The Fate of the Artist (and/or Writer)

I must share with you this anecdote that I ran across today at The Fate Of The Artist, blog of genius artist Eddie Campbell. (NOTE: For those of you not familiar with Campbell let me just say that his book The Fate Of The Artist, in my not-so-humble opinion the finest comic/graphic novel/whatever to be produced last year. How many books can comment on the relationship of artist to art, artist to audience, man to family, art to life, and still manage to be both a murder mystery and a sustained hundred page gag?)

In the middle of a post about something else Campbell drops this anecdote about a story he had from Tim Powers. (NOTE: For those of you not familiar with Tim Powers let me just say that he is, in my not-so-humble opinion, one of the best novelists working today.)

Anyway, here’s the story, with Eddie’s typos left in:

The Fate of the Artist: “There were so many cartoon characters in the bar at the time…”
Speaking of Swancon, sci-fi author Tim Powers was the other principlal guest that weekend. I recall him telling me that he found out that the publishers of the Spanish (or another country’s) translations of his novels had been inserting scenes for product placement, and that this was apparently standard practice. That is, they had a local writer on hand to add scenes into all the publisher’s foreign novels where a character would go to the fridge and take out a coke, or whatever drink was contractually required.

Can this actually be true? With novels so carefully constructed as Powers’ this would drive me nuts–I’d spend ages trying to figure out what it meant that a given character preferred SpriteIt’s an allusion to The Tempest, right? It’s meant to cast the character as someone in the Prospero archetype? or drove a FiatOh come on, that one’s too obvious. I’ve seen fiat defined as “The affirmative right to state that the machinery and personnel will be made available for the plan to come into existence”, so obviously this would be an indication of the functioning of powers that are shuffling things into place to accomplish the ends of some higher plan..