On 05:37 PM 3/29/97 +0100, Eric Escudier wrote:
>>>>I think the problem with American books and movies has two faces:
>>
>>- US writers and directors target an American audience
>>
>>- It is much easier for them to focus their stories on the US of A<<
>>
>>I don't see setting stories in your own country and targeting the biggest
>>and most affluent audience in the world as a *problem*.
>
>It is a problem when it leads you to forget that there is more than 4
>billion other human beings on this planet. And all these human beings
>don't share the American way of life.
>
>When you write about the end of the world, it should go a little farther
>than the end Coca Cola.
Eeek, calm down! M. Jules Verne had his protogonists from the Frenchmen,
too, and many SF writers have used people from other nationalities as
protogonists in their own fiction. The late John Brunner, for instance, had
a Romanian (or at least romanian-extraction) character in one of his books,
and when asked why he chose to use one, he said, "why, because there *is* a
place like Romania on this planet!" [EuroCon 94] Poul Anderson had a
Turkish Rocket Engineer and an Uruguayan geologist in _Planet of No Return_,
RAHs ST had the Filipino and Finno-Turkic characters, Mike Resnick uses
Africans, the examples can be added on to.
On another list that I am subscribed to, there was a recent discussion with
a similar theme--well, lets face it, folks, that among the readers (*and*
writers) of our beloved genres, English-language speakers (both native,
second and as a foreign language ones) outnumber the non-english speakers by
a large amount. Actually, SF is one of the genres that acknowledges the
existance of the rest of the world rather more than most of contemporary
American fiction which is *totally* US-centric. It is not a matter of Coca
Cola--for instance in _Footfall_, the American's had to *literally* thumb a
lift on a Russian spacestation to meet the aliens; the largest bank in Luna
City is not the Chase Lunarian but the Hong Kong of Luna, gospodin is among
the everyday words on the moon in _MIASM_ So what if the Lunar revolt is
modeled on the American one? If I was writing it, I would base it possibly
on *our* independence war, but this is simply because I know rather *more*
about that war than the French or Italian independence wars, not because I
am a hard-core nationaist xenophobe.
OK, down from the soapbox,
--Cenk
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N. Cenk Gokce, Ankara, TR ([log in to unmask])
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