sholio | Hello, internets!

Hello, internets!

I have not been around much lately; work + social life/volunteerism + writing fiction has stolen all my online time and most of my energy. (Woe!) And it doesn't help that my workplace has tightened its rules on blogging, so I can't pop in and check LJ during the day. Hopefully things will lighten up soon.

Hmm, what's going on these days ...

1.

sga_genficathon is humming along nicely. I am thrilled to be able to sit back this year and watch stories magically appear, with just a few very minor snags to iron out and/or author requests to fix formatting errors, etc. I am still way, way behind on reading, but I am really impressed with the variety of stories, styles and subjects available to read -- The Choices That Damn Us deserves way more comments than it's gotten (a chilling, believable, Teyla-centric AU that depicts a very plausible direction in which the Stargate Program could have gone). On a much more cheerful note (yes, I am counting apocafic as "more cheerful") Where the White Lillies Grow is a long and very enjoyable, John & Rodney-centric story of two clashing AUs, one in which a series of Years Without a Summer in the 1800s wiped out most of civilization on Earth, and another in which a darker Atlantis expedition never regained contact with Earth. A malfunctioning Stargate causes them to collide ...

2. Switching to serious RL stuff, Tor Books does it again with a YA fantasy about a magical USA in which the continent is conveniently empty of inhabitants when the Europeans arrive. This is not, in the book, presented as a terrible tragedy or a reason to explore a necessarily very different America; instead it's an excuse for a light-hearted romp with mammoths and covered wagons in an America that (in defiance of logic, reason or morality) is pretty much the same as the one we know except for the no-pesky-indigenous-people thing. Then Lois McMaster Bujold, whose books I like very much, gets involved in the comments and makes everything so very much worse. *headdesk* Due to the whole lack-of-time thing, I haven't read more than a random smattering of posts on this, but naraht has link roundups. (How do you make the LJ-user code work for Dreamwidth accounts? Cannot figure it out. Brain is very limp and floppy tonight.)

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I'm about to run off to work, so very quickly: Thank you for the recs! I plan to read the genficathon once things calm down here, so much appreciated.

On the DW thing:

user name=jadesfire2808 site=livejournal.com

inside <> should work :)

Ah, thank you! I still struggle with DW-specific markup. :)

The code thing depends on from where you post, I think. On DW the posting interfaces recognize additional site="livejournal.com" or site="insanejournal.com" added to the tag and when you crosspost to say LJ the crossposter formats the DW user tags to point to the original site too. AFAIK on LJ you'd have to do this manually and insert the links and tiny head and so on by hand (though there are scripts that generate this code for you), but giving the site as parameter does not work.

Does it really? :D I've been sticking with the old LJ tags because I was afraid I'd break the posts on this side.... another reason to love that crossposter!

A-ha! That explains a lot, actually -- I kept seeing the little DW heads in LJ posts, and couldn't figure out how people were doing that. Now it all becomes clear. :D Thanks!

Wow, I'm glad to have read this--otherwise I feel like I'd miss everything during finals.

So are you switching your fics over to DW?

No. I have a DW journal for reading, commenting and backup, but for now, I'm not even cross-posting -- everything is here. I guess I'll have to deal with it the next time I post a long fic, since DW's post limit is so much larger, but it hasn't come up yet. :D

That bit with The 13th Child, man, I just cannot get behind the sentiment that an alt history piece that excises Native Americans is the same as an alt history piece that says Native Americans aren't important to the development of America.

Maybe it's just that I've been tuned into the crazy channel for the whole deal, but so far the only good argument I've seen is that it could bolster the 'empty plains' myth. I don't see the author talking about intent, and with something this subtle, I think I need some to differentiate this from normal alt history that doesn't get accused of racist undertones.

Ah, I just spent approximately forever reading about this, so I might know! (I also answered the teacher's questions first in class, what?) Ah, basically a lot of the problem stems from a comment the author made before publishing the book about its premise, along the lines of 'there are two ways to portray Native Americans, both are stereotypes, therefore I will eliminate the problem by not having Native Americans!' Now, the eliminating the problem phrase was indeed her own language - I can't swear to the rest of it. But I can definitely see how a PoC might read that perhaps well meaning blurb and wonder why the author didn't try representing Native Americans as, I dunno, people instead of stereotypes. I get the author's point, I have a huge problem representing minority populations myself, but I still keep trying. And if I were publishing something? I think I'd research the hell out of it, rather than papering over a major issue. But I dunno, it's very very late and I spent way too long over there. Oh, try this website: http://www.oyate.org It's pretty awesome, and has links to other great resources. I mean, what would normal alt history be? I can't think of any that erased a population, not off the top of my head. But then I don't read a lot of alt history of the subtracting kind - I like the sort where something is added, like the recent Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Oh! The Pierce Adams series set in Florida might be an example, it had magical creatures, and was a magical land but instead of Florida, so no Florida tribe or anything ...
This is becoming a pointless ramble, to sleep!

Yeah, I think my consternation comes from the idea that by not exploring the issue deeply, because the author wanted to get at what they actually wanted to write about, that she's either being racist or lazy or shit.

It can be easy to sling labels like that, but then again, I'm only a bit oppressed, so I usually leave taking umbrage to the people actually hurt by racism. For me, I was very unlikely to read that book to begin with, had I even heard of it. ::shrug::

The Pierce Adams series set in Florida might be an example, it had magical creatures, and was a magical land but instead of Florida, so no Florida tribe or anything ...

Did you mean Piers Anthony, the Xanth books? <--- is giant nerd

You know, I hadn't even thought about them in context of this discussion, but you have a point; I mean, Anthony's ouvre in general is not exactly unproblematic (though it's mostly writing women that he has trouble with, oh my gawd) but I never once got a skeevy sense off Xanth, at least not in that particular way, even though it's very obviously and unsubtly a magical version of Florida.

In my understanding, it's not *just* the comment by any means (see my answers to Kurosau below); I think it really all comes back to what you said here:

I think I'd research the hell out of it, rather than papering over a major issue.

Yes! That's the issue, really; that it's so loaded, and so much an ongoing issue for people who are still alive -- to write a book that pretty much plays straight into the hands of the racists, because you either failed to do your research or just didn't care, is something that deserves to be called out.

Aha, yes! Piers Anthony! Man, I haven't read anything of his in years, and I was conflating him with a few other writers in the A section. That was a profitable section, in my sci-fi years ... But no, I never thought about them in that context, either, not when I was reading them. As you said, I was most concerned by his portrayal of women, which seemed ... women in these books, in most books, never seem like me, like someone I could identify with or want to be like. That's a problem with MOST OF LITERATURE, however, so I'm used to it. o.o

And research is so important! Even when you're writing something you think you know, you still have these unexplored assumptions affecting your point of view. It's worth researching the everyday, even, if only to make yourself a better writer on the aesthetic level, never mind the moral level!

The biggest thing I've learned from RaceFail09 is that intent isn't nearly as important as effect. Even if the author thought that she was doing the right thing by removing all indigenous people from America to avoid stereotyping, the effect of what she did does give the message that at best, their presence isn't important, and at worst that they're a 'problem' best solved by their removal. It seems to me that if she wanted to have colonists in America with woolly mammoths and other extinct species, she could have just had colonists in America with woolly mammoths and other extinct species.

See, that's part of the whole deal, I don't think that eliminating a variable from an alt history story (no matter how less or more alt history it is since people are arguing about that now) says that said variable wasn't important. That's the part that's being read into that I don't think is supported. If I wanted to eliminate the Cathars from my 13th century French conspiracy/religion/slash-fic alt history piece, I wouldn't be saying that they're unimportant, they're just a piece of the setting that I've 'turned off'. That can go further if you push it, I could actually make the case that they aren't important, but until I read The 13th Child and find that, I just don't see it here.

I don't think that eliminating a variable from an alt history story (no matter how less or more alt history it is since people are arguing about that now) says that said variable wasn't important.

But taking that variable, eliminating it, and then writing a history in which everything is pretty much unaffected except for the addition of some Cool Stuff(TM) -- that's exactly what it says. And that's exactly what she seems to have done, in total defiance of actual history.

At the risk of Godwining myself, her history is as egregiously wrong as if she'd eliminated Germany and Japan completely from an alt-history and then written a book set in the 1980s that had everything we've got, including WWII, neo-Nazis, the atomic bomb, and the present-day map of the world, except with France's borders extended to encompass the area where Germany now sits.

But this only covers the "totally wrong" part of her alt-history and not the "massively skeevy" part, because there actually was a concerted campaign throughout the last few hundred years of American history (the 19th century in particular) to "remove" inconvenient Native Americans from getting in the way of colonial "progress". There is still a very strong tendency in the history that all our schoolchildren learn to downplay their accomplishments and portray history as having started in the Americas when Columbus landed -- or, in North America, when the Pilgrims set up a town on the coast. We learn far more about the political interactions of France and England than we do about the politics of the Wampanoag and the Abenaki, even though the latter were just as important to the present-day shape of the U.S. (and no less fascinating).

So, against the backdrop of a world in which there's a centuries-old and in some ways ongoing effort to wipe out an entire branch of humanity and scrub them from history, a white writer writes a book in which history conveniently did it for us, and the world is a better place for it. (It's full of mammoths! And magic! Squee!) And the subtler implication is that the contributions of the Americas to both American settlement and to world culture just don't matter, that you can yank out all the assistance that enabled the early colonists to make it through the winter (rather than failing as the Norse settlements did), that you can remove the potato or corn or tobacco, and still have a political landscape that looks pretty similar to what we've got, except without the unpleasantness. (No slave trade, for example, even though cheap/forced labor was hugely integral to building the present-day picture of our society.)

I have not read the book; I'm relying on reviews and accounts from people who have read it to build up a picture of what its politics look like (much as one does when viewing the past).

It's not so much that you couldn't do it as a what-if; it's a combination of the issue that the concept itself is so tremendously loaded that it deserves to be handled fairly, and the fact that she's not done that -- she's just used it as a springboard for a "whee! cool!" world that isn't realistically drawn from our own.

I get what you're saying about the totally wrong and massively skeevy bits, but I can't agree.

She didn't write a history in which everything is unaffected by the loss of the Native Americans. She wrote a history in which she left out Native Americans but otherwise didn't make many changes. That's less a concerted effort to write them out and say they weren't important as just flip a single switch to support a single concept, namely megafauna. Plus, I don't think that the inclusion of mammoths and magic is saying that the world is a better place without Native Americans in it. Those are straight up pure fantasy concepts that wouldn't reflect on the absence or presence of a given culture no matter what we do.

In terms of what she's done wrong as an author, my attitude is that she's really taken away something that's extremely important to Americana. There's this weird mutant thing in my head that I think of when I think of the history and fiction of America itself, and Native Americans are a big part of that. But them being gone does not, to me, equate with the giant blindspot that historical and educational materials have created.

And I'd add to what you've said to suggest that it wasn't just a concerted campaign that erased Native Americans from history books, but rather a straight up willful desire to write a white history. It didn't need a campaign, everyone in charge was doing the wrong thing already.

But that still doesn't fit together with The 13th Child in my head, it doesn't seem to be the same thing at all. And as much as she could've likely done the job better, I also don't know not having read the book, I think deciding on a change like this because it's a "whee! cool!" concept is a legitimate choice, as legitimate as an in-depth, detailed, well researched handling of the issue.

She didn't write a history in which everything is unaffected by the loss of the Native Americans. She wrote a history in which she left out Native Americans but otherwise didn't make many changes. That's less a concerted effort to write them out and say they weren't important as just flip a single switch to support a single concept, namely megafauna.

... um, I can't figure out what your argument is here, honestly. Aren't those the same thing? If she removes one factor and leaves all else the same, doesn't that imply very heavily that the factor she removed is, at least by her, considered irrelevant? Either that, or it implies that she's such a poor or lazy writer she can't be bothered to do simple fact-checking for a book. Neither one of which is very complimentary to the writer, but honestly, when you've got a situation where a bunch of people are pointing out something in a book that they find offensive, those are basically the options -- that the writer is ignorant enough about the situation to have written something heavily offensive by accident, or that they don't care and/or believe what they wrote.

Clearly no one is saying that she's a terrible person, but, as a writer, she *has* caused offense to a segment of her audience (and Bujold's compounded the problem).

In terms of what she's done wrong as an author, my attitude is that she's really taken away something that's extremely important to Americana. There's this weird mutant thing in my head that I think of when I think of the history and fiction of America itself, and Native Americans are a big part of that. But them being gone does not, to me, equate with the giant blindspot that historical and educational materials have created

Well, not really a mutant thing at all, I think; I would have thought it was pretty much indisputable that the history of the Americas is intrinsically bound up with the people who were here first, who shaped the colonizers' settlement patterns and are still here in greatly reduced numbers.

Erasing them for a work of light fantasy is not, of course, an act on a par with physically wiping them off the map, or removing them from history books -- but IMHO, it's not entirely removed; it's part of the same continuum, just as the absence of black characters in leading roles on TV is part of a continuum that includes discriminatory hiring and lending practices, Jim Crow laws and so forth -- one small part (but definitely a part) of a narrative that says "We don't want you here" and "Mainstream=/=you". (The caveat here is that I'm very much a white girl, so I'm looking at this from the outside and feel a bit weird taking an expert tone on it. Of course, like most modern Americans I'm also a blend of several races and cultures if you go far enough back. I look white, culturally identify white, basically am white in every way that counts, and there is no way I can claim Native heritage without being hideously co-optive, which means it's totally irrelevant to these discussions -- but on a strictly personal level, my ~1/16 Choctaw self would not exist in Wrede's 'verse because my great-grandparents would have been on different continents, and it's hard to avoid thinking about that too.)

... um, I can't figure out what your argument is here, honestly. Aren't those the same thing?

Very nearly so, yes. I'm making a very subtle distinction in the idea that you can do at least two things here. On the one hand, you can remove Native Americans because you think they're irrelevant, or at least make the point that they're irrelevant. On the other hand, you can remove Native Americans because they're an obstacle to your story, without any intent what so ever as to casting them as irrelevant. In the former, you're making a pretty slimy argument. In the latter, you're being ignorant of what that does to your world's internal consistency. Both will still offend, but I think they're slightly different things.

Well, not really a mutant thing at all, I think;

Sorry, I should've elaborated, I mean mutant as in my head is full of cowboys and oregon trail people and native americans and mad frenchmen and The Dark Tower and Josey Wales and all that. With John Wayne standing overwatch and Wes Studi being a total jerk somewhere in the background.

And yeah, I agree with you on the continuum idea.

My personal background is very mutt like, but it's all european/scandy mutt. Sometimes I wonder if someone's going to yell at me for having my opinions and being white.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, intent somehow plays into my moral philosophy, whence why the distinction between those two concepts is important in my head. I don't really know how my own moral system works, I haven't finished translating it from emotions to concepts yet.

(One thing about DW that's tempting to me ... longer comment limits!)

I think deciding on a change like this because it's a "whee! cool!" concept is a legitimate choice, as legitimate as an in-depth, detailed, well researched handling of the issue.

I'd totally agree with you if it was something without the huge amount of cultural and historical baggage associated with it, because I am very prone to the "whee! cool!" reaction myself. (F'r example, any combination of dinosaurs + mammoths + dirigibles + magic + modern world is pretty much guaranteed to get a *\o/* reaction from me. Under different circumstances I'd be thrilled to read a book like this.) But considering that we do live in the real world, I don't think it's that easy to tease apart the real-world milieu in which the book is written from the fictional tropes of the book. Whether we like it or not, a book in which a plague killed off all the white people (like Bear's "Carnival") has a totally different import than a book in which a plague killed off all the black people (like Sewer Gas Electric, to name one). It'd be like, say, playing the Cambodian Killing Fields massacres for laughs; oh sure, you *can*, but just because you can doesn't mean you should, because there are a lot of living human beings for whom it would be one more hurt on top of many. This, I think, falls into that category -- it wouldn't be that much of an insult by itself, if it weren't falling on top of a virtually infinite line of similar insults and worse.

I still think it can work, especially considering that we're looking at a YA novel, and traditionally speaking they aren't expected to carry the weight of the world as we know it. Interesting stuff set in somewhat easily understandable settings and all that.

Someone pointed out to me that there's no such thing as problem-free fiction. I tend to agree, and my attitude about The 13th Child is informed by this and two other things. First, I dislike extremist arguments, so the people that have been rah rah there's nothing here and the people that have been rah rah this book is totally fucking racist have really gotten my hackles up. Second, I think there's a spectrum in regards to what could be considered subtly racist fiction. Some of it isn't actually going to be racist, other stuff is, that's why I want to argue about this, about whether or not her decision could be innocent or just ignorant, whether or not it's worse or better or just neutral because of the long line of fiction preceding it that might've touched on similar ground.

... but wait, there's more! Sorry, after I posted the previous, I got to thinking about it and realized that I didn't even get into what is, to me, probably a bigger Humanity!Fail than the book itself, and that's the mocking and dismissal of those who brought up issues with the book's concept in the Tor thread.

I'm not accusing you of doing that. But I do see this pattern, which was very prevalent during RaceFail earlier this year, for someone who says "Hey, this book offends me" to be insulted and attacked, labeled stupid or ignorant or a poor reader. These, too, are charged terms. And if you dig deeper into the Tor thread, past Bujold making an ass of herself, there are the usual comparisons to book-burning and censorship.

I absolutely do think that we need to talk about this stuff and air these issues in the open. Nothing should be de facto off limits. But how can a rational discussion be held when just raising the issue in the first place is an invitation to be shouted down, insulted and accused of supporting censorship? And every time that a discussion like this gets a tip of the asshat from people like Bujold (whose books I really like, who I used to respect a lot as a person), it makes the next discussion that much more fraught and tense.

That quote you linked me to of Bujold's doesn't strike me as mocking or dismissive. Bujold did say some stupid things that I said, that doesn't seem to be one of them. Here's my take on why.

There's discussion back and forth about this issue, about the book, whether or not it's racist. And so battle lines get drawn. Some people support it, some people attack it, and that's all good.

And then people who up who act like it's the next most racist thing since Mein Kampf (I've no idea how racist it is, I never read that either), along with the people that act like the people attacking the books are crazy super-racism-labelers that want to turn our world into a bright shiny PC colored rainbow. And they tend to throw things off a bit.

For my stake, I'd like it if The 13th Child didn't go down as racist trash because it was shouted down by the extremists. And I don't want to see people who have legitimate concerns (IE, is this book racist, does it harm Native Americans by what it's done?) get shouted down, because the discussion about that is something worth having.

So, that's my feelings on the shouting down bits. I think it's important to acknowledge that there are too many extremists on both side of the argument, and they're making everyone feel shitty.

In the end, I don't think that the conversation about this book will change anyone's mind. I'm still going to have it though. I believe in the freedom, as an author, to be able to write whatever the hell I want, and I really want the chance for my book to stand on its own two feet instead of being shouted down as racist chance because of the argument surrounding it. So I feel compelled to say stuff like this. It's still important to ask questions like "is my favorite/new/old/hated book racist?" but it's just as important to not jump to conclusions and insert one's own feelings too far up the books ass.

I found the comment of Bujold's, that I linked to, an incredibly rude and ungracious response to SkywardProdigal ... pretty much in so many words, she called SkywardProdigal ignorant and dismissed SkywardProdigal's "I will not read this book because the premise is abhorrent to me" as an invalid critique because SP had not read the book. (I seriously can't even figure out WTF her logic is supposed to be there.)

I am very uncomfortable with having anyone involved in this discussion dismissed as an "extremist", because the difference between an extremist and a legitimately angry person is in the eye of the beholder. So is the difference between a productive conversation and one that simply consists of shouting. I can't figure out what your hypothetical productive discussion would look like if it didn't look like this, not when there are very painful issues at stake, about which people feel very strongly. This is not to say that I stand behind every single thing that has been said in the discussion, but it sounds like you expect people to discuss this sort of thing in completely dispassionate terms when it's a very, very emotional topic due to the history of it, and that's ... I think you're expecting superhuman levels of self-control, frankly. (Or Vulcan!) Especially in a public discussion where there are random people (and trolls) wandering in and out all the time with all their own takes on it, *and* you're dealing with a social milieu in which people who challenge the dominant paradigm are usually dismissed as emotional, overly involved, and/or flat-out wrong...

Also, I'm not sure how authorial freedom enters into it, because no one (that I've seen) is objecting to Wrede's ability to write and publish the book, and no one is taking action to prevent Wrede from publishing more books. Criticizing a book is not the same as stifling the author's right to free expression. You can't defend the author's free speech rights without simultaneously defending her readers' freedom to criticize the book as they will.

The interesting thing is that I agree with pretty much everything you've said up to a point (I agree about questioning what we read; I agree that authors should have the freedom to explore their ideas, and that racially problematic tropes in books should be discussed, and so forth) and then there's a point where we completely diverge, and I can't understand why you're seeing shouting and extremism and Wrede's book "going down as racist trash" where I am seeing none of those things.

Thanks for the recs, very helpful. Where the White Lillies Grow is already next on my to-read list, but I admit The Choices That Damn Us had scared me off at first because it sounded so *dark*. I mean, pitch black. But now my curiosity is piqued.

Well, it *is* dark, but it's also a very believable what-if (and even if the politics of it don't appeal to you, what they do with Teyla in the beginning is really an awesome and fascinating idea that I've never seen done before!).

And White Lillies is just lovely for those of us with John-and-Rodney leanings. :D

Wow I just killed three hours down that rabbit hole. Damnit, racefail!!! Still, excellent books to buy someday were linked on the main thread, and a new website discovered. And there are geese outside my window. ^_^ All does not quite suck.

heh, yeah, I have been basically just dipping in and out of it, commenting here or there when I can't help myself; lots of fascinating stuff well worth reading but I just don't have time to get into it ...

I saw you linked to Oyate.org above -- it's a fantastic website, isn't it? I found out about it a couple of years ago in another of these discussions.

It's got some awesome books for sale. As soon as I'm off this fixed income, I'm going shopping! But yeah, I've always been fascinated by native culture but unable to find anything worthwhile in terms of research. It's all by white men! And the one time I found an awesome reference I didn't take down its name or the author's name, and I've never been able to find it again. Very sad story, that. It was actually on male/male relationships in different tribes, the history of, because obviously things changed when the damn explorers arrived with their prejudice and christianity. :p So several chapters did engage with the impact of European mores on native mores. Interesting, but very sad. Still, even after researching, I don't know if I'd have the balls to write a book about a native culture from the native perspective. Being an outsider I could only ever approach that culture from the outside, which begs the question, why does that culture need me sticking my nose in? It doesn't. But then again, it might be nice to have people of color in my worlds, ya know. What do I do??? What's the balance??? ::dies::

Thanks for the reminder. I should go post Tuesday's fics!

Thank *you* for volunteering. :D Last year was kind of a nightmare; this year, the heavy lifting (for me) was over by the time posting began, and I think the whole thing has gone much more smoothly since I've learned from last year's mistakes regarding deadlines and such.

Yay for sga_genficathon (*bookmarks for later since I am similarly lacking in time*) and I'm glad it's going well. Boo on continued Racefail (oh my sweet - again!)!!1! And thanks for clearing up that markup ? because I was wondering the exact same thing. . .

Heh, I just had gotten to the point where I can use the LJ markups with a reasonable degree of proficiency, and now I have to adjust to slightly different markups. CHANGE! NOOO...!

... and didn't we (fandom) just have this discussion? A lot? It's very depressing. On the other hand, a few people have noted that it seems like LJ fandom is getting more cognizant about this stuff. And it did seem like, for a while there, fanfic fandom was turning up something freshly idiotic just about every other month, but nothing has really ruffled the waters in quite awhile -- either it's been eclipsed by Racefail, or people really are catching on.

I'd just gotten to the point where I was comfortable making Xjournal do all the work for me and now I have to figure out how to make iJournal do the same thing (hopefully on both sites). Ah well. . .

And yeah, we did! I think what happens is that it goes around enough times that enough people in the community learn what stupid shit not to say and do (in public at least) if they want to avoid having their naked asses toasted. Sadly, professional SFF fandom (like a lot of the rest of the world) just seems to be rolling around to the 21st c. and basic common sense in this regard.

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Hello, internets!

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Part Deux!

Re: Part Deux!

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