On Age of Sail, American fantasy, RaceFail, and history.

[melannen]

One of the things I resolved after reading everything in RaceFail09 (so far) was to stop being silent out of fear. Being silent out of not knowing what to say, or having nothing helpful to say, is a different matter. But if an issue like that touched me directly, I needed to speak up. (link to disclaimer because I'm still kind of chicken.)

Well, it has. You see, I committed, tomorrow, to writing a fandom guide post for age_of_sail in order to get people to read Patricia C. Wrede's magical Regency romances. I've got it nearly ready to go. I love the books, like I love everything Wrede's written, and I'd love to see people writing in them. But now I'm starting to wonder if I should even make the post, or if I should write something entirely different, and much more difficult, instead.

You see, Tor is failing at race again, and this time the author who wrote the book of faily is Patricia C. Wrede.

The book is titled "The Thirteenth Child", and the one-line summary which is going around about it, excerpted from Jo Walton's entirely positive review, is "This is an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America (“Columbia”) was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical."

I hope most people reading this can see, if they at least stop to think, the problem inherent in "America was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals". In terms of, you know, completely erasing all non-European inhabitants, and all of the very important, very terrible, and too-often invisible history that they were a part of. If you don't get it, I commend you to the critical links that naraht has been gathering, most of them by people who (unlike me) would not have existed in a world where the Americas were empty, and most of them far better able to speak on that aspect than I am.

I do want to point out that there are a few misconceptions going around: it's a very new book, and I don't know that any of the commenters except the other SF authors who are involved (Jo Walton and Lois Bujold, so far) have actually read the book. But, from what I've culled, it is *not* a European-dominated world - African people have played a large and active role in settling this world, and play a reasonably large role in the story itself, even if it doesn't get to be their story.

Also, Wrede didn't decide to erase the pre-existing populations just because she wanted an empty America; what she wanted, at least according to Bujold's comments, was an America with mammoths and other extinct megafauna, and she decided that the "Overkill Theory" was the way to go -- the idea that pleistocene megafauna were wiped out by wasteful prehistoric big game hunters, much like the holocene megafauna were nearly wiped out by historic big game hunters. So you take away the natives in order to let the animals survive.

This isn't an excuse. In fact, it almost makes it worse. The thing about the Overkill Theory is that it's pretty clearly wrong - neither the timing of the extinctions, nor the existing archeological evidence, supports the idea much at all. And it's pretty clear that the only reason the theory had much currency in the first place is that it shored up a racist, sexist, Eurocentric theory of the settlement of America as being by savage, nomadic bands of male hunters. And the only reason it ever had currency in the first place was because the white male archeologists only looked for evidence that would support it, and ignored everything else.

*Most* scientific theories that make it to an independent popular narrative, I have noticed, are the ones that shore up racist, sexist, classist stereotypes. I wonder why. So Wrede had a nifty idea based on a bit of science, realized it was predicated on writing an America without Indians, and then proceeded to write an entire book about it without bothering to either a) notice, or b) engage with the people pointing out the major, major issues with that theory on many levels. Why, one must ask, would an SF writer engage that uncritically with science? And the only realistic answer is because Science! gave her a guilt-free excuse to erase Native peoples and write what made her comfortable instead.

So now I'm sitting here, with an obligation to write a post fangirling Wrede tomorrow, and forced to confront that fact that Wrede's writing is, frankly, pretty damn unfriendly to everyone but White people. This wasn't a new realization; it's endemic to 'traditional' Fantasy writers, and Wrede doesn't escape that trap (though in my vague memories of her adult fantasy Lyra novels, she did make an attempt to write about Romani-analogue people that wasn't completely barf-worthy, and at least tried to engage with slavery, though never too directly.) In her YA work, though, I can't think of a single story with characters that are anything other than white.

The posts about "The Thirteenth Child", I'll note, weren't a sudden slap in the face, more the last straw. I can no longer blithely not notice this stuff, and with the recent discussions around race in steampunk, and the other AoS reading I've been doing lately, it's been building and building. It doesn't help that one of the most-recced Mairelon fics out there is about the Mechanical Turk. It's not that Mairelon, in general, is worse than your average Regency romance or sailing historical. It's that your average Regency romance ignores the thing entirely too, and the sailing books are better but on average not great. And it's that that Mairelon does so directly, yet gently, confront gender and class in the period, and does an awesome job with older female characters, which are some of the things I adored about it, and yet mentions race and imperialism not at all.

So - is it possible for me to write that post tomorrow about how well she does classism and genderism and ageism - the ones that affect me personally - and keep ignoring the issue of race? Is it possible for me to make that post and acknowledge the race problems without turning it into a post about race in AoS? I'd been leaning toward the answer being I probably should mention it, but I can probably get away with continuing to gloss it over. After hearing about The Thirteenth Child, I have realized that no, I can't make the post without talking about race, in any sort of good conscience. And that if I do talk about race in Wrede and in regencies, I'll have to engage the question about race in Age of Sail stories in general, a thing which I am in no way qualified to do.

One way I can to talk about it, though, is in terms of the American story and the idea of writing American fantasy. Writing the great American fantasy is one of my most enduring interests - my initial reaction to deepad's I Didn't Dream of Dragons was "you know, I didn't dream of dragons either." Which would've been completely derailing to that discussion, but - yeah, American kids get their fantasy through a veneer of 'Western Europe is the only place that matters', too, and for much of my childhood, I searched unsuccessfully for a fantasy world that I felt like I could get to without crossing an ocean, that felt like an American story in the way so many of the non-fantasy YA novels I was reading did.

Being unable to find one, I repeatedly attempted to write one. (I suppose even my first recorded novel attempt - in which my special stuffed animal, K.B., runs an underground network helping to repatriate other stuffed koalas back to Australia - is, in its own six-year-old way, a meditation on that theme.) I tried several times to create a world with the shape of a European fantasy - cities and peasants and nobles and schools of wizardry - and put it on a made-up world with llamas but no horses, dogs but no cats, and properly fierce badgers, brown-skinned people and yams. It never worked, even when I added vaguely appropriated bits of Native American magic and culture. I wonder why. (The one YA story I found as a child that tried this in any mildly successful way was T. A. Barron's The Ancient One, which probably reads as dated and appropriative to me now. Plus all the other books in the series were about Merlin rather than the spirits of great Redwood trees, which even when I was nine was disappointing.)

Then I tried to create an alternate-history story that was actually about Americans, about a world with magic and mammoths (and worldwide smallpox immunity) where Europeans came to an America that was quite ready and willing to stare them down and send them back home, and interesting things happened in the process. The story that Orson Scott Card basically dared someone to write in response to "Pastwatch". Ten years and a college degree in worldbuilding later, and I've only touched the edge of the learning I'll need in order to do that story justice.

Along the way, though, I found the first story that really hit me as a resonant, and honest, but still fun and hopeful and happy fantasy of America. It was Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. A world of diversity and possibility and magic and new vistas for everyone, where freedom was there for you to grab if you were willing to grab it - and willing to abmit that grabbing it meant trampling other people on your way.

The later Pirates movies did somewhat more obviously badly with issues of diversity, and as they approached more closely to showing colonialism in action, the failure to show the ugliest bits was harder to ignore. But I did a lot of reading in the wake of PotC on the actual history of the Golden Age of Piracy, and I'm still kind of in love with it. Pirates *is* the fantasy world of my American heart, I think. It explicitly acknowledges the human evil that the dream is built on, but it says that the freedom is worth it, and then refuses to let freedom be anything but an individual choice, and a hard choice, regardless of race or class or gender or sexuality.

This is obviously not what everybody gets out of the Pirate history. But I do think that it is impossible to write the American fantasy I want if it pre-dates European contact - it might be a great story, and it might be a story that needs to be written, but the story of America that lives in me - and most Americans, I think - is the story in which the White people killed everybody else in the service of equality and justice for all. So the farthest you can really go, back into a dreamy mythical American past to build a fantasy archetype on, is the age of sail. The age of piracy. The age of slavery and conquistadors.

As I've been reading fic in pretty much every AoS fandom under the sun in making a crossover recs post (you can see what I've been reading over the past few days in my delicious tags), I've come to realize that, yes, what draws me into Age of Sail fandoms is when they talk about America. I was lucky enough to start reading Master&Commander fandom on the book where they're American POWs (and sneak out of Boston in blackface. Which is pretty much the only acknowledgement of racial diversity in the book.) I started reading Hornblower with a book they spent sailing around the Americas, too. Look! My continent exists! That's more than I'd get out of the average Regency romance. Or fantasy novel.

The stories I want to read and write in AoS are stories about America. Because as a White American who grew up on the East Coast, that's the time and place my myths are built of, that's the story that lives in the bones of my land. That's what I've got instead of dragons.

And you can't write honestly about America without writing about race.

And writing about race is really, incredibly hard. And part of the reason it's so hard is that so many people write around it instead of about it. And so we get accustomed to telling and hearing our own story with a gaping empty place in its heart, until we learn to not even notice it's there. Even, sometimes, the people who live in that blank spot learn not to notice.

I'm tired of stories with an empty space in the heart. And it hurts, every time, now that I've learned to notice the blank spot. And I don't know of any way to make it better, except to keep insisting on pointing it out when it's there, until it can't be invisible anymore.

...and this post is already far too long and rambling.

I still don't know what I'm going to do about my post tomorrow. But I'm going to do something, even if it's just link back to this post.

And in the meantime, I'm going to keep reading and discussing other peoples' posts about this. And thinking. And trying to be better. (After, of course, I do all the house chores I put off for two hours while writing this incredibly long post, omg.)

Disclaimer due to being chicken: I am still not very good at anti-racism. So if there's something in this post or its comments that is hurtful, and I recognize it, I will do my best to make it stop, but I can't promise that I'll automatically notice without being told. I can promise to listen if told, though.

Comments

[crantz]

Aw man, Wrede. I have a ton of her old books on order right now. It's upsetting to hear this about her, especially since first nations stuff is pretty close to my heart.

[melannen]

Yeah, I know. I'd like to reserve judgement until I read the book, because colonial America and Mammoths! It's like she reached right into my id! Only if it's really based on the Overkill Theory, which at best is wrong and at worst is racist; and having already been noticing lack of confrontation with race in her other stuff lately too -- I really can't.

(I do have a vague memory that her Lyra books at least tried with race, through the less-than-ideal lens of D&D-style epic fantasy. I should re-read them again for the first time since high school and see if I still think that.)

[trouble]

How many times this year are we going to do this? Erasing whole swathes of people from your story and then going "Wait, what, that matters?" all innocent like? C'mon, it's 2009! Either own up and say "I don't care if I alienate people of colour/non-white readers as long as I can appropriate their stories!" or admit that you put your foot in your mouth but good and are sorry! If you didn't mean to harm others, then going "Damn,that was thoughtless" shouldn't actually harm you!!!

[melannen]

I think we're going to have to keep doing it until we're doing it so continuously that people get the message *before* they write the stories. And keep teaching enough new people that the same voices don't have to shout themselves hoarse every time.

I'm holding out hope that this lot will manage to own up reasonably quickly. Because I *liked* them, dammit! And the internet aspect of it hasn't gone too far yet.

Semi-OT

[willow]

Going through Deviant Art a week or so ago, I came across a drawing of a Jedi by someone and the artist's comments mentioned that the Jedi character was blind, but once he got trained in the ways of the Force, that cleared the problem right up.

And I immediately thought of you, because my response was "But blindness doesn't need to be cured, far less with something like the Force." I was ruffled/upset that Yoda uses a motorized chair because he's so little he can't keep up with the other Jedi Masters otherwise. But someone else's blindness has to be cured.

All your postings creep into my brain like fungus and set up a home. But I still don't think it's anyone's job, to keep repeating all this over and over again.

[cypher]

--I am so glad that I am reading you again, right now. The connections you draw here, between fantasy as a genre and cultural mythologies and the prejudices that get written into (entirely too many of) these stories, are really thought-provoking. Thanks for posting.

[melannen]

A lot of this has been percolating for a long time (as you can probably tell!) I just didn't have the framework to try to talk about it in a non-hurtful way recently. I'm glad you got something out of reading it.

[damned_colonial]

Thanks so much for posting this. I was fretting a bit about the age_of_sail pimping post too, on your behalf. If you're still up for posting something, that would be awesome, and I think drawing on some of what you've written here would be very appropriate.

the book where they're American POWs (and sneak out of Boston in blackface. Which is pretty much the only acknowledgement of racial diversity in the book

That's factually incorrect; I've just re-read the book recently and can state this with confidence. But I don't want to derail too much. I'll just say... yeah, POB's series does better than most AoS fandoms at showing racial diversity, but it's still not great.

Mind you, I got into AoS fandom through having similar experiences to yours wrt America: I started writing M&C fanfic because my own place (Australia) was being left out of the books, and I was upset by it.

[melannen]

I think I will probably start by talking about this post, and then go into what I was originally going to say. But I'm still thinking. I'll at least do something.

And yeah, here is where I admit that I haven't actually read M&C for several years, and it's getting a bit foggy! Some of the people they met in Boston were actually abolitionists or something, weren't they? The blackface was the bit that stuck with me, anyway. (And the way the blackface went so unremarked. Which, given the times, why would it be? Except it should have been. Dammit.)

I would say that in my memory M&C isn't actually bad with race, even by modern standards, it just doesn't ever go out of its way to be good.

And I've heard you talking about putting Australia back in the books! That must be even harder than looking for America. (Although, interestingly, one of the people who often gets mentioned as sucessfully writing epic fantasy from the colonies is Patricia Wrightson, who writes about native Australians. I don't know how much you read fantasy, but I'd love to talk about her books, sometime.)

[princessofgeeks]

thank you.

I am a clueless white person who is just now starting to notice all the ways privilege affects me, and like you I'm trying to be more aware of what I have been ignoring in my fiction all this time.

I think it's encouraging that if we dig around and look, there WERE PoC in all those eras, all those fandoms, all those times, all those regions. The stories exist, and they are there to be told and retold and told through fiction (the lies that are true).

They've just been overlooked and whitewashed. But they are there and real.

[melannen]

I am trying to be less clueless, especially when it hurts. But "trying" is the relevant word there...

And yes! The white people weren't the only people there! And there are stories to be told about all the people, and as many different stories to be told about them as about whites.

One of the most insidious ways of erasing people is to say that there is only one story about them, and that story is about what White people did to them. If there's only one story, and we know it already, what's the point of telling it again? That's a very important story, but it's not the only one. The stories about what they did despite the White people are important stories, too.

It's depressing how hard it is to even find non-fiction works about some of those stories, though. I've been trying for ages to find the reference material I'd need to write a story about the people who lived in the monumental civilizations of the Ohio River Valley, and even *going* to Mound City and Sunwatch and asking the people in their museum bookstores got me only meager pickings.

[morineko]

I haven't read the book in question yet either, but please don't write a post pointing out the fail BEFORE you've actually read it?

[melannen]

I probably wouldn't have, if I hadn't already been noticing the fail in the books of hers that I *have* been reading recently. :/ And if it hadn't been for the way the people who have read the book are talking about it in an amazingly privileged way.

Actually, part of the reason I wrote this post was because a lot of the people talking about this are accusing the author of doing things that we can't know she did, without having read the book. I wanted to focus on the things that I know are wrong, regardless of the contents of the actual book. One of those things is that apparently nobody involved in writing, promoting, or publishing the book realized that a book predicated on an empty America was going to make people unhappy about race, and they needed to acknowledge that. One of those things was hiding behind bad science in order to justify racism.

You can't judge a book by its cover. But sometimes you need to judge the cover itself.

[staranise]

Thank you for this post! It makes me think a lot, and my brain doesn't work right now but I wish I could properly engage with how neat it is. My attempts to do so are all dulled by cough medicine.

(I agree with you, about stories about where one is from; I think I read cowboy novels partly because that's what my family's heritage is, more than my love for sagebrush and gunfights. It's being able to say, "This is my reality. It's important, and it has stories in it.")

I was going to say that AoS narratives don't deal with race because that shatters a lot of the fictions we have about that age, but that's not true, is it? It's there anyway, even if authors of that era didn't deal with it specifically, and it's a theme some authors like Naomi Novik or Susannah Clarke are starting to deal with in some fashion.

(Oh, I wish I had a brain.) What I want to know is, where are the stories that start to deal with PoC and America (as a continent) without whitewashing the history there? I can think of Charles de Lint as someone who's tried to do that, but it doesn't quite come close enough for me. I think he's another author that writes around race, and sometimes the circles he does are very informative, but doesn't put it at the heart of what he writes. It makes me wish I'd read more Thomas King.

[melannen]

I think if it shatters some of the fictions, it doesn't shatter the *important* fictions. The fiction that it was less complicated back then, maybe.

Many of the authors of the era actually do deal with it pretty explicitly: Mr. Midshipman Easy, one of the best-known books about the Hornblower-era navy by someone who was actually there, is explicitly political and has a main character who's a former slave; the Leatherstocking Tales are all about the devastation of the native American peoples; Melville wrote about Pacific and American cultures; the real question I ended up with after reading some of the period books is why 20th century writers find it so necessary to erase the issues that were inescapable to the people who lived it.

(The gaping exception here, of course, is Austen. I don't remember race ever coming up in Austen to speak of. Mind you, the Napoleonic Wars rarely came up in Austen, either. So is it simply part of the literary genre of the drawing-room romance that such things Aren't Talked About?)

The only White American author I can think of offhand who has written American fantasy/sf and put race front and center is Orson Scott Card. Which is terribly depressing, because he's so faily in other ways.

Virginia Hamilton, Zorah Neale Hurston, and Olivia Butler each wrote a few books that might count as American fantasy, maybe, though closer to magical realism/urban fantasy, which is probably also where Gaiman's Nancy Boys falls. Why are there not more? A lot more?

[isis]

Huh, the "people wiped out the megafauna" theory was certainly given credence in Alan Weisman's The World Without Us which was just published in 2007. (And I worry that saying, "indigenous peoples were too in tune with nature to have caused these extinctions" is patronizing and smacks of the "noble Red Man" stereotype.) But I agree that one doesn't need to wipe out the humans in order to preserve the animals. Especially since I live in a part of the country where pre-Columbian peoples had a strong and lasting effect on the land, I can't imagine this place without their legacy.

[melannen]

It's still given a fair amount of creedence by people who aren't prehistoric New World archeologists. (And by a small cadre of old-guard archeologists who cling to their theories and must be listened to due to sheer age.) It's one of those theories that escaped into the popular imagination, and still gets used by people who should know better, because it fits the popular imagination so well.

Part of the reason it's so evocative is because it debunks the Noble Red Man image, and lets white people say "Look! They're just as destructive as we are! So it's not our fault!" Which is not any better than Noble Red Man really. Perceptions of Native Americans and environmentalism is a whole 'nother issue which I'm even less qualified to talk about.

Current best theory is that human pressure was probably one of several pressures on the megafauna, but they were already on their way out due to climate and habitat change, and would probably have gone anyway, and if it was in any way due to humans, it was probably habitat loss rather than hunting that did it. Mostly because the extinction was well under way well before any evidence of human impact shows up, and there was a major Eurasian die-off at the same time in areas where human hunting was already established.

One of the problems is that it's inextricably mixed up with the Clovis First controversy, and the fact we don't even have an even vaguely good timeline for when and how exactly humans did come to the New World, and with feminist archeology and gender and race fail in science, which is why some of the old curmudgeons are so irrational about it.

Anyway. Probably at some point, stellar_dust, who is actually studying this stuff with some of the people who did early work on it, is going to show up in this entry and tell me I'm wrong. :D Regardless, it's sufficiently controversial that, in writing a book based on it, I would have researched enough to realize that part of the controversy around it was very highly emotionally charged stuff about race and gender, and thought twice about adopting it uncritically...

[flourish]

When I think about it, I think part of the reason I was so attached to the Dragonriders of Pern series - yes, dragons! - was that it was about people traveling to a new country and colonizing it, essentially. Only the place they colonized didn't have any indigenous people to subdue, so one could feel much less guilty about it.

Anyway, this is an interesting perspective on it, and you're right, we need to get the fuck over our fears so we can actually address the problems we've got.

[melannen]

Yes! That's one of the reasons I loved Pern, and the reason I loved the colonization-themed Pern books more than any of the others.

Then I re-read Dragonsdawn one time too many, and realized, wait, they didn't colonize an empty world, they colonized a world and then through horrifying experiments altered the native intelligent life form to make it biologically dependent on and obedient to humans. And then continued enslaving them for millennia, without ever really examining the moral issues involved, even when they got forcibly shoved into 20th century morality by AIVAS.

...that's one of the issues that Temeraire is taking on headfirst (and one of many reasons I love Novik like burning.) Interesting that she ended up putting Pernese dragons back on Colonial Earth in order to do it, though.

[lindentreeisle]

But I did a lot of reading in the wake of PotC on the actual history of the Golden Age of Piracy, and I'm still kind of in love with it. Pirates *is* the fantasy world of my American heart, I think. It explicitly acknowledges the human evil that the dream is built on, but it says that the freedom is worth it, and then refuses to let freedom be anything but an individual choice, and a hard choice, regardless of race or class or gender or sexuality.

Really?

I mean, I like a good sanitized pirate story as much as the next person, but I'm not sure where you look at piracy and get freedom. In a lot of ways, pirates during that age were a lot like modern street gangs.

[melannen]

I don't know if "sanitized" is quite the word for it, but pirate crews and pirate islands were, at least according to scholarship c. 2004, actually run on a very egalitarian system that was all about personal choice, mostly as a direct rebellion against the way non-pirate sailors were treated. Most pirate ships were democratic co-operatives with every crewmember having an equal ownership & profit share under popularly elected officers, an egalitarian labor system that existed basically nowhere else at the time. Race and class were at least partially erased, religion was free, homosexuality was accepted, and equal justice for everyone under the ship's articles was foundational.

Only with more murder and rapings and lice. The movie/book versions of pirates, interestingly, tend to sanitize them by making them both less murderous, *and* less democratic - on a historical pirate ship, they wouldn't've mutinied against Captain Sparrow, they'd've just voted him out of office.

I'm not up to giving it the time it deserves right now, but the writer I mostly read on the subject of piracy-as-political-theory (he being the one available in the school library at the time) was Marcus Rediker. But there were several other people working in the same general area, and even my Maryland History classes touched on it.

[rivenwanderer]

I am following you solely on the basis of this entry; thanks for writing it.

(I was raised mostly in the rural western US; I'm only now beginning to tease out the privilege and whitewashing of history that my worldview has been soaking in and turning that towards the things I'm fannish about. Maybe someday I'll have my thoughts collected enough to address the failings in the fandoms I love so much.)

[melannen]

I've learned (mostly from talking to people on LJ!) that people from the West can have a very different perspective on the American myth than us Easterners do. So I'd love to read your thoughts, if you ever find a way to express them. (It's taken me a long time to get even where I am in talking about this stuff.)

[elspethdixon]

I find myself agreeing with the one commentor on the Tor site who pointed out how impossible it would be to end up with anything like 19th century pioneer America with the presence of Native Americans and slavery (maybe failing to notice that, as he said, everything between Baltimore and Barbados would be unrecognizable without tobacco and slavery-driven cotton & sugar cane growing is part of the tendancy to think of New England & the Midwest/West's story as the story of America as a whole, which gets people off the hook for having to acknowledge slavery).

As he pointed out, you can't have Thomas Jefferson and the entire Virginia planter class without tobacco, which European settlers would have no knowledge of if Native Americans hadn't introduced them to it. You couldn't end up with anything even vaguely similar to 18th/19th century Canada and Quebec without the fur trade. And that's just the economic impact of no contact with Native peoples (and not even touching on how different the history of Central America, the Caribbean, and as a result of Spain would be if the conquistadors had found nobody to conquer and steal from).

And those are just world-building concerns -- they don't even come close to how problematic the idea of a completely empty American West where Native Americans have been erased from existance just the way 19th century Americans kind of wished they had been is. It's like the Vanishing Indian myth taken to it's most extreme conclusion -- they didn't even vanish, they never existed in the first place to vanish.

Also, this is a personal hang-up, but... humans are part of America's natural history. It feels weird to try and imagine a people-free pre-Columbian North America, which I guess might be a failure of imagination on my part, because I can imagine entire people-free other planets and versions of America where there are dragons and werewolves and vampires, but somehow taking humans out of pleistocene North America makes me run into the same flaily wall of "but that's not the way it works in real life!!1!1" that, like, mpreg does.

American kids get their fantasy through a veneer of 'Western Europe is the only place that matters', too, and for much of my childhood, I searched unsuccessfully for a fantasy world that I felt like I could get to without crossing an ocean, that felt like an American story in the way so many of the non-fantasy YA novels I was reading did.


Celtic/Norse mythology and European fairytale are some of my great storytelling loves, and I adore Western Europe-based fantasy above most other genres (it's up there with Westerns and historical fiction and space opera), but you have a really good point here. One of the things I like about SPN (despite it's gaping flaws in other areas, inclding gender and race) is how much of an American story it feels like -- it's set in small town America, in parts of the country that don't often show up much on tv, and there are so many themes and details worked into it (the American folklore and urban myths that some of the monsters of the week are based on, the entire theme of the opne road and the wandering loner heroes who come into town, take out the bad guys, and leave...) that just give it a very mythic feel. It's like a crosover with American Gods waiting to happen.

And in terms of heroic fantasy, there are very few fantasy worlds out there that include an analog of the Western Hemisphere, either pro-Columbian or colonial.

[melannen]

Not having actually read the book, I'm reserving judgement on the plausibility of the worldbuilding - all I really know so far is that there are trains and pioneers, and I could buy both of those happening even with a really different settlement pattern. And it does look like she's building a really different settlement pattern. It would have to be.

It might actually be interesting to write a people-free North American ecology, if only because it would force you to point out just how vital the human inhabitants *were* in creating the continent we know, because without without people it would be an entirely different environment. And part of what you'd be doing is pointing out that the pre-European presence *isn't* something that can simply be erased.

But even that would be really hard to do without being racist. And the way Wrede is doing it does not sound like that's what she's doing.

One of the reasons I wanted to love SPN was because I was hoping it would take up XF's mantle as the Great American Magical Road Trip. Yes! I do think that's a format that has really awesome possibilities. But it kept being even worse with race and gender than XF, and I stopped caring. (not that XF was great on those issues, but at least it was less myopically focused on young white boys and Christian metaphysics. And I hadn't learned to see it as well, back then.) Someday, a show will come that uses the wandering-culture-heroes format and actually does a good job with race, culture, and diversity. I have faith!

The small-town-America aspect is pretty interesting, actually. There's this meme of small town America, but it's a myth that's been partially created for (racist) political purposes, and small-town hasn't really been the center of American life honestly since the Depression, if it ever was. One of the things I liked about XF is that they occasionally had MOTW cases in the city or the megalopolis, acknowledging all of America. SPN has a few city stories, too, but the small town myth was part of its basic show concept. Which seemed really unbalanced to be, 'cause you'd think the beasties they hunt would go where the population goes.

[bessemerprocess]

Oddly enough, for someone with a MA in nautical archaeology and maritime history, I'm not in a single Age of Sail fandom. I think it's possibly too hard to enjoy when you have the history. Though if you really like pirates and/or want to know more about pirate history and archaeology, you should go over and say hi to elanya who is like the Queen of Pirates.

As for Wrede, I started reading the first of her Dragons book to my sister when I was home last week, and thought I'd never noticed it before, the all encompassing whiteness of the world is very apparent when I was sitting there realizing that there wasn't a single person in that book that even sort of looked like my sister.

[melannen]

On first glance, Enchanted Forest Chronicles is based on the European fairy tale tradition, so why shouldn't everyone be European? On the other hand, it's explicitly screwing with that tradition, partly to give it a more modern sensibility, so why is everyone still white??

Looking back on it, I think I may have actually made Alianora, Keredwel, and Hallana, and some of the other minor characters, multi-chromatic in my mind's-eye, even though when I check my copy they're explicitly described as blonde and blue-eyed, because in the story I wanted her to be telling, everybody shouldn't be white. Dammit.

(Now I'm trying to think of which book it was that gave me the image of the fairy-tale princesses of many races standing together, and if it wasn't EFC, I can't think what it was. But the image was definitely there. Surely that book existed! I will be even more depressed if it turns out it didn't.)

[technocracygirl]

Thank you. I was so filled with hurt when I originally read Walton's post about TTC, back when only two people had commented. I had thought maybe it would be like The Sharing Knife books, with a really different world, but no. It's supposed to be an AU, not a completely different world.

At this moment, I feel like holding onto Naomi Novik and begging her to keep finding the clue that she has. Because we've now seen multiple non-European countries in her books (with fascinating asides to the Americas) and in all of those countries/societies? Dragons and people interact differently. And realistically. And with their own blind spots, their own epic fails, and their own epic wins. I'm sure she has faults too, but by goodness, she is not ducking colonialism issues.

I love Bujold, I love Wrede, I love Walton. I do not understand where they are coming from on this issue. Especially Bujold, who has always been so very open to different interpretations of her own work. And who has been fantastic on gender, sexuality, and other such explorations.

I'm here from damned_colonial's post at age_of_sail, btw. Do you mind if I subscribe to you?

[melannen]

I never mind subscribers! Subscribe away! I can't promise my journal will always be interesting, though. :P

Naomi Novik has gotten some criticism for her handling of race, but a) at least she tried, and b) she handled the criticism gracefully, unlike the people who've been getting the fail label. Which is one reason why she's so awesome. (Also, I probably let her get away with more than I should when I realised the first four novels in that series were written under contract in something like 12 months, omg.)

I am very sad about Wrede, who was one of my lifelines as a child, and I can't look at the same way now that I've noticed this. (I got into Bujold recently enough that I'm slightly less attached. Actually I got into Bujold after learning that she was really good RL friends with Wrede, because they read after each other at the same even. So on one hand I'm not too surprised that Bujold jumped to the defense. But it would be nice if there were at least a few SF authors who write awesome female characters that I could still cling to safely, sigh.)

[(Anonymous)]

sent here by shiegra [on LJ] and I have to say that not only did you nail every reason I have issues with people acting as though, being US-born, I must also dovetail happily with Euro-centric fantasy/folklore (no, I don't), but also what makes me so dissatisfied with American-based urban fantasy in and of itself. I've blogged at length on it before, but maybe I should've just waited and linked to you, instead -- much, much more succinct and coherent than I ever managed!

kudos for an excellent thought-provoking essay.

- kaigou

[melannen]

Ooh, do you have links/a tag for your stuff on the topic? I was glancing at your LJ earlier, but I'd love to read more posts of other peoples' thoughts on this.

[(Anonymous)]

I’ve read "The Thirteenth Child" and definitely kept wondering were all the native people were and when they were going to show up with their own system of magic adapted to the altered environment. America (Columbia) as it stands at the end of the first book has hardly been explored outside the magical barrier, and the characters keep saying (really they repeat this a lot) that anything could exist beyond the places where it’s too dangerous for them to pass.

I wish I hadn’t returned my copy to the library yet, because I’m pretty sure there’s a line where one of the scouts talks about how he got to a place where something magical seemed to be telling him to turn back, which I took as evidence that there was someone out there working spells to keep him away. Maybe the main character will meet Columbia’s native population when she goes out exploring herself in later books, maybe not, but there are a lot of issues about race and colonization that the brought up by "The Thirteenth Child" that bear thinking about, and I loved to see some discussions of them by other people who’ve read the book.

[melannen]

Huh. I'd like to think that you're right, and she's planning to bring in Indians in the later books, but some of the stuff that's come out from her defenders (and quotes from her while she was writing) strongly implies that this is not the case.

It would be really, really amazing, however, if what she's doing right now (while everybody else is making themselves look bad online) was frantically re-writing the sequel to us your ideas.

I will probably read the book if I manage to get my hands on it for free (I have no discretionary funds at the moment, so wouldn't've been buying a copy anyway. I'd like to think it could still be better than people like Bujold are making it sound, but the basic concept of erasing Indians is pretty faily regardless.

[dharma_slut]

Aww, AOS!

One thing about POTC fanfic, is that Sparrow is often non-white. I've seen him be written as; Malaysian, Indian, Native North American, Native South American, Black...

I fangirl for, and have written for, the worlds tiniest fandom, "The Imp Of The Perverse" a crossover of POTC and Neil Stephensons' Baroque trilogy, with the OTP being Captain Jack Sparrow and the King of the vagabonds, Jack Shaftoe. hee! And you are cordially invited.

The two main writers plus me nicely trisect the globe, one being in New Zealand, one in Great Britain, and me in California USA. And the Pearl being an Atlantic ship, the long epics happen anywhere the wide width around. I discovered, when I started to write an epic, that it somehow had to be the New England Coast, and an Algonquin tribe had to be a major part of the story. Luckily this fandom has as many OC's as canon characters-- more, in some places. One of my primary arcs is the struggle between the puritan smugglers and the First people over territory.

[melannen]

Sparrow's race is really interesting - I just assumed, re: the first movie, that he was supposed to be mixed-race. I actually ran a poll on What Race Is Captain Jack? back in 2006. (which I link here partly as evidence of how much I've learned in three yeras!) But all the votes went either to "white" or "god only knows", which surprised me, until a bunch of extra-canonical stuff showed up that said he was meant to be entirely European.

Then in AWE we got to see his mother and it was strongly implied he was mixed-race. So who knows!

I never really managed to get into the Baroque cycle, but I will definitely check out the crossover anyway!

[pseudo_tsuga]

Your thoughts on American fantasy are very interesting to me. A lot of fantasy bounces off of me because it doesn't appeal to me, all those autocratic rulers and tons of countries bordering each other where my mental landscape has tons of powerful factions fighting each other and huge landscapes as well as cool port cities. I saw some of the comments above, and I agree that a lot has to do where I grew up ( see icon.) But you're right, you can't write about America without writing about race; it's our national obsession. That doesn't stop people from trying to do so, of course.

Um, so basically I'm saying that I agree with you.