# Authors Ripping Off Other Authors?



## Kyle R (Feb 2, 2013)

While reading one of Kelly Link's short fiction collections, _Magic for Beginners_, (written a few years ago) I read a passage of hers that reminded me very strongly of one from Kurt Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse Five (_written decades ago).

I'll let you do the comparisons:


(_Kelly Link_'s passage is about a woman dreaming she's in a time machine travelling back in time)

_She dreams she's on a train going down the tracks backwards and behind the train someone is picking up the beams and the nails and the girders to put in a box and then they'll put the box away. The trees are whizzing past, getting smaller and smaller and then they're all gone too. Now she's a kid again, now she's a baby, now she's much smaller and then she's even smaller than that. She gets her gills back. She doesn't want to wake up just yet, she wants to get right back to the very beginning where it's all new and clean and everything is still and green and flat and sleepy and everybody has crawled back into the sea and they're waiting for her to get back there too and then the party can start.

_
Now, the passage it reminded me of, _Kurt Vonnegut _in _Slaughterhouse Five _(Billy Pilgrim seeing aerial bombers move backward in time):

_When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby. . . Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve.
_

What do you think? Rip-off, or coincidence?

Got any you want to share?


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## Rustgold (Feb 2, 2013)

Sorry Kyle, but I think Kelly just stood at the back of a train one day (most likely a country train because most suburban trains don't let you see out the back like this), and thought it'd make a good story image.  Kelly's piece is simply the product of a great imagination.

Now for a ripoff, try love triangles, or to be more specific love triangles where the female is supposed to take the 'acceptable guy' she doesn't truly love and she struggles until she gets the inappropriate guy she truly loves (eg Twilight) 'gags - runs to basin'.  Someone ought to tell these authors that Romeo & Juliet didn't have 'and they lived happy ever after' ending.


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## Olly Buckle (Feb 2, 2013)

No, I think that's a fairly common idea, going backwards. How about Benjamin Button? The man who lived his whole life backwards. Like Rustgold says there are some plots, like the Romeo and Juliet one, that get written over and over. 

I have taken plots from short stories and re-written them myself, one from Herodotus about a queen losing a useless husband and marrying the captain of the guard I turned into a modern day Mafia tale, one from Kipling about two married women fighting over a raw subaltern in Simla I turned into two barmaids in a university town in England fighting over a student. I am not sure about the Romeo and Juliet one, but a lot of Shakespeare's plots are re-workings of familiar themes, the twins who are mistaken for one another for example. 

I think it is the way you tell them that is important, there is a story that the need for a silver bullet to kill a vampire was invented by a writer who had taken a break to watch The Lone Ranger and thought "Silver bullets, cool", but I don't think of that as a rip  off, it is more spotting a cool idea and applying creative thinking to it.


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## moderan (Feb 2, 2013)

That story's apocryphal, you know. Silver bullets kill werewolves, and 'twas Curt Siodmak that came up with the notion.
I wouldn't be surprised if that passage was just honestly written (by Kelly Link). No doubt Vonnegut was on the reading list at some point, and likely made an impact.
I've actually had an entire novel ripped from one of my ideas...so it definitely happens. But I don't think Kelly Link needs to do things like that except as homage. And Vonnegut may have borrowed it from an earlier pulp writer. I've seen similar passages before. M.P. Shiel somehow comes to mind in that context.


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## Olly Buckle (Feb 2, 2013)

> That story's apocryphal, you know. Silver bullets kill werewolves, and 'twas Curt Siodmak that came up with the notion.


BBC radio 4 is usually a good reference. I got it from an interview with the guy who wrote the screen play for Van Helsig (?) a vampire movie where he kills them with ordinary bullets. He said a 'Purist' fan objected and was making the point it was *all* fiction, he knew the man who came up with the idea etc.
I guess apocryphal stories are always like that "Really - it happened to my friend's brother." Oh yeh? Sometimes I am a little naive, but he is a man who writes stories about vampires, if you can't believe him ....


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## moderan (Feb 3, 2013)

Olly Buckle said:


> BBC radio 4 is usually a good reference. I got it from an interview with the guy who wrote the screen play for Van Helsig (?) a vampire movie where he kills them with ordinary bullets. He said a 'Purist' fan objected and was making the point it was *all* fiction, he knew the man who came up with the idea etc.
> I guess apocryphal stories are always like that "Really - it happened to my friend's brother." Oh yeh? Sometimes I am a little naive, but he is a man who writes stories about vampires, if you can't believe him ....


Curt Siodmak was the writer behind that, in the 1941 film, The Wolf Man. Vastly influential writer back in his day. I wouldn't be surprised that the writer of such as "van Helsing" (a truly horrible piece of "entertainment") would be unaware of that. Director Stephen Sommers, if memory serves, was the party responsible for the script.


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