Framespotting Book Launch

There was a good turnout for the launch of Alison and Laurence's book - it was difficult to get to the bar for the glass of free wine! Alison and Laurence, perched on library ladders so they could be seen, make a good double act, and they gave a short presentation about the ideas behind the book and how they came to start thinking about the subject. This was when they were working with climate change groups, and they found that politicians and activists alike had very set ways of looking at the problems. So this is a book to help people move beyond that, to "see the frames", and to realise when they are being manipulated by the language used to set out a problem. The example given in the presentation was "tax burden", which suggests that tax is a bad thing, and paying it is a "burden", so "tax relief" must be a good thing, rather than framing tax as a "membership subscription", for instance, for which you get public services.

And once you know about framing, you start to see it happening around you.
Today I was looking at a blog post by Kameron Hurley, who won two Hugo awards at this year's World SF Convention (the Oscars of the SF world). She was talking about epic fantasy, and how it is conventionally framed (she actually uses that word) as a pseudo-Medieval, European world, usually with a quest, or a peasant boy who becomes a hero. Anything outside that frame, that doesn't fit the box, gets dismissed by the authors who write to the formula and by the reviewers and publishers who want "more of the same, only just slightly different". So fantasies that are set in Ancient China, or have romance in them, are squeezed into different boxes, even though they might be just as epic as the Tolkeinesque or George RR Martin fantasies.
The blog post can be found at http://www.fantasy-magazine.com/new/new-nonfiction/language-and-imaginative-resistance-in-epic-fantasy/

I'm looking forward to reading my copy of the book properly, but it's already making me think!