Now that is a picture I never thought I’d make, but censorship makes for strange bedfellows, and today, I’m “celebrating” Banned Books Week by bringing you the seven dumbest reasons for banning books, based on the ALA’s survey of the past year of Concerned Parenthood.
Seriously, you will not believe the one at the end.
Actually, “Available only to the public OF THE FUTURE” is a great marketing tagline.
I’m amazed Amazon.com isn’t marking their pre-release books that way.
How about banning the Bible? It has LOTS of graphic violence, a few scenes portraying sexual deviancy (Lot’s daughters date-raping their father, anyone?) and plenty of disturbing imagery. You certainly don’t want your kids to read that!
I had an entire book about that once…
http://www.amazon.ca/X-Rated-Bible-Irreverent-Survey-Scriptures/dp/0922915555
SF writer Philip K. Dick satirized this censorship attitude hilariously in his 1950s novel EYE IN THE SKY.
In this novel it happens (among many other weird things) that the protagonists are trapped inside an alternate reality, which looks like the real world… except that ONE prissy, middle-aged woman can censor this reality at will:
– She doesn’t want anyone to have sex, so their genitals instantly vanish. Suddenly everybody looks like Barbie and Ken dolls.
– She doesn’t like a thing or something about reality, and erases it.
Her impulse to censor escalates until she censors away the basic chemistry of life, and everyone dies (only to be resurrected in yet another bizarre alternate reality).
Philip K. Dick was WAY ahead of us.
My mind, she is blown.
I’ve seriously GOT to read that Eye in the Sky book you just described. It’s certainly more interesting than the disappearing world concept that was in Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, and was later used on Berverly Crusher in the Next Generation episode, Remember Me.
Holy cheese, I must of missed the meeting where it was decided that squeezing out loinfruits means you LOSE YOUR MIND.
A little late entry that I thought I should add – I just finished a rather lousy Sci-fi book titled Veracity. It’s about a totalarian state where every day, a select number of words are chosen that are deemed “Red”, meaning they shouldn’t be used anymore. One of which just happens to be the name of the woman’s daughter, Veracity.
In addition to the cookie cutter plot, the failure of conveying any sense of dread, and only the woman’s devotedness to her daughter (despite everything we hear about her loving Veracity, we hardly get to know what her daughter’s like, since she spends so much time away from her), it also fails to show anything interesting. There’s also a banned book known only as The Book of Noah, that’s the inspiration for a group of rebels who want to take their country back from those in power and yadda yadda yadda. It’s nothing that hasn’t already been covered before in better books.
There is one saving grace near the end though. That aforementioned banned book of Noah? It’s actually the Noah Webster’s Dictionary. That’s right – in a dystopian world of banned words, a DICTIONARY is the most dangerous book lying around.