Unofficial Guides and what J.K. Rowling is really afraid of

I am not sure how many of you are following the recent J.K. Rowling vs the Unofficial Guide to Harry potter Universe fight. I have been keeping track of it because of the fact that I am a writer, a scholar and book reviewer (is it a surprise that I am opinionated).

What is going on is that Rowling is claiming that only she has the right to write about the Harry Potter universe, as in she claims that she is the only person that has the right to write a guide book about her fictional universe. And that an unofficial guide to her work will decease the value of her own guide book.

For the record, I own about a half dozen guide books to the Lord of the Rings universe, and am likely to buy a seventh if I run across it. I am not that much into the Harry Potter universe; but if I was, I am quite sure that I would end up with both the official and all the unofficial guide books that were available. It is just the type of person I am.

I am not alone in things like that. I know Trekkers who own every guide book to the Star Trek universe there is, official and otherwise. Same holds true for Star Wars fans. When I was still playing Magic the Gathering, I brought every guide book I ran across (I have no time to play anymore); the same is true of my Role Playing days (Dungeons and Dragons among others).

If you are a fan who buy guide books, odds are that you are going to buy a lot of them. And publishers and film companies know that fan sites, unofficial guides, and word of mouth help sell more copies.

So what is J.K. Rowling really up to? What fear is driving her? Simple, she wants to make sure that she, and only she, ever writes any stories that are set in the Harry Potter universe. She does not want Harry Potter to become another Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, or Captain Kirk. After she dies, she wants to make sure that no one ever revives her characters and writes about them. In other words, she wants her universe to be as unchangable as the Bible.

On one hand, I understand what she wants to accomplish, but I can not consider it good news if she succeeds. She already has the right to make sure that only she can write stories about the Harry Potter universe. If she wants to put out of business fan stories of her universe, she can; and her bottom line will suffer accordingly. She has those rights already.

It is the right that she is trying to seize that worries me. Basically, she is saying that only she has the right to write a guide book and discuss her work. This is bad news for scholars and book reviewers. For years, publishing houses have been seeking a way to make sure that only good reviews get written about their offerings. It is not J.K. Rowling that I fear; it is those who will if she wins, take this victory and use it as a weapon against book reviewers, critics, and scholars hostile to their offerings.

For the record, I write hostile reviews. I just reviewing three Enochian Chess books by Steve Nichols. (Enochian Chess (Book One): Foundations ; Enochian Chess (Book Two): Practical ; Enochian Chess (Book Three): Alpha et Omega.) And I am quite sure that Nichols would love to roast me over warm coals for how I treated his books. But he can't. If I feel that a book is not necessarily the world's best on a subject, I am allowed to say so. And I did.

I am a writer, book reviewer, scholar and a Golden Dawn member. All of these depend upon literature being able to be discussed, reviewed, and argued about. Without the freedom to do so, we are all in big trouble. Remember in 1984, the first thing they did was get rid of the writers.

Using school as a setting

One of the things that used to bug me is the number of writers who use school as a setting. Like for instance, in science fiction of a couple of decades ago, school and colleges were a common setting. Every fantasy series seems to use school at one time or another. There is also that tendency in military stories to use boot camp as a setting.

As I said, it used to bug me. Not any more.

I think that my change in heart about it is that I became a college student myself. Until that point, I did not realize how life changing school could be. Especially college.

Nor did I realize how deeply set the imagery of college could be set into a person's brain. At least once a month I dream that I can't find the room where a class is taking place, or that I forgot my locker combination and need to get my homework out of that locker right now.

I have also came to the realization that people must be curious about how certain profession are trained, and what makes them react the way that they do. Soldiers, spies and magicians all are molded into something not quite normal (compared to normal human reactions and behavior) by their training. Seeing their training allows us to add another layer to their character.

Whether it is Camp Arthur Carrie or Hogwarts, using a school or bootcamp as a setting does have certain points to be said for it. Having the character be a student allows the author to be able to expound on technology or the philosophy that drives a profession without having to resort to the device of having characters explain things to one another that they should already know. "As you know, we must recover after every spell we cast. The more powerful the spell, the longer we need to rest. Therefore after we cast the lightning bolts at the enemy formation, we fall back leaving the field to the infantry..." It is better to show a character passing out in boot camp after attempting to cast a second lightning bolt than to subject the poor reader to the rather dry technical explaination.

Despite its uses, there is a major drawback to using schools as a setting. Quite simply, everyone has been in school (or almost everyone--there are the home schooled, though they are extremely rare). If you do not portray it right, you have destroyed your reader's suspension of disbelief. A hard enough blow in the form of a fundemental mistake and your reader will put your story down--a fatal mistake for a writer. Which is why I won't be writing about the horrors of being a grad student for several more years.