the public domain. I should also point out that these characters are explicitly extra-textual, with lives and personas outside the pages of the books they hail from – Fforde’s Miss Havisham drives motorboats, enjoys high-speed chases, and wears running shoes. But Fforde’s publisher would never permit him to work in a character who isn’t in the public domain, as it would be economically prohibitive even just to use a well-known name, irregardless of the personality attached. Fforde, being no fool, likely knows better than to even try. And if that isn’t a chilling effect, I don’t know what is.