lolaraincoat (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lolaraincoat) wrote2009-05-11 10:14 pm
lolaraincoat) wrote2009-05-11 10:14 pm
two points on the latest episode of stupid behavior among writers of science fiction
Okay, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, naraht has been saving up links here. Go browse.
So in my own browsing, I have come across two assertions that I know to be factually incorrect. Certainly other claims that are Wrong On The Internet have been made, but here are the two that I want to argue about.
Wrong Idea #1: "Until recently, all readers of genre fiction/visible fans of SFF have been white." No. That is a lie.
I joined my hometown's SF fan group in 1977, when I was 14, because my best friend invited me, which she did because her mom ran it. And neither of them were white. Most of the people who attended regularly were white, but not all. We were all happily reading and discussing the then-new SF dealing with race and/or gender - Delaney! LeGuin! Tiptree! Russ! My friend's mom took her and her older sister to Boskone every year (she took me too, a couple of times; she was a great mom to a lot of people to whom she was not related) so it's not like they were invisible - at least in the non-metaphorical sense - to the white fen who now are claiming that my friend and her family didn't exist. This claim about the whiteness of SF's Good Old Days is a flat-out lie, and an excuse for present-day racist speech or behavior based on this claim is no excuse at all.
Wrong Idea #2: Alternate Timestream stories
I actually meant to say something like this about Elisabeth Bear's pseudo-Elizabethean fantasy series, with apologies to friends who I know really liked the books, so now I will say it about them and about the premise for P. Wrede's new book (which I haven't read, sorry) as well: Please leave the past alone. Just make up crap about the future! You will keep the historians from rending their garments and smacking their foreheads! Thank you!
More specifically, Wrede's new book is based on the premise that in some other universe, our planet's history was basically the same except that 1. there was such a thing as magic and 2. the big animals of the Americas did not die out when the glaciers receded and 3. the Americas were never populated until Columbus arrived. And yet the story is set in a recognizable version of 19th-century Minneapolis. Well ... okay, if there was enough magic to do all the work of clearing the land that was, in our universe, accomplished by swidden agriculture practiced by native people in some places or by herds of large animals managed by native people in others. Buffalo, sheep, cows, goats: whether or not the animals came with Columbus, it was local people whose uses of them changed the landscape. And there would have to be enough magic to come up with a suitable replacement for manioc, the food staple invented by Andean people that right now provides more calories than any other food eaten in Africa, because I guess Wrede's story does include African slavery, and all those enslaved people had to eat, right? Whereas here in North America, we are as we have been for millenia the People of Corn, and so I guess magic would have to replace corn as well (since it was bred up in the Valley of Mexico by native people there.) And if there weren't pre-existing gold and silver mines, what would have motivated the Europeans to bother with conquest at all? They had been following the cod stocks across the north Atlantic for centuries before 1492 and never troubled themselves with settlement or exploration, after all.
The general point is that the past is more tightly woven together than you think, and no amount of "world-building" can salvage a project that starts with such sweeping assumptions but ends up in such a familiar place anyway. I'm not usually all that much of a materialist, as historians go, but jeeze, you can't just ignore the interconnectedness of everyone's material existence, either.
The best description of how dependent Europe was on the Americas, in material terms, and of the relationship between demographic catastrophe in the post-conquest Americas and changing forms of labor is still to be found in Alfred Crosby's sadly outdated The Colombian Exchange. (Just say no to Jared Diamond and that silly-ass 1491 book, all right? Thank you.)
eta I realize that I should have pointed out that the most important thing about Wrede's three assumptions is that she (fictively) erased all the peoples of the Americas, which is to put it very gently an erasure with uncomfortable relationship to the needs and desires of writers and readers who sit at the top of the racial hierarchy in the anglophone world, and would prefer not to have to notice that the hierarchy exists at all - much less that non-white people exist. But, um, you know all that already, right? and you know I know that. So.
naraht has been saving up links here. Go browse.So in my own browsing, I have come across two assertions that I know to be factually incorrect. Certainly other claims that are Wrong On The Internet have been made, but here are the two that I want to argue about.
Wrong Idea #1: "Until recently, all readers of genre fiction/visible fans of SFF have been white." No. That is a lie.
I joined my hometown's SF fan group in 1977, when I was 14, because my best friend invited me, which she did because her mom ran it. And neither of them were white. Most of the people who attended regularly were white, but not all. We were all happily reading and discussing the then-new SF dealing with race and/or gender - Delaney! LeGuin! Tiptree! Russ! My friend's mom took her and her older sister to Boskone every year (she took me too, a couple of times; she was a great mom to a lot of people to whom she was not related) so it's not like they were invisible - at least in the non-metaphorical sense - to the white fen who now are claiming that my friend and her family didn't exist. This claim about the whiteness of SF's Good Old Days is a flat-out lie, and an excuse for present-day racist speech or behavior based on this claim is no excuse at all.
Wrong Idea #2: Alternate Timestream stories
I actually meant to say something like this about Elisabeth Bear's pseudo-Elizabethean fantasy series, with apologies to friends who I know really liked the books, so now I will say it about them and about the premise for P. Wrede's new book (which I haven't read, sorry) as well: Please leave the past alone. Just make up crap about the future! You will keep the historians from rending their garments and smacking their foreheads! Thank you!
More specifically, Wrede's new book is based on the premise that in some other universe, our planet's history was basically the same except that 1. there was such a thing as magic and 2. the big animals of the Americas did not die out when the glaciers receded and 3. the Americas were never populated until Columbus arrived. And yet the story is set in a recognizable version of 19th-century Minneapolis. Well ... okay, if there was enough magic to do all the work of clearing the land that was, in our universe, accomplished by swidden agriculture practiced by native people in some places or by herds of large animals managed by native people in others. Buffalo, sheep, cows, goats: whether or not the animals came with Columbus, it was local people whose uses of them changed the landscape. And there would have to be enough magic to come up with a suitable replacement for manioc, the food staple invented by Andean people that right now provides more calories than any other food eaten in Africa, because I guess Wrede's story does include African slavery, and all those enslaved people had to eat, right? Whereas here in North America, we are as we have been for millenia the People of Corn, and so I guess magic would have to replace corn as well (since it was bred up in the Valley of Mexico by native people there.) And if there weren't pre-existing gold and silver mines, what would have motivated the Europeans to bother with conquest at all? They had been following the cod stocks across the north Atlantic for centuries before 1492 and never troubled themselves with settlement or exploration, after all.
The general point is that the past is more tightly woven together than you think, and no amount of "world-building" can salvage a project that starts with such sweeping assumptions but ends up in such a familiar place anyway. I'm not usually all that much of a materialist, as historians go, but jeeze, you can't just ignore the interconnectedness of everyone's material existence, either.
The best description of how dependent Europe was on the Americas, in material terms, and of the relationship between demographic catastrophe in the post-conquest Americas and changing forms of labor is still to be found in Alfred Crosby's sadly outdated The Colombian Exchange. (Just say no to Jared Diamond and that silly-ass 1491 book, all right? Thank you.)
eta I realize that I should have pointed out that the most important thing about Wrede's three assumptions is that she (fictively) erased all the peoples of the Americas, which is to put it very gently an erasure with uncomfortable relationship to the needs and desires of writers and readers who sit at the top of the racial hierarchy in the anglophone world, and would prefer not to have to notice that the hierarchy exists at all - much less that non-white people exist. But, um, you know all that already, right? and you know I know that. So.
no subject
And so clear and good, just like you.
My now 4 racefail posts are none so clear and specific, and none done. but they will be eventually.
In terms of this post, I'll be scratching my head awhile over the injunction not to fuck with the past. It seems to me that this focus, while admirably simple, has the disadvantage of being somewhat legalistic and maybe rejecting too much. Before considering new books to be set in the past/otherwhere, we might consider old ones. (also: is the future so easy to get right? Which is why books set in the future are so plausible in terms of diversity and women...)
Wow I've taken Ambien and I'm not thinking too clearly. But say The Aeneid and The Tempest. Objectionable on factual and moral grounds. But not texts we want to get rid of, or even change (except in fan fiction, leaving the donor intact). Does that mean we want to make more of them? Well, definitely! actually. We just want the new ones not to make the same mistakes. The new ones can make their own mistakes. And even if the new ones make mistakes that are really bad, bad enough for the authors to be told to STFU, they will just be floated in a shiny happy diverse internet where people will say "oh no you may not" and the bad books will crawl under the bedding and hide, while better books are told "welcome! you need a beta," or spawn discussion, or just be embraced with passionate glee by all the eager robot FOC offspring spawned by the internet.
Personally, I'm looking for a lesbian martial arts/taiko romance set on Sado Island in the 17th Century. Exiled female fighter (for justice!) falls in love with Taiko master. But the dangers on the main island have not been resolved. OMG INJUSTICE! She must fight her way back - no one has ever done it, not for a thousand years. But can she do and still be with the woman she loves? Now, there are a billion things wrong with this and hideous pitfalls. A white author of such a story would have to be prepared for criticism, do reasearch, and get advice. But is this story and so many others something that shouldn't be attempted? Or maybe just not at Tor?
God I'm stoned.
no subject
That's the main thing. Otherwise, um, yeah, I may have overstated things a bit here (see my response to Ellen F., above.) but really I am not saying "nobody is allowed to write fiction about the past, or make stuff up about the past." I am saying "if you make stuff up about the past, you are very likely to cause historians to gnash our teeth and howl woefully." Sadly, the fear of upsetting historians is not much of a motivator for most writers.
And, you know, leaving aside great lit, I do enjoy some fictions about alternate pasts. I'm a big fan of one novel which starts by assuming the near-total destruction of the population of a continent: in Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson kills off the Europeans shortly after the fall of Rome. But he thought very hard about what that would mean over a long timescale - he had to drag in reincarnation in order to do it - and he's about a zillion times smarter than your average writer-of-urban-fantasy, so.
Enjoy that Ambien! Also, mwah!
no subject
That's because historians don't pull people's arms out of their sockets ...
(Also, awesome post; I knew you'd have good things to say about this.)
no subject
I wonder about this too--should white authors just never try to talk about the experiences of people from other cultures, or who are a different color? Is that the logical conclusion we could get from all this?
*ponder* I was recently told I was "derailing" when I paraphrased/synthesized commentary from several people of color about their experiences with the police. In the context, the accusation was hardly rational or fair, and so I'm a little extra sensitive about this whole "off-limits" thing at the moment.
no subject
I am saying that writing stupidly about the past will make me and many of my fellow historians bang our heads against the wall, or - if we have the time and energy - point out to the world how stupid the stupid writing is. This is not a dire fate: hardly anyone listens to historians anyway.
no subject
To touch on the historical part, that I think I grok too. It's part of that endumbening thing that aggravated me so yesterday, maybe. Some people will just never understand why others get upset about that sort of thing. I really enjoyed the way you pointed out that history is a lot more interconnected than most of us realize, and that you just can't swap out bits and pieces as you see fit. Plus, again, that last little paragraph was a tour de force all on its own.
no subject
I think this is a pretty common reaction of pasty folk (like me, and I assume you) to the various RaceFails-- I've had it. And then I stopped and calmed down and stopped making it all about me (not that you're doing it, I'm just giving my experience) and actually slowed down to see what people were saying. And mostly what people were actually saying is "please, suck less." (Sometimes they weren't saying please, but hey, they don't have to.)
Really, what happened with MammothFail is this 'white people shouldn't talk about people taken from other cultures' taken to the logical extreme-- she dealt with her fears about writing Native Americans by erasing them completely. And that sucks. I think all you have to do is look around and see some of the popular PoC in SF and fantasy to see that if white people write PoC the characters can get embraced-- I've heard lots of good things about, for example, Fat Charlie and Spider from Neil Gaiman's work, or Hardison on Leverage (who's not in a SF universe but is a total geek, and utterly awesome).
And you know, what I eventually took from that is that yeah, I'm gonna get it wrong sometimes. But I get shit wrong all the time about lots more than racism. So I just need to try, and I need to keep listening, and thinking, and trying to do better.
here from metafandom!
no subject
In retrospect, my remark probably sounded kind of like a whine (probably because I brought a separate but somewhat related personal incident into it), but I really do wonder if white folks should just ease on back from writing PoC, or at least be really, really thoughtful about how they do it. And the whole erasing Native Americans thing is just scary. It's wrong on so many levels. Wow.
no subject