On Age of Sail, American fantasy, RaceFail, and history.
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![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.