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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.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
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.)
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.)
Part Deux!
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.
Re: Part Deux!
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.