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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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.

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Hello, internets!

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Part Deux!

Re: Part Deux!

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