A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com Lately there’s been a heated debate over how young adult fiction is written. Many YA authors have been slammed by critics, both pro and amateur, for including controversial material in their books, such as racism, and how it represents minorities. One of the latest cases has been with Amelie Wen Zhao’s fantasy novel, Blood Heir (due for release in November). Back in January Zhao had pulled her book from the pre-publication stage because several people on Twitter, many who were also YA authors, criticised it for being insensitive to the slave trade in the U.S. This was regardless of Zhao herself being a minority of colour, an immigrant from China. It was also regardless of her intentions to, as reported in Publisher’s Weekly , make people aware of the issue of human trafficking as well as telling an engaging story and that much of the slave trade and indentured servitude scenes in the book were rooted in her own Asian culture’s history and not meant to depi...

Last week’s Sacramento News and Review contains an article about a war protest that occurred a couple weekends ago at the Sacramento Central Library. But it wasn’t so much a protest against a real war than it was a war game. The article states that the activist groups Veterans for Peace and Grandmothers for Peace protested the video gaming event Nerd Fest’s Call of Duty tournament. According to the article, the protesters felt that Call of Duty was encouraging war and violence. But the game has an M (“Mature”) rating and so is limited to the 17 and older crowd in its sales and at its tournaments such as Nerd Fest’s, as the article indicates. That, at least to an extent, solves the problem of influence on minors. However, according to SN&R , what the protesters were really speaking against was the library, a place of educational and intellectual activity, promoting the game and in so doing promoting war and violence. Therefore they were saying that the tournament ...