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rob_sawyer_blog pointed out a debut novel by one Gerald Brandt, The Courier, about to hit the bookstores soon. The Courier is subtitled on the cover as "a San Angeles novel".
So, you know me by now. Alternative geographies, fictional geographies, they get my attention right off. Naturally, I went looking to see if the name had come up in SF&F before.
Some of you will already know what I'm about to say: that the name has a history, inside and outside of the genre. "Prior art" is, I think, the phrase for it. And Wikipedia has some detail on the cultural history of the name. Real-worlds politics, dystopian SF, super-heroic fantasy...it's been making some serious rounds.
Using the name and concept in yet another novel isn't necessarily a bad thing, and everyone who's used it has their own spin on the idea, but to these cultural-historian eyes of mine, I don't belive there's any way to make an exclusive claim on it at this point.
rob_sawyer_blog pointed out a debut novel by one Gerald Brandt, The Courier, about to hit the bookstores soon. The Courier is subtitled on the cover as "a San Angeles novel".So, you know me by now. Alternative geographies, fictional geographies, they get my attention right off. Naturally, I went looking to see if the name had come up in SF&F before.
Some of you will already know what I'm about to say: that the name has a history, inside and outside of the genre. "Prior art" is, I think, the phrase for it. And Wikipedia has some detail on the cultural history of the name. Real-worlds politics, dystopian SF, super-heroic fantasy...it's been making some serious rounds.
Using the name and concept in yet another novel isn't necessarily a bad thing, and everyone who's used it has their own spin on the idea, but to these cultural-historian eyes of mine, I don't belive there's any way to make an exclusive claim on it at this point.
