![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.)
no subject
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.