♪ Spoken upon long-distance melody ♪
Jan. 21st, 2008 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athenaltenaWatching a PBS documentary on lobotomies and the guy who pioneered them. I think the best way to sum this up is "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions" since he did it to try and relieve the suffering of the people who were societal outcasts. Once the guy started getting almost religiously fanatic, however, it turned south and he refused to see what was really going on and started getting too big for his britches. He even got the freaking Nobel Prize since they hadn't seen the full effects yet.
But what struck me is that one letter from a woman who had her son lobotomized had her say that he was "like a child again" and that they'd "stripped him of the burden" of being fully conscious.
... I think I know where Phillip Pullman may have gotten some of his ideas. This sounds suspiciously similar to the "intercision" procedure in The Golden Compass and uses the same justification, as well as the same net result. The sad part is that lobotomies were performed en masse when they first developed them because they were thought to be a miracle, and it wasn't until much later that it became clear what they were really doing to people. This is why we have drug testing and clinical trials for everything now.
So yeah, very clever Phil. But as they say fiction is the melting pot of reality and fantasy, so it's inevitable that things like that show up even if the author didn't intend them. And now that I'm on the subject, I've been thinking about that in terms of the story I've been hashing out the details on lately.
What can I say, I'm a product of my environment, and it's showing up in what I write. And even though I'm not consciously meaning to, criticism of the War on Terror is creeping in there. I'm going to try and avoid doing the dread Author Filibuster and just lecture the reader, as I know how annoying that can be (I'm looking at you, Ayn Rand!) and how it can derail a perfectly good story. So yeah, slap me if I start to do that.
More on that later as things begin to flesh out. And once again I'm unsure what to call that series, even a codename. I'll come up with something, just need an InspiroBrick™ to hit me square in the head.
And oddly enough, the number 5 keeps coming up in this story, so I'll just go with it. *Japanese pun in last sentence*
But what struck me is that one letter from a woman who had her son lobotomized had her say that he was "like a child again" and that they'd "stripped him of the burden" of being fully conscious.
... I think I know where Phillip Pullman may have gotten some of his ideas. This sounds suspiciously similar to the "intercision" procedure in The Golden Compass and uses the same justification, as well as the same net result. The sad part is that lobotomies were performed en masse when they first developed them because they were thought to be a miracle, and it wasn't until much later that it became clear what they were really doing to people. This is why we have drug testing and clinical trials for everything now.
So yeah, very clever Phil. But as they say fiction is the melting pot of reality and fantasy, so it's inevitable that things like that show up even if the author didn't intend them. And now that I'm on the subject, I've been thinking about that in terms of the story I've been hashing out the details on lately.
What can I say, I'm a product of my environment, and it's showing up in what I write. And even though I'm not consciously meaning to, criticism of the War on Terror is creeping in there. I'm going to try and avoid doing the dread Author Filibuster and just lecture the reader, as I know how annoying that can be (I'm looking at you, Ayn Rand!) and how it can derail a perfectly good story. So yeah, slap me if I start to do that.
More on that later as things begin to flesh out. And once again I'm unsure what to call that series, even a codename. I'll come up with something, just need an InspiroBrick™ to hit me square in the head.
And oddly enough, the number 5 keeps coming up in this story, so I'll just go with it. *Japanese pun in last sentence*
