On checking oneself before wrecking oneself

[roadrunnertwice]

MammothFail rolls onward, eh?

* Like an idiot, I clicked a link to Will Shetterly's MetaFilter post. Don't ever do that Will Shetterly thing.
* Nick Mamatas brings the snark, as he do, and it made me lol.
* The usual suspects are writing interesting and amazing stuff. (I'm elbow-deep in this Deepa D post at the moment.) Keep an eye on that tracking stream. (And thanks for your work, naraht.)
* New community: foc_u. Near as I can tell, it's meant to be a permanent focal point for continuing the good stuff that's come out of the Great RaceFails of '09 (And Previous), while also acting as another source of pushback whenever the bad stuff rears its head again.

Also, I'd like to return to the roots of this iteration -- that is to say, what to write -- for a moment. A few days ago, jwz said this about time travel:

If your story is not about time travel, but it has time travel in it, then your story sucks.

Can we say that if your story erases an entire people (or an entire hemisphere's-worth of peoples) from history, but is not about that erasure, then your story sucks?

Or perhaps more generally, some things are always big enough and mean enough to eat the story that contains them. If you have one and it's not eating the story, ASK WHY, because the reason might be a sketchy one, in which case you will need to do something about it.

Comments

[haruka27.livejournal.com]

No, you know what? I disagree with that last paragraph. Certainly in some situations you can't ignore a big thing like erasing a people or time travel, but I really don't think the story necessarily has to be _about_ it. That means it is always making it into A Problem, instead of something Normal. That doesn't work for RaceFail, but it does for certain other things.

What I guess I'm driving at here is, there are only so many stories you can have about a Big Mean Thing before you've said everything and you need to incorporate it into the greater mass of things that just are. I'm having a lot of trouble elucidating what I mean here, so I'm going to go concrete:

I can't even count the number of books about gay teens that are about them being GAY. " GAY GAY GAY HOLY SHIT ZOMG HOW CAN THEY DEAL WITH THIS? LET US FIND OUT. OH LOOK HOMOPHOBIA. UNCERTAINTY! DIFFICULT AND DANGEROUS WATERS!" Ok, so obviously homophobia and ill treatment of gay people is horrible and big and mean and Needs To Be Addressed. But when the only stories about a topic are about that Big Mean Thing, the stories lose their punch. For ONCE, I'd like a book with a gay teen, who has to deal with it, and maybe experiences some homophobia, but that's NOT the driving force of the story.

I guess I mostly do agree with you specifically about the assholes who pretend them brown peoples don't exist in their stories, but I think your generalization is kind of flawed.

[roadrunnertwice]

That's fair! I'm kind of exploring here, it's not like I'm firmly set on any of these measurements. (And for what it's worth, I think jwz's statement is wrong about time travel too, although it's right somewhat more often.)

The thing that got me was Wrede's statement that she was going to depopulate the hemisphere but that it wouldn't be a "wildly divergent" alternate history. Perhaps what I'm getting at is just that large things need to... appropriately deform the story they're in? Well, maybe I'll word it better next time.

[haruka27.livejournal.com]

Oh, wait, I didn't see Wrede's statement. I'm mostly uneducated about this, I just... Peter and I have had several irritated discussions about how sooo many books with gay people in them are either about being gay or the gay person is a marginal character.

But I totally agree--if she's depopulating half the earth and expects there not to be a Huge Difference in the world, she has some reading and rethinking to do...

[elf]

Wrede quotes; my emphasis added
Eliminating the Problem

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.

and Prepping the land for human occupation

I'm currently assuming there will be African slaves, possibly even more (since there won't be any Native Americans to have already done a certain amount of prepping land for human occupation, nor to be exploited later).

[jonsonite.livejournal.com]

Huh. This is sort of weird. If you don't like
"Indians qua savages" or "Indians qua ecologists", why not just have "Indians qua Indians"? The fact that there's two warring stereotypes shouldn't keep a good author from threading between them.

That said, there's been plenty of good distopian fiction where they just do away with the rest of the world. Wasn't V for Vendetta like that?

[elf]

"Indians qua Indians" apparently fell under the "math is hard!" category of "this is fantasy; I'm certainly not going to do research for it!"

The problem isn't exactly with "eliminating the Indians." It's with eliminating the Indians... and claiming that the US would've developed the same anyway, except for the place names and they'd use wheat instead of corn.

xiphias is collecting speculation on how things would be different, with the main point being: No Native Americans = no "American frontier" a la Little House on the Prarie.

[haruka27.livejournal.com]

Blah blee bloo how are you? Pete said he ran into you yesterday.

[roadrunnertwice]

Doing great! Yeah, we randomly met up in the swamp over at Reed. My life right now: Very happy about the prospect of a better job, still all het up about looking for a house. (aaaaaaaa.) And I'm writing again, which feels good. You doin' well?

[haruka27.livejournal.com]

I'm ok, lots of stupid details about stupid things tripping me up this week.

You can still move into our house if you need to! :D we had one response from CL but not much. I know it's a pain to move more than once, but if you do still need the space...