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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Only in Canada, eh? Pity

I’m probably dating myself with this reference but an article in the Globe and Mail today reminded me of this old Red Rose Tea commercial.

The article in question refers to the Canadian habit of removing Canadian references when writing in order to be able to sell books in the United States. One would think that as a science fiction writer I would be somewhat immune to this affliction. However when I wrote The Gender Divide, I struggled with this issue.

Strangely enough it wasn’t so much the location that I struggled with. For most science fiction authors, many of our locations and environments are completely fictional and the reader has to rely on the writer to properly describe it. Ironically when writing The Gender Divide I used an American location (California, outside of LA) but only because that was the location where the idea of writing The Gender Divide came to me and I couldn’t envision it somewhere else.

The changes I did make to The Gender Divide to ‘Americanize’ it were in the areas of spelling and measurement. In retrospect it’s odd how much I worried about such inconsequential issues when there are so many more items that define Canada. Perhaps it took the recent Vancouver Olympics and the not so recent (or over) financial crisis to help me focus on what it really means to be Canadian.

I’ll leave you with this American perspective on Canada (we Canadian’s are normally too modest to do this sort of thing, despite our fierce, albeit restrained, pride in ourselves and our country).

posted by David at 3:51 pm  

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