Burn baby, burn

Thanks Overlord Tomala, I’ll take it from here.

My chosen topic is –

Tomala, stop it. I’m the co-author, I’m the author of this post. Play nice.

Right, as I was saying – Oh look Tomala, there’s Evil Rand slapping Uru hackers’ wrists!

Good, that’ll distract her for a good 5 minutes. The subject of this post is Book Burning.

Take a read at this, I’ll wait.

Welcome back. As you can see, I’m going to criticize this scenario a bit.

First of all, there is nothing wrong with disliking a creative work. There is nothing wrong to say that a particular creative work goes against your beliefs. That’s your freedom of expression right there.  With book burning, you’re just being downright ignorant.

Here’s what you think/wish happens when you perform a book burning:

Author: Nooooooooooooooo, my beloved book! I’ll never write something like that again.

Publisher: Noooooooooooooo, our prodigy! We’ll never publish something like that again.

Bookstore: Nooooooooo, they burned a book! We’ll never stock something like that again.

Doesn’t that sound far fetched? Well, here’s what actually happens:

Author: Yay, I sold more books! I’ll be able to expand it into a series.

Publisher: People like these kinds of books, let’s publish more like them.

Bookstore: There’s a huge demand for this, we’ll reorder more to meet demand.

(and a few more)

Nature: WTF dude? Haven’t you heard of this global warming thing?

You: Oh, I seem to have wasted my money.

Another route is to go all out against it and try to beat it with more fury than a power ranger on steroids.

You: X is bad! Do not touch X! X killed my wife and kids!

Audience: Oh, what is X?

You: X is an abomination! It goes against our beliefs.

Audience: Don’t worry, we won’t.

(First thing written in Google? X, of course)

I don’t think there’s ever been a book burning in my country. Not in my lifetime at least. (My country is Malta, by the way, the country that seems to be very popular with people wanting to get out of Libya right now). I can’t say the same for authorities speaking against a book.

Since Malta’s religion is defined as Catholic, there was quite a stir when The Da Vinci Code was being filmed. (Some scenes were filmed in Malta under the incognito title of Roslyn, but they were not in the theatrical cut; I guess the parents of the child-extras were none too pleased when they found out that they were tricked). Nauturally, this aroused the curiosity of people and lots of us who went to see it. I was one of them.

For the record, there was also a minor controversy because of violence deemed excessive in The Passion of The Christ. People died during the screenings, but not in Malta I believe. In the end, the film was interpreted as a “what Jesus Christ suffered for us” story so all was fine.

When I attended a talk about The Da Vinci code, I also learned about His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. This got turned into a film as well, although there was a small debate around it. Since the bulk of the controversy rested with the latter two books, most people didn’t get why the film was controversial. Since there doesn’t seem to be profitable to adapt the latter two books, it’ll be safe to say that most people will never find out why they were controversial.

Lastly, Angels and Demons was adapted. There was little mention of it as being controversial in my country, so its safe to say that only people who wanted to see it did. Few people were roused by curiosity.

What to take from this post:

If you disagree with something, don’t buy multiple copies of it just to burn it. Think of the planet, think of your wallet. Buying increases demand and demand is met with higher stocks.

If you disagree with something, don’t ever speak out against it in an excessive manner. If you’re a person in authority, try not to mention it at all. There’s no such thing as a bad advert, only the rousing of people’s interests.

Right, the Overlord seems to have arrived with a linking book for me. She doesn’t look too pleased.

Please Overlord Tomala? Just 5 more mi-