The return of book-burning

02/01/2019

Our cultural landscape is increasingly controlled by the permanently outraged. Books - even trashy fantasy novels - are a key component of civilisation. They are tangible, material repositories of humanity, in all its forms. Burning books is the sign of a society going wildly wrong. Banning books, also. Scaring authors into pulling the publication of their books surely sits in the same egregious territory.

Nobody has a monopoly on morality and it is gross to try to force writers to comply with your particular worldview. There is no requirement for any minority group (or, for that matter, any majority group) to be represented in a story. There is no requirement when representation does occur for it to be positive or negative. People who think otherwise have forgotten what fiction is, and they have forgotten what freedom is, too.