Help! What if someone beat me to it?

Serra K

Question: What's your opinion?

  • Serra K
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Katie-Ellen

Inspiration! Hear ye! Hear ye!...(tolling town crier's bell)

  • Katie-Ellen
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I am down with Covid, so may be missing something, but to me it's not plagiarism if you came up with it yourself, before being exposed to the similar, but far from the same, line. That's not to say you shouldn't think about it, but I'd be cautious about using the "big P" word.

"the universe laughing at me/him" is basically a cliche (sorry, but google it and find many many), so just lose the word "hiss" and you are golden?
 
I wouldn't think too much about plagiarism... unless you're ripping an entire intellectual property, and even then; Bored of the Rings? The Sell-a-million? Barry Trotter? All parody pieces of popular works that ripped entire lines out of the original to make fun of it.

No one will notice. Very few people will read both books, and the ones that do will not remember one line from one to the other.
 
M. Dupré said:
I've not had a good few weeks. This one got a bit worse while listening to an audiobook yesterday.

It was 80s first-contact science fiction. The story and tech are a bit dated, but excusable given advances in technology. There's no excuse for how dated the characters are (most especially the female ones).

However, pulpy characters or plot didn't ruin my Thursday. A single line of narration did. It matches almost word-for-word a sentence in my novel!

I'm really bummed about this. I thought I created a bit of witty prose. What I actually did was plagiarize it. To hear my words read back to me was a sucker punch.

My question...do you think I should rewrite the passage in question? Here it is...

*****

“Okay, our dish is moving into position. Let’s see what’s out there.” Darryl switched on the radio, tuned to 1420.405752 megahertz, and found…nothing. There was no signal at all, only the hiss and soft static of the universe laughing at him.

*****

Do you think a reader would recognize the last sentence from another work? Does anyone here know which one?
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Seeing as there pretty much are an infinite number of us working on an infinite number of typewriters (okay, maybe one left doing that, the rest of us monkeys are on keyboards of some sort), I'd suggest this is not the last time you will run into this particular issue. T.S. elliot offered a bit of advice: "Good writers borrow. Great writers steal." I think it's worth a discussion: Can you count a single close to duplicated sentence as stealing? I'd suggest the sentence matters. If, for instance, your sentence was "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" or "Call me Ishmael" or "hello, I'm Harry Potter the wizard boy and I'm off to play Quidditch with Emma Watson" I'd suggest you have troubles brewing. You can't plagarize what you read after you've written the sentence. Well, I guess you can if you don't consider time linear, or you're aware of yourself throughout the multiverse. On the above sentence, I googled it and can't imagine you're walking in plagerism land with it.
 
Jake E said:
I wouldn't think too much about plagiarism... unless you're ripping an entire intellectual property, and even then; Bored of the Rings? The Sell-a-million? Barry Trotter? All parody pieces of popular works that ripped entire lines out of the original to make fun of it.

No one will notice. Very few people will read both books, and the ones that do will not remember one line from one to the other.
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Parody has exceptions when it comes to legal ramifications, although most who use it tend to seek some form of acknowledgement of permission from the original creator, especially if they're squillionaires.
 
Hannah F said:
Easter egg in a C code? Now, this conversation has lost me. Way over my totally non-computer-science head.
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There are two types of Easter eggs in code:

1: The program does something "special" if a user provides some sort of "secret" input. Imagine accessing a hidden room in a video game when a certain button combination is entered at the right time. Most Easter eggs of this type are almost meant to found these days.

2: Cheeky bits of code that will never be executed because the conditions can never be met. My assignment was to write a program that determined the day of the week based on a date from 10,000BCE to 10,000ACE. In my code, a date of "42.42.4242" would output "The meaning of life, the universe, and everything." However, other limits within the program would not allow such a date to be entered. It was "unreachable" code that only a programmer would see. I thought my prof would find it funny. He didn't.

TBF...sometimes unreachable code becomes reachable when another programmer makes enhancements somewhere down the line. They may not see your Easter egg, so their changes allow the hidden code to execute. I saw this happen twice with industrial products. One was funny; the other was racist AF (neither was my code).
 
M. Dupré said:
There are two types of Easter eggs in code:

1: The program does something "special" if a user provides some sort of "secret" input. Imagine accessing a hidden room in a video game when a certain button combination is entered at the right time. Most Easter eggs of this type are almost meant to found these days.

2: Cheeky bits of code that will never be executed because the conditions can never be met. My assignment was to write a program that determined the day of the week based on a date from 10,000BCE to 10,000ACE. In my code, a date of "42.42.4242" would output "The meaning of life, the universe, and everything." However, other limits within the program would not allow such a date to be entered. It was "unreachable" code that only a programmer would see. I thought my prof would find it funny. He didn't.

TBF...sometimes unreachable code becomes reachable when another programmer makes enhancements somewhere down the line. They may not see your Easter egg, so their changes allow the hidden code to execute. I saw this happen twice with industrial products. One was funny; the other was racist AF (neither was my code).
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Ah. So not some kind of 3-D production of Easter Eggs then.
 
MattScho said:
Well, technically, I am not an Albanian cow waiting outside a butcher shop, so this isn't so time sensitive.
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Albanian cow ???

About the reference you haven't a clue to...it's the novel Voyagers by Ben Bova. Most of the characters are shallow stereotypes. Middle-aged guys lust over twenty-something women. Twenty-something women advance their careers by screwing middle-aged guys. This is early eighties sci-fi, not a 1950s soap opera.

The plot isn't terrible, and there are some sympathetic characters. However, it's like the author never met a woman in his life. Holy hell...I hope I can write better than this.
 
M. Dupré said:
Albanian cow ???

About the reference you haven't a clue to...it's the novel Voyagers by Ben Bova. Most of the characters are shallow stereotypes. Middle-aged guys lust over twenty-something women. Twenty-something women advance their careers by screwing middle-aged guys. This is early eighties sci-fi, not a 1950s soap opera.

The plot isn't terrible, and there are some sympathetic characters. However, it's like the author never met a woman in his life. Holy hell...I hope I can write better than this.
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I can't say, not for sure, that the cow identified as Albanian. Just that he was tied up outside a butchers on the outskirts of Tirana, and struck me as a metaphor for life, admittedly a bit on the dark side.
But thank god we moved on from that world of fiction into the more gender-realisitic world of, uhm, Dan Brown and, uhm, Grisham and, ah, erm the Shades of Grey guy (James). The 1980s were still an era in which far too many authors looking to describe an independent woman inevitibly arrived at a prostitute, but, you know, without a pimp and with a heart of gold. In SciFi, I assume the heart would actually be made of gold.
Edit to add: So, steal from that era, or borrow from that era, but only with the goal of actually doing some justice to poor plotlines that now rightly suffer because they're set against a rapey cultural backdrop.
 
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MattScho said:
I can't say, not for sure, that the cow identified as Albanian. Just that he was tied up outside a butchers on the outskirts of Tirana, and struck me as a metaphor for life, admittedly a bit on the dark side.
But thank god we moved on from that world of fiction into the more gender-realisitic world of, uhm, Dan Brown and, uhm, Grisham and, ah, erm the Shades of Grey guy (James). The 1980s were still an era in which far too many authors looking to describe an independent woman inevitibly arrived at a prostitute, but, you know, without a pimp and with a heart of gold. In SciFi, I assume the heart would actually be made of gold.
Edit to add: So, steal from that era, or borrow from that era, but only with the goal of actually doing some justice to poor plotlines that now rightly suffer because they're set against a rapey cultural backdrop.
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Damn...that is dark. I hope the cow was dispatched quickly. I doubt it, though.

I've been reading older sci-fi to learn from authors who defined the genre. I'm learning something, for sure. It's just not the lesson I expected. I guess no matter how forward-minded (you think) you are, cultural stereotypes are tough to break.

In classics such a Fahrenheit 451, nearly every female character is incredibly shallow and annoying. The only two interesting ones are killed off (one at the very beginning, the other offstage).

Nivens and Pournelle gave us some female characters to forget in the 70s and 80s. At least they were stronger, and given more meaningful roles. Although (as you mentioned) they often had to sleep with the right guy to fulfill them.

I felt Michael Crichton fared somewhat better - then I read Next. Lots of stereotypes to choose from, but the histrionic "mother" of the human/ape hybrid really stuck out.

Let hope we all can do better.
 
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Serra K

Question: What's your opinion?

  • Serra K
  • Replies: 8
Katie-Ellen

Inspiration! Hear ye! Hear ye!...(tolling town crier's bell)

  • Katie-Ellen
  • Replies: 4
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