A Turkish woman takes umbrage at the misrepresentation of Turkey in Christopher Pike's novel The Secret of Ka. She posts a review on Amazon (and another one on LJ at bookfails) talking about her complaints with the book.

Then, a man claiming to be one of Christopher Pike's editors shows up to westsplain her own culture to her. Also he decides that she's been threatening to cut off the author's hands.

Arguments include:

1) It's okay for a major character to have an Indian name! He started off being Ahmed but readers liked this other name better. Also, Amesh sounds a lot like Ahmed. Same difference! ~~Although it turns out Ahmed isn't even a Turkish name and Turkish people will spell it Ahmet.~~
2) Turkish, Kurdish, Arab ... it's all a matter of perspective! Who's to say whether a Turkish person is Arab or not? (Not you because I know more about your own ethnic background than you do.)
3) But all those people he wrote about who dress strangely and have foreign names and address their grandfathers by unusual titles are supposed to be weird! We didn't misrepresent Turkish culture at all! It's just that all of those characters are supposed to be iconoclasts or hipsters or something. Yeah.
4) I totally saw a guy wearing a turban in Turkey once! Also, taxi drivers in London and New York wear turbans. (???)
5) All cultures even tangentially related to Islam and the Middle East are segregated, war-torn, and insanely conservative. It's illegal to swear and nobody sits near women and bloody wars are waged outside of the Hilton every night. :(
6) I'm just never going to address the fact that you're offended and feel that your culture was used like a dirty rag at all!
7) u mad :(

Ah, I remember well the Turkish capital, Istanbul, that desert city.

I nicked this from a mouse at wank_report (thank you mousey!)

ETA: A clever person on Amazon dug up proof that the "editor" Michael Brite is actually a sockpuppet of Christopher Pike himself. He seems to mostly use the account to leave worshipful reviews of his own books. Seriously:

Perhaps The Best Book I Have Ever Read
Christopher Pike's "Thirst" is a masterpiece. The book is not only a fantastic thriller, a mind boggling mystery, but a spiritual revelation. Alisa is a five thousand year old vampire who kills as casually as she makes love. Yet there remains deep within her a painful and yet abiding memory and love for a man she met when she was young, a man who may have been more than a man -- the mysterious Lord Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita, the equivalent of the Indian Bible. However, please do not get the idea this book is about religion. Pike's novel is totally free of dogma. He never says Krishna is God, and his heroine is never sure who Krishna truly is. Also, he is careful not to offend anyone's faith. But there is a heart breaking passage where two of the main characters debate the existence of God. They soon come to the conclusion that "God" is impossible to define or know, but whatever Krishna was, he was too powerful, and too beautiful, to disobey. And that leads to the crux of the story. The master vampire who has created Alisa must destroy all the vampires to gain salvation. Yet, ironically, Krishna has promised Alisa she will have his protection if she obeys him and never creates another vampire. It is the clash of these two contradictory vows that stands at the heart of this brilliant novel. Reading it, I felt I was given an insight into the mystery of life itself. Why, for every good impulse in the world, is there an opposing evil? Yet Pike tells this incredible morality play without preaching. In fact, I suspect most people who read the book will simply enjoy it because it is a kick-ass novel about the most intense character in all of modern fiction. I am trying to say "Thirst" is so much more than a vampire book. It is ultimately a timeless fable of how fear can change to hatred, and then to love, and finally mature into devotion. Pike has managed a small miracle by showing us that these emotion are not truly at odds with each other. For they all reside in every human heart, in the same way, perhaps, the divine does as well. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It changed my life forever.

ETA again: Christopher Pike has now made an impressively paranoid post on a website of his accusing the original Amazon reviewer (caligirl_08) of posting negative reviews under multiple aliases, as well as claiming that

bookfails is a "livejournal community sponsored by someone of Turkish background who has taken things much too far and is trying to rob fiction authors of their artistic license".

Dear Author has also caught wind of this (last item on the page).

But wait, there's more!

caligirl_08 (

bs_08 on

bookfails) tackles Pike's aforementioned sexy vampire novel, Thirst. It ... well, I'm just going to leave this here:

Initial post: Nov. 7, 2009 3:08 AM PST
Michael Brite says:
It says clearly in the book that Sita was an Aryan, a well known group who invaded India five thousand years ago. They were all blond and blue-eyed.

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sgaana
2010-09-27 03:04 am UTC (link)

I actually agree with your comment otherwise, but this stuck out to me:

It's like having a cowboy character with a bowler or a Tyrolese hat.

Er.... Bat Masterson wants a word with you....

(While not a "cowboy" in the purest technical sense, Masterson is one of the famous gunslinger figures of the Old West. The bowler was... just a hat, and people wore them in the Old West. No, really. They had all kinds of accents besides a Texas drawl, too, because they were immigrants who frequently headed directly West -- John Cleese's sheriff is one of the great details in the movie "Silverado".)

Otherwise, though... I'm in complete agreement that all of the mistakes add up into something incredibly sloppy, and I actually think it's WORSE because it's a YA book. The POV character being ignorant would be fine with me, because plenty of Americans are that ignorant about Turkey. But it would only be fine with me if the point of her being ignorant was so that she could have her ignorance corrected through the course of the book, and thus the readers would learn something, imagine that.

And the point really OUGHT to be that neither the editor nor the author should need to be Turkish to care about getting some very basic details about another country correct.

It makes me wonder if I'm just being hopelessly naive in thinking that people who write YA books should make even more of a point than usual to be educating those who will read the books, as well as entertaining them. (*sigh* Probably, yes.)

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ealusaid
2010-09-28 07:08 pm UTC (link)

The bowler was... just a hat, and people wore them in the Old West

*digresses*

Also, not everyone who wore a cowboy hat wore a Stetson! Even now you've got a reasonable chance of telling which region a cowboy is from based on his hat, and back in the day you could place someone rather more accurately based on their hat, rope, chaps, and saddle, since to my knowledge there was no "Ranch Hand Fashion Monthly" going around in the 1880s.

(It's almost like John Wayne movies aren't perfect illustrations of life in the Old West.)

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sgaana
2010-09-28 08:48 pm UTC (link)

Yeah, not least because Stetsons were actually relatively expensive. Which doesn't mean that a cowboy or other Western figure might not have considered it worth paying for, but there were many cheaper alternatives.

"Contrary to popular belief, it was the bowler and not the cowboy hat that was the most popular in the American West, prompting Lucius Beebe to call it "the hat that won the West."" - quote from Wikipedia, but footnoted to a 1957 article by Beebe in "The Deseret News":

"A few years ago a writer was engaged in preparing for book publication a pictorial history of the Old West. He examined literally thousands upon thousands of contemporary illustrations, especially photographs, and after a time he became haunted by what at first seemed a recurrent and indefinable but ever present anachronism. At length it dawned upon him that a formidably large proportion of the population of the Old West, the Wild West, the West of everybody but Frederic Remington and his imitators were wearing derby hats and not Stetsons."

(Came across that when trying to look up my vague sense that the "ten gallon" style made by Stetson is actually from later, but I wasn't sure what "later" might be. I was going to reply to you that you can also in some cases make a guess as to time period, by the hat style. Which is not to refute the idea that "the cowboy hat" became popular and widespread -- it had a lot of practical features, it became popular for a reason. Just that, as you and I are both agreeing, that doesn't mean other types of hats weren't found in the Old West, or even "typical" of the Old West.)

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