One of my “for fun” books that I have going right now is Houses Under the Sea, a collection of Lovecraft mythos stories by Caitlín Kiernan.1 After reading their story “The Cats of River Street,” which is a really clever story about heroic cats, I found myself thinking about how Lovecraft’s work has had a rich creative afterlife because it all went into the public domain after his death.2 People love to say that superheroes are today’s modern mythology, but the superheroes they mean are protected intellectual property, and I don’t think that’s a merely technical difference. The Old Ones, on the other hand, belong to everybody. Innsmouth belongs to everybody. You can do absolutely anything you want with these things. There’s no Lovecraft style book saying Cthulhu can’t be pictured in a certain way.
But, to pick a similarly influential modern fantasist, you could not do that with Tolkien. You could not write and publish a story that was called “The Cats of Mirkwood,” because the Tolkien estate would not let you do that. You’d have to set your story in not-Mirkwood, where cats do battle with giant spiders which may or may not resemble other giant spiders but nobody owns spiders, right, so….
At that point your story might be good and it might be bad but the one thing it would not be is building on something else. Yet the protectiveness of the Tolkien estate has hardly prevented people from making terrible (if authorized) Tolkien adaptations or naming their companies “Palantir.” It means you have to come up with your own elves. Which is not a terrible thing, inherently. Still, I at least wonder what it would be like if Tolkien’s work was something people could use as a basis for something new rather than something they had to reproduce before they could get started.
Right now, copyright is the main legal protection artists have, in addition to being the way that they can, in theory, get paid for their work. (One of the first actions of SFWA, the Science Fiction Writer’s Association, was to help Tolkien fight pirated versions of his books were being sold in America.)3 But copyright also creates a situation where people have to maintain a legal version of what creation and inspiration “are” that, in my opinion, doesn’t really bear much resemblance to how these things actually work. In actual practice, it’s fine to read a short story and want to write your own version. (Gene Wolfe talks about doing this twice in The Best of Gene Wolfe.)
But if you’re gonna tell people you did that… you have to be careful.
Somebody who really gets screwed over in this talking-out-of-both-sides-of-your-mouth approach to inspiration is Olivia Rodrigo.4 I had written most of this post before her interview with Popcast dropped, in which they ask her about how she feels about being accused of beefing with Taylor over having to give Taylor credits on her song “deja vu.” Olivia gives a truly incredible PR non-answer (“it comes with the territory, it’s par for the course”) which indicates to me that the actual answer is “I feel pretty bad” but that she doesn’t want to talk about it.5
I don’t think there are villains in the Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo “Cruel Summer” credits scenario (previously), though I’d imagine there are or were some pretty hard feelings on Olivia’s side, and, watching that clip, it’s pretty obvious that there are. In a better world, though, it would not be a huge mistake to say in an interview that you set out to mimic the bridge of a song you admire when writing your own bridge in your own song, as Olivia did. However, that’s exactly what you’re not allowed to do.6 And while the fallout for Taylor has been that this credits situation follows her around as the thing people can always bring up to prove she’s a bully, the fallout for Olivia has been a lot worse, because people dissect everything she does to prove she’s a thief. And she doesn’t seem to know how to deal with this except by ignoring it, but ignoring it doesn’t work. She’s not big enough to get away with that move.
I am, personally, not a big fan of Olivia’s music (my thought whenever I hit play on a new single from her is “I am too old for this”), but that doesn’t really matter. If anything, I suspect that this constant narrative of theft makes it harder for her to digest her influences and make them her own.7 She’s too anxious to show her work. So I end up reading comments about how the font she’s using this album cycle is a ripoff of Hole’s Pretty on the Inside, which it is not, or comments about how people don’t understand why Olivia doesn’t have somebody who tells her every time she writes something that kind of sounds like something else. And the obvious answer to that second point is just that you can’t create anything that way.
But another answer is also just that Olivia Rodrigo is not making atonal symphonies, she is making pop music, and a lot of pop music sounds a little bit like something else and borrows widely from other sources. That’s fine… as long as you don’t say it, apparently. In any case, I end up feeling bad for her—not over the original credits scenario, but the way it’s dragged out and out around the rest of her work. It doesn’t really seem fair that she gets punished for being honest in a way everybody else was trained not to be. I would like to not care for her music in peace.
This post is willing me toward an ending that is about “the age of AI” but I don’t really want to think about AI all the time. What I want is a situation where people can be a little more real about inspiration and creativity without forfeiting the things copyright really should protect, like your ownership of your own work. I hate the kind of scarcity mindset that leads to things like authors publicly complaining about library usage, which I’ve seen happen a couple times. There must be a better way, you know? Maybe there isn’t. At any rate I’m not going to solve it here. Instead I am going to make another cup of coffee, a move I stole from Twin Peaks.
Kiernan uses they/them.
It probably should not have but well water under the bridge.
The copies that were published with Tolkien’s approval were sold as “Authorized Editions”—you could say… “Tolkien’s Versions”…
If you were wondering why this post is filed under “Taylor Swift Studies,” here you go.
I did not actually watch the interview beyond a couple clips.
Taylor herself has a number of songs where she’s clearly been listening to something and wanted to do her own take on it.
You can kind of see this at work in the (very stupid) “babydoll dress” controversy where she was accused of catering to pedophiles by wearing a babydoll and bloomers on stage. I’m frankly unconvinced anybody seriously held this position, as opposed to picking it opportunistically in the heat of stan wars. However, Olivia was also on record as being inspired by Courtney Love here, and she neither went in the direction of “full Courtney Love” (which would provoke accusations of stealing) or doing her own new thing with it (which might provoke accusations of filing off the serial numbers). Instead, she just wore the clothes but didn’t really make anything out of them.
Ada Palmer has a great list of influences at the end of the Terra Ignota series:
"Diderot, Voltaire, de Sade, Homer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Bester, Gene Wolfe, Osamu Tezuka, and also the many makers of I Claudius, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Gundam, and Julie Taymor's Fool's Fire".
Your post brings this quote from Terry Pratchett to mind:
“J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.”
Even though all the serial numbers have been filed off, everybody knows where everybody else's sprightly elves and deep-digging dwarves came from. Not even the powers of the global copyright courts are powerful enough to keep long-lived, pointy eared freaks and their half-size pals out of our entertainment for the last 80 years.