Oct 31, 2009

Originality, Plagiarism and Clinamen

One of the concepts is most misunderstood by the layman is that of originality. Over and over again, people complain that a record sounds like another one, or a film claims to be a 'reimagining,' or...

With the ease of access to material on the internet, this lack of understanding has led to an explosion of plagiarism. Every module at university has carried a huge warning about it. But conversely, there are such fears of being accused of it that some writers and students refuse to read others writer's work.

Plagiarism is a very specific problem and according to The Collins Concise English Dictionary (1962) its definition is "the appropriation and giving out as one's own the writings, inventions or ideas of another."

The way to avoid accusations varies according to the source work:

Inventions are protected by patents.

Writing is protected by ensuring that quotations are limited to two hundred and fifty words or less, and credit given to the source work and author.

But how does the writer avoid appropriating an idea? This is where 're-imaginings' and sampling can confuse the issue, especially as there are almost no truly original ideas under the sun. But in each instance, there are small but significant changes made to the principal work.

In The Memory of Whiteness (1985), Kim Stanley Robinson refers to clinamen, a term coined by the Roman philosopher Lucretius:

"[T]he swerve in atoms that makes change in the universe possible." (p.77)

That 'swerve in the atoms' was the smallest change that the philosopher Epicurus could comprehend in his 'atomistic doctrine.' It is all that's needed to change an idea.

An example is that of dragons -- creatures of myth. By contrast, alien planets are achetypally Science Fictional. Until the 1960s, no one had fused the idea of dragons as an extra-terrestrial creature. Then Anne McCaffrey wrote 'Weyr Search' and sequels, and the rest is history.

In 1990 Allen M. Steele published the novella 'Trembling Earth,' in which a wildlife park in the Okenofee Swamp was filled with dinosaurs which attacked unwary tourists. The same year Michael Crichton's monumental bestseller Jurassic Park appeared.

Its plot similarities are remarkable, but Crichton expanded the science and characterization twelvefold, and in so doing, changing the setting and plot and characters, Crichton made a clinamen which probably took him three or more magnitudes ahead of Steele.

The key change to make a work original, even where it has been done before is to put one's own stamp on it, be it a summation of an academic theory, or a short story. Where it isn't possible to make a change, cite the source material.

Simple, really.