once more, with feeling
May. 12th, 2009 13:56![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
piranhaone thing that continues to annoy me is the outcry on how critics of the thirteenth child haven't even read the book!, and this one just will not die.
and it just flabbergasts me, this notion that i have to have read a book before i can decide whether i actually want to buy and read it. (though hey, it argues for illegal downloading!)
if i read a book a day, and granted myself a lifespan of 100 years and reading ability from the time i popped out of the womb, i'd still only be able to read 36,500 books, which is a tiny fraction of all the books in the world. isn't it obvious that i have to have some method to pre-sort those millions of books somehow? and shouldn't it be up to me how i do that?
certainly, i cannot made a thorough critical analysis without having read a book; i cannot analyze the plot, or talk about whether the characters are fully realized. but that's not what people are doing! they are saying that the premise makes them uncomfortable, that they are unlikely to want to read a book with that premise. and they're saying that not in response to a hostile review that distorts the facts, they're saying it in response to a friendly review, by a person who thought this might be the author's best book yet. and other people who have read the book have chimed in and said, yes, that is the premise on which the book is built, yes, these are the assumptions, and no, the author doesn't throw in a surprising twist to show us that the natives left a giant hole, megafauna falls, everyone dies.
you can't judge the entirety of a book by its cover. but i can certainly decide whether to buy it, or push it hastily back onto the shelf if the cover features a swarthy, loincloth-clad native in war paint, with feathers in his hair, and in his arms a swooning women in a ballroom gown with her creamy, alabaster bosom half-exposed, blond curls streaming in the wind. if covers didn't matter at all, publishers could just use kraft paper.
if reviews didn't matter at all, if people can't decide based on them whether a book might speak to them, why does every book seller worth their salt offer them? in reality reviews can make or break a book.
the facts of the premise, and it being followed through in this book are not in dispute at all.
heck, even those who'd argue that we need to take authorial intent into account (she's a nice person, and she didn't MEAN it!)(*sigh*, cf. path to hell, paved with), are easy to counter by simply quoting patricia wrede herself, from a discussion of her ideas for the book in rec.arts.sf.composition:
The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna). I'm not looking for wildly divergent history, because if it goes too far afield I won't get the right feel.
this is pretty much the death knell. no, a PoC doesn't need to read a book about which its author has said this, to judge it as lacking. it is perfectly clear that:
a. wrede felt the easiest way to deal with stereotypes was to... erase the stereotyped people entirely.
b. she's unaware that the quarternary extinction might've not been due to prehistoric overkill; there are equally likely (if not more so) hypotheses.
c. she spent more time discussing the choice of an alternative name for england than she thought about real-world effects on the people she was so handily erasing. no, really. go read the entire thread. it's ever so geeky, but oh, it reeks of white privilege, and i am ashamed. one person made the mildest suggestion to have the natives be "reluctant shamans" instead of writing them out, and she brushed that off with "Well, that's your book. This one's mine, and I'm doing mammoths and wooly rhinos and no Indians.".
d. she was not looking for wildly divergent history, and yet she thought nothing of completely erasing the existing peoples of america. this, if nothing else, proves just how successful the actual erasure has been -- she acts as if natives did nothing more than name some landscape features, and oh yeah, hunt the megafauna to extinction.
so go away with your but you haven't read the book. it's just another distraction from the callousness of this book's premise, and the white privilege cluelessness of its author and those of us who knew but didn't say anything. there are native people in minnesota, you know? some of them have been long-time science fiction and fantasy fans. even before the internet! there are PoC SFF fans all over the world, even if most of them don't go to SF cons. but ms wrede as well as ms bujold don't know any, except maybe octavia butler.
if you're a PoC, do let them know you exist, and you count, and you matter. if you're a PoP (person of pallor), go look, because it might give you more perspective next time the question of "why is SFF so white" comes up.
and it just flabbergasts me, this notion that i have to have read a book before i can decide whether i actually want to buy and read it. (though hey, it argues for illegal downloading!)
if i read a book a day, and granted myself a lifespan of 100 years and reading ability from the time i popped out of the womb, i'd still only be able to read 36,500 books, which is a tiny fraction of all the books in the world. isn't it obvious that i have to have some method to pre-sort those millions of books somehow? and shouldn't it be up to me how i do that?
certainly, i cannot made a thorough critical analysis without having read a book; i cannot analyze the plot, or talk about whether the characters are fully realized. but that's not what people are doing! they are saying that the premise makes them uncomfortable, that they are unlikely to want to read a book with that premise. and they're saying that not in response to a hostile review that distorts the facts, they're saying it in response to a friendly review, by a person who thought this might be the author's best book yet. and other people who have read the book have chimed in and said, yes, that is the premise on which the book is built, yes, these are the assumptions, and no, the author doesn't throw in a surprising twist to show us that the natives left a giant hole, megafauna falls, everyone dies.
you can't judge the entirety of a book by its cover. but i can certainly decide whether to buy it, or push it hastily back onto the shelf if the cover features a swarthy, loincloth-clad native in war paint, with feathers in his hair, and in his arms a swooning women in a ballroom gown with her creamy, alabaster bosom half-exposed, blond curls streaming in the wind. if covers didn't matter at all, publishers could just use kraft paper.
if reviews didn't matter at all, if people can't decide based on them whether a book might speak to them, why does every book seller worth their salt offer them? in reality reviews can make or break a book.
the facts of the premise, and it being followed through in this book are not in dispute at all.
heck, even those who'd argue that we need to take authorial intent into account (she's a nice person, and she didn't MEAN it!)(*sigh*, cf. path to hell, paved with), are easy to counter by simply quoting patricia wrede herself, from a discussion of her ideas for the book in rec.arts.sf.composition:
The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna). I'm not looking for wildly divergent history, because if it goes too far afield I won't get the right feel.
this is pretty much the death knell. no, a PoC doesn't need to read a book about which its author has said this, to judge it as lacking. it is perfectly clear that:
a. wrede felt the easiest way to deal with stereotypes was to... erase the stereotyped people entirely.
b. she's unaware that the quarternary extinction might've not been due to prehistoric overkill; there are equally likely (if not more so) hypotheses.
c. she spent more time discussing the choice of an alternative name for england than she thought about real-world effects on the people she was so handily erasing. no, really. go read the entire thread. it's ever so geeky, but oh, it reeks of white privilege, and i am ashamed. one person made the mildest suggestion to have the natives be "reluctant shamans" instead of writing them out, and she brushed that off with "Well, that's your book. This one's mine, and I'm doing mammoths and wooly rhinos and no Indians.".
d. she was not looking for wildly divergent history, and yet she thought nothing of completely erasing the existing peoples of america. this, if nothing else, proves just how successful the actual erasure has been -- she acts as if natives did nothing more than name some landscape features, and oh yeah, hunt the megafauna to extinction.
so go away with your but you haven't read the book. it's just another distraction from the callousness of this book's premise, and the white privilege cluelessness of its author and those of us who knew but didn't say anything. there are native people in minnesota, you know? some of them have been long-time science fiction and fantasy fans. even before the internet! there are PoC SFF fans all over the world, even if most of them don't go to SF cons. but ms wrede as well as ms bujold don't know any, except maybe octavia butler.
if you're a PoC, do let them know you exist, and you count, and you matter. if you're a PoP (person of pallor), go look, because it might give you more perspective next time the question of "why is SFF so white" comes up.
no subject
on 2009-05-12 23:19 (UTC)Re: once more, with feeling
on 2009-05-13 06:51 (UTC)i know! i mean, i've read it, but if i hadn't... pretty much everything worth mentioning about it (without spoilers) has been mentioned.
no subject
on 2009-05-12 23:25 (UTC)I don't mind people not reading the book - but I do mind people actively *misrepresenting* what's in the book when they haven't read it, in a purely factual basis.
For example, I've seen posts from people saying there are no people of color in the book - that's not true, and the POC play some significant roles in the outcome of the plot in various ways. (Main character? No. It's a first person narrative. But significant to the plot, as much as the main character's family are.)
And it means I have a really hard time taking those particular people's other complaints as seriously and as deeply as I have from people who've either read the book, or are taking care to make sure the basic details are being correctly shared.
I have not had the time to keep up with all of the discussion this week (need my brain working better - migraines are not my friend - and have had some other stuff to deal with, mostly), but I also note that there's a difference between two arguments.
I think the book (which I've read) argues for "The Bering land bridge never got crossed because there were even nastier animals here than in our world, and people who tried ended up dying in the attempt" This is bolstered by all sorts of white explorers and settlers in the time frame of the book getting killed, even with far more 'modern' equipment and resources
I think that's a different argument than "Not at all aware of the extinction theories not being caused by the people there". I think it's perfectly reasonable to have very deadly fauna, and for that to massively change migration patterns - just as very deadly environments have changed other migration and settlement patterns in our world's history. (Now, would it have changed things to the extent it is in the book is a reasonable argument - but I think what Pat lays out is at least plausible, given internal details in the book itself.)
(Though, as I said, I haven't been following Pat's direct commentary in the last four or five days: will be catching up later. Just pointing out that *author-speaking-on-Net* and *what book implies and says* are two different sources.)
Now the other arguments here are ones I think are definitely worth further discussion, debate, etc. But they're also ones that can be addressed at least partially without reading the book. (i.e the overall concept, and issues with it.)
The two I note above, however, mean that someone needs to have accurate info about what's in the book (some of which is more obvious than others - the dangerous fauna bit is spread out over a couple of sentences at a time in a bunch of different places, for example) and the best way to do that is to read the thing or to have a *very* accurate and detailed recounting.
no subject
on 2009-05-13 07:17 (UTC)I think that derives from Wrede's comment that doing away with the natives would allow her to experiment with megafauna. The implicit assumption would seem to be that the presence of natives is somehow responsible for the lack of megafauna. Other interpretations are possible, though.
no subject
on 2009-05-13 15:58 (UTC)It's not just mammoths, and it's certainly recent -- not-yet-extinct mutualist plants persisting, for example -- and we now have (unfortunately) very good disease impact models (greenfield feline distemper in the Stellar's Sea Lion population) which tend to suggest that no, this is not a plausible explanation for what happened to the lions. The particular pattern of the faunal change is highly suggestive, as well; large food sources in order of protein-for-effort and predators. (A pattern repeated over and over again on Pacific islands, for instance, to the point where you can predict what ought not to be there anymore.)
It's fairly simple to argue that human influence wasn't the only, or the sole, cause of the extinctions; there's pretty good evidence that there are influences from climate stress, for example. But it's not a mistake, or stretching a point, or in any way improper with respect to the extant-factual-record to postulate major contributions from humans to the North American megafauna extinctions.
However, it is exceedingly difficult, to the point where I think it has to be considered as a severe world-building fail, to maintain that the presence of megafaunal apex predators could stop or slow human expansion into a continent. It's common to think of this as "take on short-faced bears with spears!" but that's not what neolithic cultures do. They use techniques like the Inuit anti-polar-bear technique of bending narrow, springy sharp material in a circle, tying it with something that dissolves readily in digestive juices, and packing it in bait. It doesn't matter how nasty the predator is if it's got peritonitis. (Or just consider the Inuit at all; totally marginal existence in the presence of apex predators entirely convinced you're food. The only thing that has allowed the polar bears to persist is the low human population density.)
Now, worldbuilding, especially worldbuilding outside immediate human social scope, has never been one of Ms. Wrede's strong points as a writer. But this kind of thing makes me twitch; it gives a strong impression of being constrained by something other than plausibility.
no subject
on 2009-05-13 16:20 (UTC)When you add in *magical* megafauna (I believe two types are explicitly discussed in some detail, and a bunch of others are casually mentioned) I can see the picture shifting - at least enough to be going on with, as with any other fantasy ecology.
no subject
on 2009-05-13 20:09 (UTC)Magical megafauna, well, having wooly rhinos and mammoth in NorAm implies a migration route; those came from Asia. That makes the lack of magical megafauna going back over the migration route peculiar.
It's also wildly unclear how naturally occurring advantageous magic could avoid spreading. If it's a very, very recent -- under a thousand years, recent -- occurrence, there would have been people in NorAm already when it arose. If it was established already by the ~25 kyears Before Present necessary to block human settlement of NorAm, it's spread back over the land bridge to Asia, along with the camels and the cheetahs.
Generally, naturally occurring magic is simply another factor in natural selection; if advantageous, it would spread like crazy, to the point where the first clade that evolved it would plausibly become dominant to an extent that messes up any possibility of a faunal assemblage that looks like the one we've got. If it's not that advantageous, it's not going to stand up to intelligence and co-operation and tool use very well.
If it's not naturally occurring magic, well. All claim of cohesive worldbuilding tends to collapse.
no subject
on 2009-05-13 01:33 (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-13 06:22 (UTC)I agree.
PoP - hee.
PoP
on 2009-05-13 06:39 (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-13 10:33 (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-17 06:03 (UTC)thanks for the earlier pointer to the post by rushthatspeaks.
libraries are my preferred place for trying out books that I may later want to buy, and I am quite ruthless about dropping things that either don't engage me, or actively offend my sensibilities, although that latter is pretty hard. too many books, not enough time. I don't think I'll be reading Ms. Wrede's latest though.
"PoP" is _very_ funny. and yeah, white male, and privileged and well aware of it, especially at the moment due to location.
"White folks could be people of color if they'd only relax."
Alice Walker. 1984. "These Days", in Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. SD;NY;London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich