{"id":500,"date":"2002-06-27T20:39:20","date_gmt":"2002-06-28T03:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/06\/27\/500.html"},"modified":"2002-06-27T20:39:20","modified_gmt":"2002-06-28T03:39:20","slug":"mistaken-notions-of-origins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/06\/27\/mistaken-notions-of-origins\/","title":{"rendered":"Mistaken notions of origins"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I got too little sleep again last night, decided to work at home today, did a little bit here and there, went out and got a haircut, came home and realized that I was too exhausted and headachey and generally out of it to get anything done, took a long nap. Feeling some better, but not enough to drive up to see Foucault WHO?<\/cite> in SF tonight, sadly. Oh, well, I've got plenty to do here, and I'll try and get to bed relatively early. Gotta rest up for the big weekend to come.<\/p>\n

But that's not what I'm here to tell you about. I was poking around on the Web looking for information about Alexei Panshin's Anthony Villiers books, and came across Panshin's Web site<\/a>. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did find a wealth of other information, including a long essay<\/a> on the genesis of Panshin's best-known novel, Rite of Passage.<\/cite> (Actually, the first half of the essay is mostly about Panshin's exposure to Heinlein and complicated reactions to him; Panshin doesn't talk much about Rite<\/cite> 'til halfway through.)<\/p>\n

And it turns out that I've been telling the story of that genesis wrong for years.<\/p>\n

I always thought (and have said on numerous occasions) that Rite<\/cite> was an explicit reaction to Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars<\/cite>—a sort of \"that's not a plausible teenage heroine; this<\/em> is a plausible teenage heroine\" kind of commentary. It turns out that Rite<\/cite> was indeed a reaction to Heinlein, but not to Podkayne;<\/cite> in fact, Panshin wrote the original story that Rite<\/cite> was based on in 1961, a couple years before Podkayne<\/cite> was published, and he was dismayed to learn that Heinlein had written a first-person girl-protagonist story, especially when Podkayne<\/cite> was moved to the top of the publishing schedule at Fred Pohl's If<\/cite> and was published (in serial form) just before Panshin's story (written earlier, but obviously not by as big a name, since Panshin was just out of college) appeared in the same magazine.<\/p>\n

The novel version of Rite of Passage<\/cite> was completed not long afterward, but took quite a while to find a publisher, which is why I always thought it was written four years after Podkayne.<\/cite><\/p>\n

Moral: research is hard!<\/p>\n

No, wait, that can't be right. How about this:<\/p>\n

Moral: don't believe everything you read in bibliographies.<\/p>\n

Or:<\/p>\n

Moral: don't repeat stories 'til you've verified that they're true.<\/p>\n

Oh, I give up. Why does everything need to have a moral, anyway?<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got too little sleep again last night, decided to work at home today, did a little bit here and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}