Two Topics Related by One Book

[anicalewis]

Today's two writing-related topics are steampunk (yay!) and cover whitewashing (boo!).

How do these things relate? Well, Jaclyn Dolamore's debut novel, Magic Under Glass, is YA steampunk. (I have heard some arguments for calling it "Victorian fantasy" instead. Haven't yet read it, so I'm going by what the various categorizing entities say.) It

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[toastedcheese]

I just got Soulless, which is on that list - it's technically my roommate's birthday present but I will be reading it first. :) It is Very Silly Indeed, and technically a paranormal romance - but the semi-love interest is a werewolf whereas the main vampire character is a flamboyantly gay fop with a monocle

[miss_maxine]

LeGuin, I believe, commented that when writing the books that she didn't reveal that Ged had dark skin until rather late in the first book, because she didn't want to put off her publishers right away.
Seriously? When I read it I remember every other page was like, "Ged's dark face..." "his dark skin.." or whatever. This was in the context of a class on fantasy lit, so we discussed the whitewashing of the covers that occurred despite all this, and of the issues surrounding Earthsea as a groundbreaking fantasy novel in featuring nonwhite protagonists and all of that, but my impression was she definitely erred on the side of NOT being subtle about it. (Which is fine, considering the context, and that plenty of people willfully missed it anyway (and we did watch clips of the horrible miniseries, which we groaned over as a class).)

[toastedcheese]

I must be remembering wrong (and/or she was being a bit disingenuous in her quote) - it's been a couple years since I read it.

[miss_maxine]

I'm guessing the latter. She strikes me as the disingenuous sort. Not intentionally, but...hmm, have you ever read any of her essays where she discusses (the trainwreck known as) Tehanu?

[toastedcheese]

Aha, I have found the quote I was thinking of:

"I figured some white kids (the books were published for "young adults") might not identify straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees-hoping that the reader would get "into Ged's skin" and only then discover it wasn't a white one." (from here)

So she may be misremembering just a little.

I believe I've read bits and pieces of those essays. But I really enjoyed Tehanu, honestly - it was certainly a very "look at me I'm being political" book, but not to the detriment of her plot or characters, in my opinion. I will admit that I am not well-read in contemporary fantasy and so the novelty of reading a feminist deconstruction/retelling of the epic fantasy genre went a long way with me, whether or not it had actually been done before. And I just really love Ged and Tenar. :)

[miss_maxine]

I think I may have been the only one in class (a Fantasy class, mind you, filled with geeky sympathetic types) dedicated enough to read Tehanu all the way through, actually. But Robin McKinley and I go way back, so feminist fantasy was already old hat to me.

I was referring more to LeGuin's essays about her feminist awakening, though. I dunno, it made no sense whatsoever to me that she would have been led into thinking she had to write from a male perspective no matter what era it was.

[toastedcheese]

Hmm... depending on what you mean by "from a male perspective," I think it makes a fair amount of sense that if you develop as a writer in a tradition that tells such stories, you unconsciously do the same - especially since those stories partly inspired you to write in the first place.

This is particularly true when that tradition is science fiction and fantasy - female novelists in the 18th/19th century at least had the precedent of early male novelists telling stories with female protagonists, but early female SF/F authors were working almost exclusively in the context of stories about men doing and thinking about male things.

[miss_maxine]

I wish I had the essay on hand to quote from. I just remember her saying something along the lines of, oh, due to evil male repression I thought I had to write like a man and from a male perspective and it never ever occurred to me to write any other way.

I'm aware of the history of fantasy and especially science fiction and that it was definitely a boy's club back then, but even so, I have trouble believing her.

Writing from one's own perspective seems like the natural default. And Robin McKinley, even if she did start a little later (mid-late 70s?) never seems to have contemplated writing about anything other than Girls Who Do Things. And there's always Madeleine L'Engle, too.

[miss_maxine]

(And I also just have a big problem with her (apparent) subscription to the Men Evil, Women Good, foaming-at-the-mouth brand of feminism.)