Even if it just stopped after the title, David Thompson's Ray Gun Patriarchy would be a great read. Those three words in that configuration just tickle me. I want it to be the name of a band or book or a big metal sign I could hang in my living room or all of the above.
Thompson takes into a Gaurdian columnist called Bidisha for her wandering rant Planet Diversity. And he does it well. Her thesis is that science fiction and fantasy genre novels are a the exclusive province of straight white males writing entirely about straight white males. She defends this point by creating a strangely exhaustive list of non-straight, non-white, non-male authors who have written well-received, if not particularly famous, books.
He goes on to comment that Bidisha's point is more probably
to be *seen* being loudly "outraged" by something, regardless of how absurd that something happens to be.
So here we have outrage as currency. Bidisha herself was inspired by a perfect storm of invective on LiveJournal (where no controversy is too minute to agonize over, at length, with 250 of your closest "friends"). MetaFilter gives the best summary. But that currency is fundamentally broken, since there are only two sides, other and non-other. It seems that, short of Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack and the various works of Tim Wise, there is no way for the non-other to talk about The Other. When outrage is the only currency, nothing ever has value. Or when you've made all values relative, everything is currency, therefore everything is inflated, and you can only trade among your own community. Way to reinforce the reprehensible privilege you just railed against.
I'm as against character shorthand as the next person. I cringe to see gay clueing weak or fat as obviously evil. But I also know that I am an active viewer and can, with enough work and a heavy enough thesaurus, make any (or indeed all) arguments about selective subtext and cultural appropriation. I could amass a big pile of Outrage. Though being a big fan of sf/f, the genre known best for pushing identity boundaries, where would I spend it?
Comments (2)
Its not the outrage I object to, its the puerile nature of the outrage. A smarter individual would stop a second to ask, "who am I angry at?"
The inescapable reality of science fiction writing its that its a business with a well-defined market--white adolescent males.
Is it really any surprise that the vast wasteland of modern science fiction writing reflects the unnuanced sensibilities of that demographic?
Do you want to sell books or not?
Don't hate the player...hate the game.
Frankly the best a talent sci-fi writer can hope to do is be incredibly subtle about introducing sophisticated ideas, and realize that it will fly right over the heads of the vast majority of your readers.
I've read the Dune series in every decade of my life, and was delighted to discovered something new--something that had escaped notice the last time through, in every case.
Frank Herbert had the talent to write a first-class space opera, but undergird it with layers of social and philosophical insight. Most people don't.
The important thing is the space opera though--that's what people want to read.
Posted by Mick Stockinger | January 27, 2009 11:48 AM
Posted on January 27, 2009 11:48
It's still a bit shocking to me that The Guardian is read in Alabama, but I'm pleased that you follow tradition by mis-spelling it 'Gaurdian'. Because of The Guardian's pervasive typos it was always known as "The Grauniad'.
The article was so puerile, as Mick says, that you wonder if it's satire.
Posted by mark | January 27, 2009 1:05 PM
Posted on January 27, 2009 13:05