An online sf/f magazine presented a strongly worded negative review of Deborah Harkness's Discovery of Witches a couple of weeks back. Among other criticisms was DoW is merely another version of the Stephanie Meyers's series. As I find Meyers unreadable either as writing or as story, and yet did enjoy Harkness's novel so much that I'm looking forward to the next one, which should be out this summer, I have serveral takes on what this series will or may be. One of these takes became my comment to the SH's review, which included this:
Very clever writers, both Harkness and Collins learned a great deal from Meyers, and then grafted their own strengths on what they learned from Meyers: Harkness her academic Elizabethan era history of science scholarship, and updating to what an older woman finds romantic and sexy, and Collins her background in writing television and theater.
It's interesting in terms of the history of genre fiction to observe Meyers's books, justly or not so excoriated by so many, justly or not so adored by so many, sparking so much successful spawn -- and not least the E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey BDSM ladies' porn series, which was created out of Twilight fanfic and further datamining her own and others's fics, and initially self-published, then receiving a print publication for even more money. Like Meyers's books, these writers also have or are having movies produced from their works.
Not to mention the other night at the Aaron Burr exhibition and presentation, the presenter, a middle-aged balding lawyer, at one point said, "I'm one of those who insists you don't have to chose Team Alexander Hamilton or Team Aaron Burr, but rather, a thoughtful, historically informed person will find Hamilton and Burr equally fascinating, each of them with their considerable strengths and their considerable weaknesses, and they were more alike in many ways -- particularly their mutual weakness for the ladies -- than they were different."
Team Edward ... Team Jacob ... yay, Team!
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2 comments:
I mentioned Twilight in my latest post and you too have written about Meyer.
LOL.. An interesting coincidence.. :)
As all these other works are pop culture phenom, and there are all these descendants or at least relatives from Meyers, and so many either hate or love them ... Twilight 'verse is frequently referred to by so many -- who, like you and me have neither read nor watched. However, many people I do know have read and watched both, and if they haven't, their daughters or grand-daughters have, so there ya go.
Love, C.
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