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Worried about Copyright? You’re Wasting Your Time

September 9, 2019

book, copyright, literature, marketing, meaning

Part of evolving as a writer (and a person) is to learn from silly past mistakes. Another way to learn, more subtle, is to learn from your silly past preconceptions. Writers worried about copyright is a great such example.

Just in case it’s not clear, let me be explicit about it. If you’re worried about copyright – and authors typically worry about someone stealing their idea – you’re wasting your time. Completely.

There are several factors behind this. You might be familiar with some, not so with others. Motivation for this article came after someone in an online discussion (elsewhere, not on Home for Fiction), asked for help with their novel, but was reluctant to supply information. Why? You guessed it: they were afraid others (me?!) would steal their idea.

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What the Ship of Theseus Tells Us about Qualia

September 4, 2019

Philosophy

consciousness, identity, philosophy, subjectivity

If you feel helpless reading the title, bear with me. I’ll explain it all in a moment. If you do know what the “Ship of Theseus” refers to, you might still be wondering what’s the connection between the Ship of Theseus and qualia. That’s what this post attempts to ponder on.

First things first, especially for those who are not familiar with either the Ship of Theseus or qualia. That is, first let’s see some brief definitions – at this point I only offer the definitions; analysis will follow right after.

The Ship of Theseus is the name given to a thought experiment known since the 5th century BCE. It’s related to the metaphysics of identity.

Qualia is the name given to individual instances of subjective experience. When you see a red flower, the “redness of red”, the way you, specifically perceive it, is qualia.

ship of theseus qualia — This specific ship is not the Ship of Theseus, and qualia does not refer to you seeing the picture. But whether the act of “seeing the picture” can be objective, the experience of “seeing the *pictureness* of the picture” is subjective.

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Religion in Frankenstein: Dialectics of Authority

August 30, 2019

Criticism

academia, criticism, frankenstein, Gothic, religion

Note: the following article on religion in Frankenstein is a modified excerpt (pp. 110-111) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which is available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, presentations, etc. feel free to visit the relevant page on the main Home for Fiction website.

You can also find an article about religion in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and another about religion on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Religion in Frankenstein: A Secular or Religious World?

In the context of Frankenstein, a story replete with moral dilemmas and dichotomies based on otherness, it is perhaps not surprising to discover a multitude of religiously charged temporal dichotomies.

Punter and Byron argue that Victor, although a modern Prometheus (as the subtitle of the novel underlines), lives in “a notably secular world with no gods against whom to rebel, and … his search is conceived of in scientific terms” (2004, 199).

religion in Frankenstein — Religion in *Frankenstein* is a matter of understanding the dialectics of authority involved in the story

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