The fail, it burns.

[fiction_theory]

I am completely unsure of where to start with the bad as far as this article "Third World Worlds" by Norman Spinrad is concerned. Because there is a lot of fail jam packed into it. I actually read the entire thing, and yeah. Failtastic.

I think Jason Sanford gets at the basics of the wrongness in this post and Nick Mamatmas does an even better job

Comments

[fiction_theory]

You're very welcome! :) I'm glad that you found this post useful.

Yeah, it bothers me alot that Spinrad's article mentioned only one woman, and only to be dismissive of her. I'm not sure how to articulate the many reasons why I think it's problematic from a gender standpoint that his focus on the entirety of SF literature and the world output of it was limited to a narrow band that has been traditionally male-oriented and male-dominated.

But yeah. Because apparently SF only counts if it falls into the Boy's Own Adventure Tales. And no mention of those icky, girl-infested fantasy genres, either.

I can add in Norman Spinrad's latest pantlessness to show that yet again, there are Old Skool White Writers who Do. Not. Get It.Oh freaking hell yes. I am so completely tired of seeing people that I admired and who were already giants in the field by the time I reading showing their rear ends to me. Not only is it disheartening, but I don't like the way their failtastic attitudes and viewpoints have dripped all throughout this field,

[spiralsheep]

African? Like Nnedi Okorafor? Who also wrote this:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/is_africa_ready_for_science_fiction

Or "Indian" like Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain who wrote the Sultana's Dream? In 1905....

::wryface::

[fiction_theory]

Now you're just confusing the situation with facts. :)

[spiralsheep]

Weeellllll... technically Okorafor is USian but still more "African" than Mike Resnick. ;-) And, more to the point, she's an award winning sf author.

[fiction_theory]

Given what I've read from/about Okorafor, she identifies just as strongly as Igbo (Nigerian) as she does American, and I'm not going to second guess that and say "but you were born in America, you don't count as African!"

It's not for me to say who is or isn't African. She identifies as Igbo (to my knowledge) and if Ms. Okorafor says that she is an African writer, she's an African writer, full stop.

I believe fully in respecting other people's self-identifications.

[asterling]

Norman has been doing this column since 1984. In one of the radio interviews a reader posted, he spoke of the work as journalism, and basically said he appreciated its ability to sustain him between writing books. Most columns that I skimmed today (which weren't that easily accessible) were not very different from the current column. In 2005, he did the "SF is Dead" post that I was falsely accused of - and shared this [In the context of saying fantasy could NEEEEVVVERRRR do this - he has variously stated that "fantasy" destroyed "real" SF and also that "media tie-ins" destroyed "real" SF).

If it does this, and there is any speculative element in the externals of the fictional universe at all, it is true science fiction, and if it does not, it is not true science fiction. Period. . . . [this science fiction is] A visionary literature. A transformational literature. A means evolved by western evolutionary culture to further evolve itself

[madwriter]

>>I'd like to ask Mr. Spinrad if he thinks that France = England = Italy = Germany = Russia = America<<

As much as he referenced "Europe", seeming to lump America into it culturally, he may very well think exactly that.

[icecreamempress]

He apparently lives in France himself. I mean, he's established his bubble of xenophobic white-US-centrism at a French address.

[fiction_theory]

*rolls eyes*

And yet his pantsless ass can be waved 'round the world. The internet is a beautiful thing, ain't it?

[fiction_theory]

I got the sense that he didn't, especially since he talked at length about researching for a novel he wrote specifically about Russia and the information I have now that he's lived/living in France.

I guess I got uncomfortable when he started using "African/Africa" interchangably with "Kenya/Kenyan" in discussing Resnick and Hemmingway's respective works as though all of Africa is homogenous and Kenya is the same as any other part. Which is, you know, NOT TRUE REMOTELY.

It may well be me reading into it, but it makes me vastly uncomfortable when someone starts using continental names to describe anything but continents. It's one thing to say "Kenya is an African nation", it's another to think that there aren't other, vastly different, nations in Africa. And that was the impression I took away from his entire saddening (and too lengthy) diatribe.

Not SF, but...

[madwriter]

...this is something that's been in the forefront of my concerns while I've been writing my Shenandoah books: I write about Native Americans, slaves, freedmen, people who faced down the KKK...and those were stories I wanted to do justice without cultural appropriation. The best advice I ever got when I expressed this concern was, "Just talk to the people from those cultures".

Granted I couldn't talk to 17th century Cherokee or slaves freed by the Civil War, except through oral histories. But I could and did talk to living members of the Cherokee nation, and people whose great-grandparents were slaves, and people who faced the Klan and walked to a school where there might be only twenty other black students out of hundreds. The stories they told were fascinating, heartbreaking, tragic, and uplifting--sometimes all at once

Re: Not SF, but...

[fiction_theory]

*nods*

I haven't read the Shenendoah books (obviously), so I can't judge one way or the other on them specifically - but I do think it is a good thing that you have kept problematic issues like cultural appropriation as part of your thought process when writing and researching.

And I kind of wish that when white writers start talking about "research what you write!" they would keep in mind that it isn't enough to do the textbook research, but that there is a very real systemic component to research (indeed, even to being in a place where one has access to the right materials) and that cultural appropriation can be a big problem even with the best researched book in the world.

I hope I do get to read these books sometime soon, it's been quite fascinating reading your progress on them and as something of a historian (or history student who never gave up loving history) it's definitely something I want to read.

Re: Not SF, but...

[madwriter]

I certainly hope you get to!