Title: Invisible
Editor: Jim C. Hines
Genre: writing commentary
Price: $2.99 (ebook)
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
ISBN:
Point of Sale: Amazon / B & N / Smashwords
Reviewed by: Chris Gerrib
A few
months back, Alex Dally MacFarlane wrote an article suggesting that science
fiction writers might want to include more than just Straight White Males in
their stories. What should have been as
controversial as “you should bathe regularly” created an amazing swirl of
controversy on the Internet. Invisible is a response to that
controversy.
Blogger,
author and (full disclosure) personal friend Jim C. Hines is a Mark 1 Straight
White Male. However, he offered his blog
to various people who wrote moving essays about being other than Straight White
Male, and what it meant to them to read (or not read) of people who were more
like them. Jim then collected 13 of
those essays into this slim ebook.
The
essays are all exceptionally well-written, and speak powerfully to the
experience of being Other, as well as the help one can get by reading the right
book at the right age. Writers varied
from an albino (have you ever seen a not-evil albino in fiction) to people of various
genders, orientations and races.
As an
author, I want to entertain people. I
want to affect them in some positive way.
Reading the essays in Invisible helped
me better understand how to do that. As
a businessman, (and all writers should be people of business) Invisible pointed out that non-Straight White Males have
money and are interested in science fiction.
Providing them characters they can identify with can be profitable. As an artist who happens to be a Straight
White Male, part of being a good artist is an ability to populate your book
with other than clones of yourself. Invisible gave me some thoughts on how
to do just that.
If you
want to be a writer, you should do yourself a favor and read Invisible.
9/10
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