Tangled Mind

Heh, Sci-Fi isn't nearly provocative as it could be. Imagine if even 50% of the current sci-fi writers added one more default race or ethnicity to their palette-- now, that would be some genuine provocation.

See-- it's not the INHUMAN ALIENS, it's that the Good Guys who fight the Inhuman Aliens are... almost always... unless it's Will Smith...

white.

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autopope.livejournal.com

it's not the INHUMAN ALIENS, it's that the Good Guys who fight the Inhuman Aliens are... almost always... unless it's Will Smith...

white.

Also: American. (In outlook, under the funny costumes.)

SF as a genre in the English-speaking countries comes with a certain amount of implicit ideological baggage attached, and many of the practitioners (and readers) are unaware of this.

Personally I'd be a lot happier if 50% of the current sci-fi writers we read in English were being read in translation from those other languages in which they were writing ...

Edited Date: Sunday, May 10th, 2009 06:43 am (UTC)

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So absolutely. I used to read heavy Metal magazine, and sometimes even Metal Hurlant. And I can get Japanese or Korean manga... but not novels so much.

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autopope.livejournal.com

I'm monolingual (in English) and non-American, and as an SF writer who is mostly published in the USA I feel like a peculiarly privileged alien; if not for an accident of linguistic birth (being born in the UK) I'd be excluded from what is basically the most lucrative market for commercial fiction.

But even with the right language, I find a lot of American attitudes ... weird, to say the least. For example, the obsession with race goes hand-in-hand with an almost total blindness to the idea that American values aren't universal and that other people in other places are real in their own right. From the outside, it's glaringly obvious that the one is an aspect of the other -- but from the inside? Deafening silence.

I sometimes think the rest of the world could vanish and the only affect in the USA would be some yelling from the politicians in districts with large military bases, who would naturally be offended by the lack of foreigners to be defended against to the tune of several billion dollars a year in pork.

Edited Date: Sunday, May 10th, 2009 05:55 pm (UTC)

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marypcb.livejournal.com

and by the same argument, KSR's Years of Rice and Salt would be only acceptable because White Europeans can't be discriminated against too much... faugh

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Where is this happening? I am not going to participate, honest, but I would like to look.

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Tor,

rushthatspeaks,

ithiliana.

I think it's, amongst other things, another example of the difference between American and ?European / ?British / ?non-American views, experiences, positions on race and racism.

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I found the Tor thread last night. I am not touching ithiliana with a ten-foot bargepole, but the thread at Tor is both interesting and depressing.

I can see your point of view, but yes, I think Pat's book is problematic, and I think her starting point is a good example of good intentions coupled with innocent thoughtlessness.

It's a bit like writing an alternative history in which the history of Europe is changed by the fact that Jews never existed while Christianity still developed, and this was all for the fun of having Zeppelins still in use. A lot of people would say, now wait a minute... Which is not to say that you shouldn't write the book: it just means that if you then act all surprised at Jews being pissed off, you haven't thought out your hypothesis as well as you should have. And perhaps if you had, you would have written a different book. Perhaps Stephen Fry's Making History.

This said, I still want to clobber a lot of the commenters over the head with a copy of The Collected Works of George Orwell. There's being right, and there's being a jackass about it. Some people there are right, some people are jackasses, and some are both at the same time. And they are damn well stopping anybody having a good thought about the issue.

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Also, while there are important differences between how race, xenophobia and ethnicity are treated in the US and UK, the UK has its own share of problems, one of which is that white Britons tend to be fairly blind to the existence of the other people who live here, except when they suddenly notice them and feel a deep unease if not worse.

Living in London we have a skewed perspective on this, but still, the other day in my counselling class I heard something along the lines of "people who engage in antisocial behaviour tend to eat fatty food" and "there are adults in the East End who have never used a fork", and I could pretty well decode it, and so I suppose could the one black member of our group, who kept silent. I am utterly sure that the two people who said this, who have read a lot on diversity and are probably committed to it, had no clue that it was problematic.

And THAT is the problem. Unfortunately, I did not know at the time how to raise the issue in a useful manner, and I still don't know.

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I wonder if your decoding works the same as mine? Because I read both those comments as class, rather than race, prejudice.

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Careful! You'll evoke Will Shetterly if you go on like this...* :-)

Of course, antisocial behaviour and eating greasy food are connected by the fact that both, independently, are "behavior exhibited by poor people". So I rather doubt it's the greasy food that causes the antisocial behaviour as my tutor meant.

It could well be that, as the greasy food I tend to crave is mostly KFC, and as somebody once branded forever KFC in my subconscious as "Black people's food", this is a personal shortcircuit. It could even be that the KFC = black people association happened in the US - frankly, I don't remember, but it seems likely. My immediate association was with black Londoners, but that could well be me, the Wire, and the fact that I have been too long in the States. And of course the various Tennessee Fried Chicken, Southern Fried Chicken, Alabama Fried Chicken, mostly manned by people from the subcontinent but still messing with my subconscious.

*And we'll have to have THAT conversation all over again. And then again. And then again...

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nooooo, let's not channel Mr Shetterley ...

Yep, definitely some differences, and some alternate experience, here. My immediate unpacking of 'greasy food' is McDonalds, rather than KFC -- tho' I don't think of either as associated with non-white rather than white. (Kebabs and curry, now ...) And the 'mostly manned by people from the subcontinent' may be a London / city-centric perception -- I tend to think of fast-food joints as 'manned by spotty teenagers with attitude problems', because that was what applied where I grew up.

But then we are each the product of our experience, and my experience has predisposed me to a very white-centric perspective (partly racist, partly ignorant of British non-whites), coupled with a working-class chip* on my shoulder.

* not a fry! (French or otherwise)

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fastfwd.livejournal.com

I didn't know about this at all. And like

annafdd, I ain't touchin' this one with a barge pole.

But now I'm going to read the book and recommend that reviewers I know review it.

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ithiliana.livejournal.com

I am involved in the debate. I have not read the book (but plan to as soon as school is out, I finish Bear's book, and I have some spare time). I love Wrede's earlier week.

But a number of us find the premise problematic (and said so), and there are discussions going on about the way the text mirrors the erasing of indigenous peoples in "American" history.

I do not how it can be a "kind" of censorship (people are always claiming censorship on the internet ignoring the fact that actual censorship requires a government body; disagreement is not in fact censorship; reading a review of a book by someone who has read it and deciding not to buy or read it is not censorship (and while not everybody in the thread has read the book, some have, and confirm the problematic nature of the premise is born out in the book itself). I also connect in a recent post to a discussion thread at amazon.com which covers in detail the problematic way the book built on its premise.

There are a number of sites (oyate is mentioned) where American Indians write about the racist, stereotyped, and other problematic portrayals of their culures in mainstream texts (and many many other sites and writers about similar problems with the protrayal by a white male dominated media of African Americans, all the cultures of Asian Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, etc.). Heck, even white feminists have been known to critique the sexist portrayals of whtie women in white male dominated media.

Nobody I have seen is calling for a "boycott" (though some are saying, as often happens, that they don't feel moved to read it by the info they see--again, how many times do negative reviews affect a decision?)

As I posted in my journal, I can find a whole lot of reviews by white women that are immensely favoritable about the book ("oooh boy magic dragons plus Little House on the Prairie").

Some people choosing to identify writers they don't choose to read are not a blacklist (i.e. employers listing who they will not employ).

No reader is obligated to read anybook.

There's a whole list of male authors I won't and don't read and haven't for decades (starting with Hemingway and Lawrence)--becuase I'd rather read women (who are mostly but not entirely white--my area of interest in literature include women, both white and chromatic.)

A number of us who are white feminists are dismayed to see rhetoric coming out of the mouth of white women that mirror what white men said to exclude white women from the academic, from literature, etc.

It's depressing.

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I do understand, or am beginning to understand, the issues with the erasure of NA from this version of American history.

I'm not claiming censorship (though I did say "This feels like a peculiar kind of censorship", emphasis on 'feels like'). Nor did I use the word 'boycott', and I used the word 'blacklist' in its metaphoric sense rather than its literal one.

What I am concerned about is the argument that it is unacceptable to write an AU with this premise.

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ithiliana.livejournal.com

*shrugs* "This feels like....censorship" might quality it slightly, but you're not the only one stating that it's censorship, nor was the metaphoric nature of your other terms clear. The other people using them are also not defining them as metaphoric.

"Unacceptable"--well, I think it's unacceptable to tell people criticizing the ideas of a book that it's like censorship. That won't stop you feeling the way you do, nor will people saying how unacceptable the premise is stop anybody from writing it.

It's not even a metaphor for whatever.

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I think it's unacceptable to tell people criticizing the ideas of a book that it's like censorship

It probably would be. But posting about how I feel on my personal journal, and engaging in a discussion which has helped me reframe the question from 'why is this unacceptable?' to 'how could this premise be written acceptably?', has given me more understanding of the issue than I had when I was reacting to comments about 'unacceptable' and 'crossing another writer off the list'.

I'm still going to read the book and form my own opinion, though.

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marypcb.livejournal.com

"actual censorship requires a government body"
I'm going to disagree with that six ways from Sunday. social pressure is a form of censorship; activism deciding what is and isn't acceptable as a premise that leads to social pressure may well lead to government action, or censorship by publishers (viz: the US media on US wars) or self-censorship by readers.

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ithiliana.livejournal.com

Should i point out the irony of criticizing posts/debates you have not read while critizing people for not reading the book but daring to criticize it?

Here is a beautiful meditative piece by a white fan on issues of the erasure of NA from "American history" with some excellent discussion (and while I haven't read every comment in the thread yet--I read a bunch yesteday but have been at a conference all day today), I doubt there's much namecalling, censorship, or boycotting calls:

http://rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com/310873.html

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Should i point out the irony of criticizing posts/debates you have not read while critizing people for not reading the book but daring to criticize it?

Please do, although that is not what is happening here. This post was a reaction to the comments on the Tor review, and to some comments in

rushthatspeaks's post (which, yes, is excellent, but nevertheless has sparked some remarks that I don't agree with).

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Yeah, I'm not real happy with the premise of the book as reported. And so far no one has denied that Wrede handwaved an entire two continent's worth of humanity into thin air-- the very same groups that have been genuinely decimated and destroyed.

it's not calling for a boycott, but pointing out that some people are tired of being invisible in the common narrative, and don't wish to spend their money on being ignored for the sake of entertainment...

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I understand some of the problems with the premise, though from a non-American perspective, which probably means I haven't been exposed to as much (mis)information, negative or positive, about NA as others.

But I'm also uneasy about the counterargument which seems to be along the lines of 'this should not be written'. SF&F is traditionally the literature of 'what if': but this is a 'what if' that is too offensive.

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fjm.livejournal.com

Haven't read this book, but I gotta say I was pretty unhappy at the way Philip Roth erased the Japanese in The Plot Against America, and similary in Chris Priest's The Separation. In the first, Roth gives the Jews the fate of the Japanese in the US; in the second, the Jews are sent somewhere else, so that's ok.

I'm also having a hard time seeing *how* it's possible to have a completely unsettled continent.

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I'm not in a position to argue re wholesale erasure of ethnic groups: it's not something I find offensive in a work of fiction, though perhaps I would feel differently if it were presented as a desirable solution.

As for how it's possible to have a completely unsettled continent? I think the answer is Magic.

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I find it problematic, but then I am myself slightly in a position of otherness, being white but not British, and living as an immigrant. What I mean is that to me, it is personally, emotionally problematic, and therefore it's a whole lot easier to see than for somebody who is, I don't know how to put it, "the default"?

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fjm.livejournal.com

And no one but the Europeans ever worked out how to get past it?

I'll look at the book when I get the chance, but I think one of the issues here is that the American Story is one which claims to have taken an unsettled "wlderness". Neither of these things are true. So a fantasy story which works precisely with this idea is going to have to work damned hard *not* to be deemed to be colluding.

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And no one but the Europeans ever worked out how to get past it?

I don't know how this works: I am going to find out when I read the book. It may or may not be a credible explanation, but it seems to be the premise.

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You'd find it offensive if you were a member of that ethnic group, one who is commonly erased in the writings and stories of the society you live in.

It's just one more damned insult... in the name of entertainment, no less...

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You'd find it offensive if you were a member of that ethnic group

Absolutely: I can't relate to that aspect of the situation because there isn't an ethnic group to which I feel any kinship.

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woolymonkey.livejournal.com

Not up with the debate or the book, but my knee-jerk reaction:
What makes this immediately feel offensive to me is that the book's premise is so dangerously close to the false view of history encouraged by the dominant culture. I'm all for free-ranging speculation and fantasy--I just like it to open up minds (mine included) to new ways of looking at the world. Maybe the way the book is written does this, but it's certainly treading dangerous ground where it could easily be part of a collective denial of reality.

Even if Wrede is doing this, I don't think the answer is to censor the book. I just wish there was more stuff out there challenging the myth that Europeans came to America and found an uninhabited virgin wilderness. It's a myth that echoes through a lot of space colonisation stories, and I'm always happy when I see people engaging with it rather than simply propagating it.

May actually have to read 13th Child so I can decide which I think it is doing. Then again, actually reading book I'm arguing about on teh Internets? Nah, why would I do that?

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the book's premise is so dangerously close to the false view of history encouraged by the dominant culture

I see your point, but I'm uneasy with the notion that a writer? a reader? should avoid alternate histories where differences in that world result in mirroring a false view of the real world, through a chain of cause-and-effect that is valid within that world and doesn't reflect reality. (A convoluted way of trying to say that I might well feel differently if the pre-Colombian population had been wiped out or specifically barred from entry: "BERING LAND BRIDGE: YOU MUST BE THIS WHITE TO PASS".)

Am definitely going to read the book: a) I like Wrede's writing b) I want to form my own opinion c) I am intrigued by that set-up though suspect I cannot now ignore the weight of controversy it brings with it.

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ladyvorkosigan.livejournal.com

Jumping over from Narahat's links. From what I've seen, people are mostly not saying that an alternate history where people didn't cross the Bering Land Bridge should never be written. What they're saying is that it shouldn't be a quick, handwaved premise so that the white settlers can come on board and have magical adventures without having to worry about them. If it was a real exploration of what the world would look like if they hadn't, that would probably be very different. (And, incidentally, perhaps give you a clue into why Sawyer's books are treated differently.)

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I'm happy that people are mostly not saying that such things shouldn't be written -- but there's been at least one thread using the word 'unacceptable' about writing this premise, and that's what got me started. Because if you can't write a 'what if' in SF&F, where can you write it?

And of course the question is really "How can you write it?"

As per comment below, I am interested in how and under what circumstances such a premise can be written without insult -- an issue which is becoming clearer.

(I don't know where the Sawyer stuff comes from, I'm not sure I've ever read any of his work!)

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ladyvorkosigan.livejournal.com

Honestly, I think the reason people who are saying "unacceptable" are probably doing so because they're responding in threads about this book which appears not to engage with the issues presented in a substantive manner. Some people might feel the same about a book that does, but since that book seems so far removed from this one, I'd tend not to hold people literally to what's said in reference to this one.

Sorry - someone mentioned Sawyer's books above and I thought it was you. They involve an alternate Earth in which Neanderthals became the dominant species and homo sapiens went extinct; mammoths also survive in his version of North America.

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tevriel.livejournal.com

One. (http://sami.dreamwidth.org/1333468.html)

Two. (http://sami.dreamwidth.org/1333674.html)

Explanations provided, in depth.

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