Fiskception: Dissecting Correia’s Critique of MacFarlane
1/30: Comments are back on, in case there are points you feel you need to make that haven’t already been covered in the ~350 posted comments from yesterday. The goblins (and fire-spider) stayed away yesterday, but will be munching comments today as needed.
Hint: if you demean a human being’s gender or sexual preference by equating it to an attraction to animals or furniture? If you question the mental health of an individual who doesn’t fit into your narrow worldview? The goblins will eat your comment.
While we’re at it, I’ve noticed a few people responding to arguments from both me and Correia by basically saying, “Well, his books suck!” Can we not do that? Unless it’s directly relevant to the argument, it feels like a cheap shot, and doesn’t actually address what’s being discussed. So yeah, the goblins will be munching on off-topic book-bashing, too.
1/31: I don’t believe I actually have to say this, but telling someone that they, or people just like them, made Naziism what it was, will also get your comments fed to the goblins.
3/21: I’m closing comments for good. People have moved on to other arguments, and this post seems to be getting spam-bombed pretty heavily for some reason…
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This is gonna be a long one.
The backstory: Author Alex Dally MacFarlane wrote an article called Post-Binary Gender in SF: An Introduction over at Tor.com, calling for “an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories.”
One week later, author Larry Correia wrote a response to MacFarlane’s piece, called Ending Binary Gender in Fiction, or How to Murder Your Writing Career. (Side note: you’ll probably want to avoid the comments on that one.)
I tried to ignore it. There’s no way I’m going to change Correia’s mind about this stuff, any more than his post changed my thinking. But of course, there are a lot of other people lurking and participating in the conversation, and while I know this is going to do bad things to my blood pressure, I think it’s a conversation worth having.
I’m following Correia’s general style here. My responses will be italicized. His original content is indented.
This was sent to me on Facebook the other day. I made some comments there, but then I got to thinking about it and decided this thing was such a good example of how modern sci-fi publishing has its head stuck up its ass that it really deserved its own blog post. My response is really directed toward the aspiring writers in the crowd who want to make a living as writers, but really it works for anybody who likes to read, or who is just tired of angsty emo bullshit.
I wonder which is more angsty … an author calling for our genre to move beyond binary gender, or another author spending 4000+ words about how people like MacFarlane are symbolic of everything that’s wrong with the genre, and are destroying fun.
Okay, aspiring author types, you will see lots of things like this, and part of you may think you need to incorporate these helpful suggestions into your work. After all, this is on Tor.com so it must be legit. Just don’t. When you write with the goal of checking off boxes, it is usually crap. This article is great advice for writers who want to win awards but never actually be read by anyone.
I agree that if you’re writing a story with the kind of checklist Correia describes, you’re probably going to get a bad story. But what exactly are the suggestions Correia objects to? MacFarlane never says all writers must now include at least one non-binary character. She says only that she wants readers to be aware of non-binary texts, and wants writers to stop defaulting to them. Not that authors should never write cismale or cisfemale characters. Just be aware that there are other choices, and make conscious choices about your writing.
Now do yourself a favor and read the comments… I’ll wait… Yeah… You know how when my Sad Puppies posts talk about the “typical WorldCon voter”? Those comments are a good snapshot of one subtype right there.
From the comments to Correia’s piece:
- “I am so tired of these pretentious twats. Err, dicks. Err… pre-op alternative genitals.”
- “The hilarious thing is my books are filled with characters who are non-white, non-male, non-straight, occasionally trans and from a mixmaster of genetic and cultural backgrounds … But I don’t write books for leftist pussies so they’ve never read my books.”
- “If this is the level of education of the typical WorldCon voter, it’s no wonder the GOOD writers don’t win awards. These loonies wouldn’t recognize good writing if Earl Harbinger yanked out their guts and used the intestines to piece out quotes from Jane Austen.”
Do we really want to start arguing about what one’s commenters say about one’s audience?
I also know from that Facebook thread that a lot of people tried to comment and disagree for various reasons, but their posts were deleted. (and some of them even swore that they were polite!). But like most modern lefty crusades, disagreement, in fact, anything less than cheerleading, is “intolerance” and won’t be tolerated. Meanwhile, my FB thread had lots of comments and an actual intelligent discussion of the pros and cons from both sides (and even transsexual communists who actually like to enjoy their fiction thought this Tor.com post was silly), so remember that the next time a snooty troll calls my fans a “right wing echo chamber.”
If Tor.com is deleting comments for disagreement, then that’s a serious problem. But skimming through the 100+ comments on the article, I find plenty that disagree with MacFarlane, or argue with what she’s saying. Tor.com does have a moderation policy, so I’d expect comments that violated that policy to get booted. Beyond that, I don’t know the details of the allegedly polite commenters who claim to have been booted for not cheerleading enough, so there’s not much more for me to say about this one.
ETA: I’m told one comment was deleted for stating that non-binary people are mentally ill, which would seem to violate #1, #2, and #4 on Tor.com’s moderation policy. There may have been other deletions, but this is the only one I’m aware of.
ETA2: One of the Tor.com moderators comments on the deletions here.
If you can’t stomach the comments long enough to hear what a typical WorldCon voter sounds like, let me paraphrase: “Fantastic! I’m so sick of people actually enjoying books that are fun! Let’s shove more message fiction down their throats! My cause comes before their enjoyment! Diversity! Gay polar bears are being murdered by greedy corporations! Only smart people who think correct thoughts like I do should read books and I won’t be happy until my genre dies a horrible death! Yay!” (and if there is beeping noise in the background, that’s because they’re backing up their mobility scooter).
So let’s break this pile of Gender Studies 101 mush down into its component bits and see just why some sci-fi writers won’t be happy until their genre dies completely. Like my usual Fisking, the original article is in italics and my comments are in bold.
Because calling for an awareness that not all people fit into a simple binary gender system = KILL ALL THE SCIENCE FICTION!!!
In other news, I believe we should do something about racism in this country, which actually means I WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA!1!!!1!
Post-Binary Gender in SF: Introduction, by Alex Dally MacFarlane
I want an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories.
I want lots of things too, doesn’t mean I can have them. Right out the gate that’s a pretty bold statement. And by bold, I mean ridiculous.
How dare people want things! How ridiculous that people want things I don’t personally agree with! You empty headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction.
What is this “default of binary gender” he wants to end? It is that crazy old fashioned idea that most (as in the vast majority) of mammals, including humans, can be grouped into male and female based upon whether they’ve got XX or XY chromosomes. Sure, that’s medically true something like 99.999% of the time, which would sort of make it the default.
1. Alex MacFarlane is female.
2. You ask what the default is that she wants to end. She answers that in the following paragraph. Which doesn’t seem to stop you from running off to declare gender = chromosomal/biological sex.
Oh, and “default” means that is your assumed baseline.
So that whole thing where people are male or female except for some tiny exceptions and that is kind of the assumption until proven otherwise is standard, so this guy wants to end that. (I’m assuming Alex is a dude, but then again, that is just me displaying my cismale gendernomrative fascism)
Cismale gendernomrative fascist? Whatever. What Correia is displaying here is his awareness that he’s making an assumption, his awareness that the assumption might be wrong, and his unwillingness to do 30 seconds of research to verify his assumption. Or just read the bio at the end of MacFarlane’s article. Either because he’s lazy, or because he doesn’t see any need to treat people he disagrees with respectfully. Or both.
What do I mean by “post-binary gender”? It’s a term that has already been used to mean multiple things, so I will set out my definition:
Post-binary gender in SF is the acknowledgement that gender is more complex than the Western cultural norm of two genders (female and male): that there are more genders than two, that gender can be fluid, that gender exists in many forms.
Wait… male and female are Western Cultural Norms? Uh… No. That is a biological norm for all the higher life forms on Earth so that species can replicate themselves (keep in mind, this is SCIENCE fiction he wants to change). I like how Western Culture is the root of all that’s evil though, even though male and female are cultural norms in pretty much every human society there has ever been.
Read more carefully. The Western cultural norm is to genders; that doesn’t mean two genders is exclusively a Western cultural norm. See also, nickels are coins, but not all coins are nickels.
And yes, male and female are cultural norms in pretty much every human society EVER! Except Mesopotamia, India, Siberia, Illiniwek, Olmec, Aztec, Maya, Thailand, Lakota, Blackfoot, Indonesia, Swahili, Azande, and all of the other cultures that historically or currently acknowledge the existence of more than two genders.
Also, nitpick. Gender was a grammar term for how you referred to the different sexes. Being male or female is your Sex. Or at least, that’s what the word meant until colleges invented the Gender Studies major for those students who found Liberal Arts way too academically grueling.
Paraphrase: “Ha, ha. People who disagree with me are dumb!”
Now, before we continue I need to establish something about my personal writing philosophy. Science Fiction is SPECULATIVE FICTION. That means we can make up all sorts of crazy stuff and we can twist existing reality to do interesting new things in order to tell the story we want to tell. I’m not against having a story where there are sexes other than male and female or neuters or schmes or hirs or WTF ever or that they flip back and forth or shit… robot sex. Hell, I don’t know. Write whatever tells your story.
But the important thing there is STORY. Not the cause of the day. STORY.
Because readers buy STORIES they enjoy and when readers buy our stuff, authors GET PAID.
I … actually, I pretty much agree with him here. People read for story, not for checklists or quotas or lectures. I see nothing in MacFarlane’s article to suggest she believes any differently. Calling for authors to be more thoughtful about their craft doesn’t mean you’re telling authors to abandon story for MESSAGE.
But you know, readers also tend to enjoy stories where they can find characters like themselves. Which is easy if you’re a straight white dude, and gets progressively more difficult the further you stray from that default. Maybe if we want to write enjoyable stories, we should try looking beyond the same old default that’s been done again and again throughout the history of the genre.
Robert Heinlein had stories where technology allowed switching sex. Great. That’s actually a pretty normal sci-fi trope where in the future, there’s some tech that allows people to change shape/sex, whatever, and we’ve got grandmasters of sci-fi who have pulled off humans evolving into psychic space dolphins or beings of pure energy. If that fits into the story you want to tell and you want to explore that, awesome for you. I’ve read plenty of stories where that was part of that universe. If your space whales that live inside the sun have three sexes, awesome (that one was my novella push on Sad Puppies 1).
But this post wasn’t about, hey write whatever mind expanding sci-fi ideas you want, nope, it want to end the norm in order to push a message. Post like this are all the same. You can swap the message around, and whatever the particular norm is, or whatever the particular message is, when you put your pet-peeve message before story, odds are you are going to bore the shit out of your reader.
Yep. Putting message before story will tend to bore your reader.
Now, if the only way you can imagine including a “non-default” character in your story is to make it a Message Story, then guess what — you’re probably a shitty writer. You can have gay characters in a story without making it a Gay Story. Austistic characters without having to write an Autism Story. Black characters without having to write a Race Story.
It’s a pretty big world out there. Why are we so scared to write about more than a limited, narrow piece of it?
People who do not fit comfortably into the gender binary exist in our present, have existed in our past, and will exist in our futures. So too do people who are binary-gendered but are often ignored, such as trans* people who identify as binary-gendered.
Will exist in the future? Probably. Should they be the default for your story? No way. Ignored? Hardly. Is that denying reality?
I don’t know what he’s saying here.
Okay, so I write a book, and let’s say that it has 20 characters in it. What is the acceptable percentage of them that should be transgender? How many boxes must I check in order to salve a blogger’s liberal angst? Let’s see… Only like 1 in 50,000 people have sex changes performed. So at 20 characters a book… If I have one character who has had a sex change show up every 2,500 books I write, I’d be statistically accurate.
Oh, yay. We’re back to quotas and checklists.
Ignoring the uncited and inaccurate statistics here, let’s flip this around. How many musclebound manly white men do I have to write about in my stories in order to convince people like Correia that it’s not a secret subversive left-wing liberal Message? How many big-busted blonde women need to throw themselves on my hero’s penis to satisfy his insecurities that non-white, non-male people might start to have an actual voice?
Oh, but now you’re going to tell me that gay people make up anywhere from 1-4% of the population. Fantastic. Except gay people are still the same sex they were born with. Gay dudes are still men and gay chicks are still women. This blogger didn’t say he wanted an end to default sexual orientation, he wants an end to default binary sex. If you think sci-fi doesn’t have people who don’t swing both ways, you’ve not read much sci-fi.
Right, so you’re throwing bad statistics out about a made-up argument that you acknowledge MacFarlane didn’t even bring up.
I think you’re wrong, because kitties are cuter than puppies. Which has nothing to do with anything Correia actually said, but that seems to be how we’re playing the game now.
Now, if I’m writing a sci-fi story set in Space Berkley or the Tenderloin District of the Future, then I’d probably have plenty of Hirs and Shmisters or whatever. Whatever fits the story, but until then how about not trying to enforce Equal Opportunity against our imaginary people?
(and if you really want to get crazy in the speculative fiction department, what with all this BS with made up pronouns to get rid of Him and Her, what the hell are romance languages supposed to do? Latino. Latina. Latinu? Latinsexyrobot?)
Language should be static and never evolve, which is why all future blog posts will be written in ancient Sumerian.
Here’s the problem. From a nuts and bolts story telling perspective, your readers are going to assume that everything in your book is similar to the world they currently live in, until demonstrated otherwise.
In talking to readers, I find that most of them assume SF/F books will portray worlds dominated by straight white folks. Not exclusively, mind you, but the representation in our genre is most certainly not that close to the world we currently live in.
Unless you say that in the future everybody has been genetically modified to have 3 legs, they are going to assume that all your human characters have two legs. If you are going to demonstrate that something is different, then there needs to be a reason for it. So if you say all humans have 3 legs, but it doesn’t play into the story at all, then why bother? And every time you change something to be different from the expected, there had better be a reason for it or you will quickly just annoy your reader.
I agree. When you make a choice about character, you should have a reason for that choice.
Making a character male or female is a choice. Making a character white is a choice. Making a character straight is a choice. But it’s a choice often made because these are the default, and the writer is lazy.
Reading sci-fi like that grows tiresome. It is like listening to an inexperienced little kid saying “Look, I can do THIS! And now I can do THIS! Isn’t that the neatest thing EVAR!?” And your response is “Yeah, yeah, that’s special…” when you’re really bored as shit and don’t care how tall their Lego tower is the 50th time.
I’m not sure what sci-fi he’s referring to, and I’m a little skeptical about how much of it he’s actually read, given his arguments. But I find stories that explore a more diverse world, that present different characters and stories I haven’t read a thousand times before, to be much more interesting. There’s comfort and enjoyment in reading the same-old genre tropes and tales too, but Correia sounds a lot like he’s bashing a genre you’ve never read.
Also, screw you. My LEGO tower is AWESOME.
If your story is about exploring sexual identity, awesome. Write that story. But only a fool is going to come along and tell you that you need to end the default of all your characters having ten fingers, because there are people in the world born with twelve and how could you be so insensitive to those who have lost fingers? Because awareness.
So if humans having 5 or 6 sexes in the future is part of your story, write it. If it isn’t part of the story, why would you waste words on it? Oh, that’s right, because MESSAGE.
ProTip: Focusing on message rather than story is a wonderful way for writers to continue working at Starbucks for the rest of their lives.
ProTip 2: If the only reason you can think of to include characters who aren’t the default is because MESSAGE, you’re a shitty writer. You might be a popular writer, because there are certainly plenty of people who want to devour books that don’t challenge them in any way, but that doesn’t make you a good writer. That’s probably an argument best saved for another blog post, though.
I am not interested in discussions about the existence of these gender identities: we might as well discuss the existence of women or men. Gender complexity exists. SF that presents a rigid, unquestioned gender binary is false and absurd.
Yes. Topic of the Day X exists! You know what else exists? Child abuse. So I’d better make sure I put that in every book I write.
It’s so much easier to argue with people if I deliberately misinterpret and oversimplify what they’re saying, isn’t it?
Because readers love that. If I’m telling a story about rocket ships, readers love it when your characters pause to have a discussion about animal cruelty, pollution, the dangers of over prescribing psychotropic drugs, or how we need to be sensitive to people with peanut allergies too. Readers are totally into being preached at about author’s favorite causes.
Have you ever gone into Barnes and Noble, went to the clerk at the info desk, and said “Hey, I really want to purchase with my money a science fiction novel which will increase my AWARENESS of troubling social issues.”? No? This is my shocked face.
Not that you can’t get a cause into your story, as long as you do it with skill. But the minute you destroy the default just to destroy the default, congratulations, you just annoyed the shit out of the reader. You want to slip in a message and not annoy your customers, that takes skill, so until you have developed your skills, don’t beat people over the head with your personal hang ups.
How about if my story isn’t in any way, shape, or form concerned with sexual identity (or whatever some reviewer’s personal hang up is today) I don’t waste words writing about it, and readers who want to can just assume that those people exist in the universe but they don’t happen to have speaking parts in this particular novel, if they care enough to think about it at all, which they probably won’t.
“Those People exist in my stories. They’re just not important enough to have speaking parts in this book. Or those other books. Or the majority of the books in our field.”
I intend to use this column to examine post-binary SF texts, both positively and critically, as well as for discussions of points surrounding this subject.
And I intend to use this column to go beyond Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
Read that a long time ago among the thousands of books I read as a kid. Vaguely remember it. Thought it was good, if I recall correctly.
I liked it, though I have to admit I find LeGuin’s nonfiction even better than her fiction.
Kameron Hurley wrote several years ago about the frustration of The Left Hand of Darkness being the go-to book for mind-blowing gender in SF, despite being written in 1968. Nothing written in the decades since has got the same traction in mainstream SF discourse—
Maybe that’s because Le Guin told a story that happened to have this blogger’s pet topic in it, that was still a story readers found interesting, as opposed to crafting a message fic manifesto, that readers found boring and forgettable?
I think the argument here is that LeGuin is the only one in the past 45 years who’s written about non-binary gender without writing a MESSAGE story. Which is a ridiculous argument, unless you buy into the tautological silliness that any story about non-binary gender = MESSAGE story.
and texts have been written. For a bit of context, 1968 is almost twenty years before I was born, and I’m hardly a child.
HARDLY! Well, there you go. I know when I’m looking for professional advice about how to succeed as a professional writer, I’m going to listen to somebody in their mid-twenties.
Hey, you’d better listen up. I’m betting this blogger went to COLLEGE!
“MacFarlane is wrong because I’m older than her!”
One of the reasons Hurley considers for this situation (raised by someone on a mailing list she belonged to) is that:
“…perhaps Le Guin’s book was so popular because it wasn’t actually as radical as we might think. It was very safe. The hetero male protagonist doesn’t have sex with any of the planet’s inhabitants, no matter their current gender. We go off on a boys’ own adventure story, on a planet entirely populated by people referred to as ‘he,’ no matter their gender. Le Guin is a natural storyteller, and she concentrates on the story. It’s not overly didactic. It’s engaging and entertaining.”
Holy shit… Wait… You mean this story has stuck around because “she concentrates on the story”? Engaging and entertaining? Blasphemy!
Yet, people like this don’t get why message fic books win piles of awards, yet totally fail in the market. See, the problem the modern literati twaddle peddlers run into isn’t that readers are insensitive rubes who don’t understand the plight of whatever their liberal cause of the day is, it is because they want to enjoy what they read. Their entertainment time and money is limited. Why spend it being preached at?
Once again misrepresenting the argument or just missing the point.
The next few paragraphs are very interesting, because they give you a glimpse into the mind of the modern literati.
Alex Dally MacFarlane IS the Modern Literati! She should totally get that on a T-shirt, or turn it into a superhero costume.
The Left Hand of Darkness certainly has been radical, as Hurley says, in its time, in the subsequent years and in the present. I have spoken to several people who found The Left Hand of Darkness immensely important: it provided their first glimpse of the possibility of non-binary gender. The impact that it has had on people’s realisations about their own gender is not something I want to diminish, nor anyone else’s growth in understanding.
However, I do think it can be very palatable for people who haven’t done a lot of thinking about gender. It is, as Hurley says earlier in her post, the kind of story that eases the reader in gently before dropping the gender bombs, and those bombs are not discomfiting for all readers. Of course they’re not. How can one text be expected to radicalise every reader?
I don’t want to cast The Left Hand of Darkness aside. It’s an important part of this conversation. What I do want to do is demonstrate how big that conversation truly is. Other texts have been published besides The Left Hand of Darkness, many of them oft-overlooked—many of them out of print. Some of them are profoundly problematic, but still provide interesting questions. Some of them are incredible and deserve to be considered classics of the genre. Some of them are being published right now, in 2014.
Fascinating. To the literati, books are all about dropping truth bombs. (as long as the truth agrees with their predetermined notions, obviously) This one is about sex, but you could swap that out for the evils of capitalism, or whatever bullshit they’re hung up on today. And of course, since publishing is an insular little industry based in the Manhattan echo chamber of proper goodthink, all the message fic that gets pumped out is stuff that just annoys the regular reading public.
More straw-manning. Yay. But yes, there are in fact people who think that maybe — just maybe — we should have stories that are more than mindless fluff perpetuating the same tired stereotypes. There are also people who recognize that all stories carry certain assumptions and messages and “truths.” Good Triumphs Over Evil. Freedom Is the Bestest Thing in the Universe. Intellectual Arrogance Will Destroy You. If Correia thinks his own personal bullshit doesn’t shape the stories he writes, then he’s a fool.
Also, damn. Bitter, much?
You want a truth bomb? Readers hate being preached at. Period. Even when you agree with the message, if it is ham fisted and shoved in your face, it turns you off. Message fic for message fic’s sake makes for tedious reading. Yet, as this stuff has become more and more prevalent, sci-fi has become increasingly dull, and readership has shrank.
Of course, the literati won’t be happy until everything is boring ass message fic and nobody reads sci-fi anymore, because then they’ll be super special snowflakes.
You know what’s boring? Yet another book about manly straight white dudes doing manly straight white things. You can’t preach about how boring conformity is bad for the genre, then spend 4000 words arguing with someone trying to challenge a piece of that genre conformity.
Okay, obviously you can do that, but I think it’s rather silly.
Amal El-Mohtar wrote a piece about the process of finding—having to find—a pioneering woman writer, Naomi Mitchison, and followed it up with a post where she said:
“It breaks my heart that we are always rediscovering great women, excavating them from the relentless soil of homogenizing histories, seeing them forever as exceptions to a rule of sediment and placing them in museums, remarkable more for their gender than for their work.”
Ah, pseudo-intellectual university humanities department speak… How I have missed you.
Writing should be simple and basic. “Invisible prose.” Because Conformity. Or something.
Yes. Because you shouldn’t elevate a book because you thought it was good and you want to share it with others, you should elevate a book because the sex, race, religion, sexual orientation, or personal philosophy of the author checks a box on the liberal angst/white guilt checklist.
The typical WorldCon voter, when presented with 5 nominees for a category, and their clique’s personal favorite writer isn’t on there, and not having actually read any of the works, will go through the authors and rank them according to the order that best assuages their hang ups. Oooh, a paraplegic transsexual lesbian minority abortion doctor with AIDS who writes for Mother Jones? You’d need a wheelbarrow to carry all the Hugos.
[Citation needed]
Quality? Popularity? Staying power? Influence? Isn’t that what makes something a classic? Not to the modern literati. We have to elevate works by people according to what they checked on their EEOC form. Meanwhile, hatey-McHatertons like me read books and like them, even when we don’t know anything about the author. I didn’t know what sex Lois Bujold or Wen Spencer where the first time I read one of their books, but I knew the writing was good. I couldn’t tell you what writers are gay or like to cross dress either, but I can tell you who I enjoy reading.
You realize that’s what El-Mohtar is saying, right? That we need to stop recognizing women writers as curiosities, noteworthy because, “Hey look, a woman wrote something good!” That we need to move past the assumption that all of the great works of literature were written by men. That we need to stop ignoring women’s accomplishments just because they’re women.
And of course, I know you would never poo-poo a book because it has girl cooties, but historically, that’s certainly been the trend. I’m glad to know you’re on board with wanting to do away with that trend.
It seems to me that there’s a similar process for post-binary texts: they exist, but each reader must discover them anew amid a narrative that says they are unusual, they are rare, they sit outside the standard set of stories. This, at least, has been my experience. I want to dismantle the sediment—to not only talk about post-binary texts and bring them to attention of more readers, but to do away with the default narrative.
Because nothing is going to make an author successful like copying things that were unpopular before.
MacFarlane: “I want to talk about these books and stories that don’t get a lot of attention, and expand the kind of stories we read and create.”
Correia: “Copying unpopular stuff will make you unsuccessful!”
Hines: “Huh???”
That process of (re)discovery is probably inescapable. A bookshop, a library or a friend’s/family member’s bookshelves can’t contain every book ever published, so new readers will always have to actively seek out stories beyond the first ones they encounter. What if, El-Mohtar wonders, the first books often included Naomi Mitchison? What if the first books often included multiple post-binary texts as well?
Wait… So the purpose of reading is to get people to accept non-binary gender? Well, huh… All this time I’ve been under the impression people primarily read for enjoyment. So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong!
Bored now. I hope Correia moves on to something new and interesting soon. The same old misreading and straw-manning is getting dull.
The English professor says: “For young people and new readers, wouldn’t it be nice if we shoved IMPORTANT WORKS about Special Topic X down their throats rather than something they might enjoy? Now I wonder why most Americans don’t read for fun anymore after we beat them over the head through their entire education and forced them to read tedious classics until reading was seen as a chore… Odd.”
And for the small and dwindling percentage of us that still actually like to buy and read books, what I’m getting from this blogger is that they’re thinking “Let’s get this mind blowing stuff out there. Yeah, that’ll rock their little bourgeois world!” Okay, dude… They’re SCIENCE FICTION readers. You’re probably not going to stun them with your big shocking ideas. You really want to shock a sci-fi reader with your book nowadays? Actually entertain them.
As an interesting side note, the Guardian just did a report that revealed how much published authors really make. For most of us, it isn’t that much. I think the average was like 30k. The majority of published writers still have their day jobs. Only the top 1% made six figures.
I am the 1%.
So aspiring authors, if you want to actually make a living doing this, you can either listen to me and put story first, or you can listen to the grad student and focus on the pet message of the day.
Regular readers will know that I always say writers should have GET PAID in their mission statement, the reason I do that is because most of us DON’T.
Correia makes more money than you. Therefore he’s right.
I’ll certainly grant that Larry Correia is a successful writer. Therefore you should do what he does.
So is Ursula LeGuin. Who wrote an amazing novel about non-binary gender that’s still popular today. Therefore you should do what she does.
Look, NOBODY IS SAYING THAT STORY ISN’T IMPORTANT, or that you shouldn’t put story first. What they’re saying is that there are more stories out there, and more characters, and more possibilities to explore.
Conversations about gender in SF have been taking place for a long time. I want to join in.
Judging by how they’ve been “grooming” the comments there, when they say conversations they mean shut up and listen while they lecture you about something.
[Citation needed]
I want more readers to be aware of texts old and new, and seek them out, and talk about them. I want more writers to stop defaulting to binary gender in their SF—I want to never again read entire anthologies of SF stories or large-cast novels where every character is binary-gendered. I want this conversation to be louder.
Read that paragraph again and think about it… Think about it really hard. Nuts and bolts. Every single SF book, he wants to default to something other than what your audience thinks is normal. I want more people to seek out not just great books, or mind bending books, but books. Period.
Yep. How dare she wish for books to more accurately reflect the diversity of the real world…
Speaking of great sci-fi, wouldn’t Firefly have been so much better if Captain Mal had been a pre-op transsexual? And just think of the hilarious banter they could have about Jayne not being a girl’s name… never mind, because in the future that is insensitive.
Of course, good writers will just write their characters so that they’re interesting and compelling, rather than to check a box to make a special interest group happy. If I’m writing a story and it would make the story better to have some character be something other than the default, then I can put that in. If it doesn’t have a point, then it is a distraction to the reader.
Characters who are not straight or white or cisgendered male or whatever Larry Correia thinks of as the default have a reason to be included in the story. (Fortunately, white dudes like me don’t need a reason to exist. We’re the normal ones, you see. We’re supposed to be here.)
Here’s a reason: because people other than your narrow-minded “default” exist in the world. Because if you want to write a story that’s in any way reflective of the real world, you have to acknowledge that fact.
Except even then, a Hatey McHaterton like me will still probably do it wrong. There was a bad guy in Swords of Exodus named Diego. This guy was an enforcer for an international crime syndicate. He participated in underground knife fighting arenas against Yakuza and Russian Mafia members for fun. Diego could match Lorenzo in a fight. He was also a gay cross dresser who made a very convincing Celine Dion, so obviously, I got a review that talked about how I hate gay people… Even though in a book where almost all of the characters, including the protagonists, are some degree of bad guy, obviously this character is a demonstration of my homophobic hatey hate mongering.
Then there’s Big Eddie, but really, you can’t think of Eddie that way. His sexual orientation was Hurt People. If you were to give him a psych evaluation to see what his “gender identity” was, he’d check all the boxes, then burn the test and stab the psychologist.
As far as a character’s proclivities, for all you know my books are filled with pre-op transsexuals, only I’m not going to stop and talk about them and what they do off screen. In fact, the only time I talk about a character’s feelings on any topic in a book are when that helps flesh out that character in a manner that helps tell the story I want to tell.
“See, I wrote about a gay cross dresser, so you can’t accuse me of being homophobic!”
To that end, I’ll be running this column: posting every two weeks, with discussions of books and short stories, as well as interviews and roundtables with other writers and readers of post-binary SF,
Oh good. Because this topic really needs to be beaten home. I hear that there are actually some consumers out there who still actually read sci-fi, and we will never rest until this genre becomes so incredibly boring that we drive everyone away!
because I strongly believe it’s important to hear multiple voices.
Just not the ones that disagree in the blog comments.
Again, try reading the comments. Also, you seem to be accusing MacFarlane of deleting comments, when I suspect it’s the Tor.com staff who are responsible for moderating. I’m not 100% sure on that, but I suspect you’ve got your snark crossed here.
I’m particularly interested in science fiction at the moment, but I expect I’ll cross genres as I run the column.
Yeah. I can’t wait until he gets to urban fantasy. Yay.
I hope you’ll join me in making the default increasingly unstable.
Wow. Yeah. I’ll show you, Dad! You can’t tell me what do! Down with your cismale gendernormative fascism!
And back to the mockery and criticizing the author’s age rather than her ideas.
#
Well that was fun. My congratulations to anyone who read this far.
A reminder: I do moderate comments here, because I’m a freedom-hating commie I don’t have time or interest in trolls, name-calling, threats, etc. You’re welcome to comment, but as Wil Wheaton says, don’t be a dick.
Marc Cabot
January 29, 2014 @ 6:43 pm
The answer to your latter question is: “Extremely atypical.” Which is why the “default” word is causing all the trouble.
Sistercoyote
January 29, 2014 @ 6:45 pm
Brian – you win. 🙂 I don’t have nearly that much space and I grew up with spiky things so I know to treat them with respect and attention.
Jim C. Hines
January 29, 2014 @ 6:47 pm
There are two levels of reading this sort of thing. One is the character’s perception and interpretation of events. I haven’t seen that particular take on it, and it’s been way too long since I read Friday to really address it.
The second level is the narrative itself, whether or not the story as a whole reinforces or challenges that character’s interpretation. For example, it’s one thing to have a racist character in a book. It’s another thing if the book celebrates that character and his racism, if that makes sense?
My recollection is that the book never really challenges Friday’s reaction to being raped. But I’d have to reread to get any further into this particular discussion.
Tom Kratman
January 29, 2014 @ 6:53 pm
No straw manning there, Jim. Those are serious questions. And I wasn’t asking you, but Alex.
That said, okay, “what if it doesn’t?” Is it enough, as with most male and female characters, to simply mention that X spear carrier is transexual, transvestite, a formerly straight male but now lesbian female, or whatever? Will that satisfy the requirement? Will that satisfy Alex? However, will that not tend to generate even more outrage when that’s all you do, mention gender? Will it not, today, when so many seem to be actively hunting for a reason for outrage? And puhleeze, I refuse to buy that they’re finding it so often when they’re not hunting for it.
I did see where Alex answered one of the questions, or her blog, referenced below, and am relieved that, no, it seems that straight men and women need not be literarily extinguished in the interests of whatever the interest is supposed to be.
Demetrias
January 29, 2014 @ 6:54 pm
True but that’s what I am getting at. The Vorkosigan books default to binary gender for most of the books and every now and then you get a treatment of a non-binary gender issue. What’s wrong with that? Why do we have to get rid of the default? The Valdemar series bunch of straight white people as main characters except every now and then we see a gay, bi or griffin character pop up and take the lead. What’s wrong with that? If i want to write a cyberpunk, steampunk, space opera or medival fantasy novel why shouldn’t I default my characters to cisgender? It will be more accessible to more reader’s and I wont have to spend time researching and design character’s I don’t know and have no passion for. Instead i can focus on what ever issue or idea triggered my desire to write that book. If later I find a reason to have one or even a whole civilization of trans then I can write them in.
Jim C. Hines
January 29, 2014 @ 6:56 pm
I know you were addressing Alex. But either 1) you’re deliberately taking things to ridiculous extremes, in which case you need to knock it off or go elsewhere, or else 2) you genuinely believe that Alex should write you a little pink or rainbow book of guidance to avoid offending anyone, and that this has anything at all to do with the conversation at hand.
In either case, I’m calling an end to it.
“And puhleeze, I refuse to buy that they’re finding it so often when they’re not hunting for it.”
You’re welcome to believe or not believe whatever you choose. Whether or not your beliefs have anything to do with reality is another question.
Lenora Rose
January 29, 2014 @ 6:57 pm
Here’s what i mean when I say “I stopped automatically using the default”.
It doesn’t mean I have never written a story about a straight white cisgendered dude (I have.) It means I *Thought through the implications of choosing a straight white cisgendered dude as the protagonist* instead of making that what the story was about because that’s how stories are written. Kind of like how our host just wrote a book whose protagonist was a straight white guy – but he had a reason to choose a straight white guy to head the story, and it wasn’t “That’s who stories are about”. (I’d have said “books”, but in the second book the protagging is a bit more of an even split with another character even though the majority of point of view remains Isaac’s. And I can’t read the third yet. POUT.)
And sometimes I thought through the implications and a character’s gender/race/ age/etc.) changed. Sometimes it even affirms the majority; at least once, I thought through the implications and possibilities and made a firm choice that character X, if she lived in 21st century North America, would be considered 100% cisgender. Making her that culture’s equivalent of trans* would have made her story *less* interesting.
Also, read this, though it’s about race, not gender: http://mediadiversified.org/2013/12/07/you-cant-do-that-stories-have-to-be-about-white-people/
That’s what we mean by the default. We mean it’s ingrained in the mind so much that children of another race and culture can’t imagine writing about *Their own people* until explicitly told they can.
Tom Kratman
January 29, 2014 @ 6:58 pm
By the way, I tend to agree with Alex, now that she’s clarified that, no, straight men and women need not cease to literarily exist. Indeed, as mentioned, I’ve done my little bit, with two de facto married gay couples, in two different series, serving openly in their military, plius heroic lesbians, elite female footsoldiers that aren’t just the product of feminist handwavium, etc.
Demetrias
January 29, 2014 @ 7:00 pm
Your expected to empathize with the good guys(generic group pronoun you want to use). Girl’s are expected to want to be Conan. They are expected to want Conan. Guy’s are expected to want to be Buffy. They are expected to want Buffy. Empathy just means you can identify with the struggle of others and both sexes should be able to do this for the other sex no matter what. If little girls can’t empathize with little boys or little boys can’t empathize with little girls, then our society needs to figure out how come we are raising all these sociopaths.
Jim C. Hines
January 29, 2014 @ 7:03 pm
Which series?
Pam Adams
January 29, 2014 @ 7:09 pm
It’s The Number of the Beast.
Pam Adams
January 29, 2014 @ 7:11 pm
Hey- the loveseat will get to keep all the change in the cushions! Maybe Jim will be owed alimony?
Tom Kratman
January 29, 2014 @ 7:12 pm
Ever read any of Thucydides, Jim: Here’s a quote for you:
“Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.”
He’s describing there the process of the effective destruction of civilization, over wide swaths. I am very skeptical of any attempt at artificially manipulating society through either assaulting the language – and that’s what PC is about; changing what we CAN think by changing the lamguage in which we do think – or by trying to manipulate more subtle concepts. The end result is almost always bad. Example: in the Army and Marines there is a piece of equipment, a canvas bag, for all intents and purposes a pocketbook, for carrying maps and papers. They’ve been around forever. They’re called “Fag bags,” or, rather, they were. About 25-30 years ago the troops spontaneously began calling them “alternate lifestyle bags.” Did that mean they’d had a sudden rush of sensitivity to the heart and head? No; it was just a cutesy way of emphacizing the insult. See, d’accord, the spontaneous changes that were made to the phrase, “Worthy Oriental Gentleman,” a very early attempt at PC.
Demetrias
January 29, 2014 @ 7:15 pm
No girls are not expected to enjoy reading endless boy orientated stories. That’s why there is a Romance, Paranormal Romance, Girl’s coming of age fiction, and Girl’s saving the universe fiction. If every one read the same thing there wouldn’t be genre fiction. We all have different taste and girl’s taste has been addressed since at least the Bronte Sisters.
I read Honor Harrington for the space battles. I really don’t care what color she is or anyone else. She is the only one I have any clue what she looks like, and that’s from the covers. If race was a big issue David Weber should have changed the covers. The other two are stressed in the books. Her chinese heritage is probably mentioned more often but is stressed less. No one goes hey your half chinese wow.
Tom Kratman
January 29, 2014 @ 7:16 pm
Several. There’s a small regiment of married gays raised in The Amazon Legion, plus an interracial South African gay couple, one Zulu, one Boer, in the Countdown series. There’s a lesbian centurion platoon leader in TAL, plus the survivor (she’s bisexual, though) of a lesbian couple, the other party of which was killed in action, at sea, in Carnifex. Then there’s the fortified position manned by one quadriplegic and four kids with Down’s Sydrome in The Rods and the Axe (TBP).
By the way, in every one of those cases, the gender / orientation / disability was key to some aspect of the theme.
Tom Kratman
January 29, 2014 @ 7:22 pm
For literary purposes, that doesn’t work, Lenora. Reader A likes version Trans-X; reader Y likes version, Trans-B. You probably cannot make them both happy.
No, that doesn’t work either. For my first published book, which Jim Baen recruited me to write (Yeah, people ask me how to get published. “Haven’t a clue; I was asked to write a book.”), the villain had no real redeeming virtues. Except she was a lesbian. _I_ thought that was her one redeeming grace. “But nooooo!” not once the thought police got wind of it.
Jim C. Hines
January 29, 2014 @ 7:24 pm
Tom – why do you think some readers objected to your villain being an unredeemable, virtueless character who was also lesbian?
Demetrias
January 29, 2014 @ 7:25 pm
Why shouldn’t it be the default? Why does any given work need to explore gender issues? Why can’t I explore ecological impact issues and just use the default binary characters? Or colonialism? Or Capitalism? Or Communism? Or Space Vampire Hunters? The default is there for ease of use and understanding. There is no reason I should take out binary gender if I don’t want to address it. Default means the base unless you want to change it. She and her commentors already showed you there are lots of books that explore the issue without removing the default and I would hazard a guess that they are growing.
Demetrias
January 29, 2014 @ 7:29 pm
It’s free market if she mean’s she is never going to buy one. It’s not free market if she is advocating Tor and other Publisher’s never print one.
Though I think it is pretty hard to find any books these days where every character is white. Anthologies is probably easier since short stories generally have very few characters. But not by much.
Tom Kratman
January 29, 2014 @ 7:35 pm
Why don’t you tell me? The character was clearly based on a true to life, evil and soulless bitch, who should hang only because crucifixion’s fallen out of favor…but her one redeeming quality is her taste in women.
Tom Kratman
January 29, 2014 @ 7:36 pm
By the way, Lenora, lest you get the wrong impression, I don’t give a flying Phladelphia F&^$ who I offend. But there are those who do.
Jim C. Hines
January 29, 2014 @ 7:40 pm
I was mostly just curious if you had thought about it beyond just dismissing the complaints as “thought police.”
Demetrias
January 29, 2014 @ 7:40 pm
Ya, Jim actually is letting lots of us comment. So props for that man.
JJ Litke
January 29, 2014 @ 7:43 pm
I’m calling bullshit on claims that any of this has anything to do with helping new writers. If you seriously need to be told that story comes first ahead of message, then there’s a much larger problem in your writing. If Correia were genuinely concerned with helping anyone who’s trying to do that, he wouldn’t be so merciless about it. Ridicule in the guise of help is not helpful.
Tom Kratman
January 29, 2014 @ 7:45 pm
Once. Nuremburg, Germany, 1976. Spoke rather good and effectively accentless German. Looked close enough to German. Was dressed more or less as a German might be dressed. But Americans have a different posture about them, it seems. Was asked at a club if I were American. Was asked to leave.
And in that moment, I wished the war had lasted long enough for us to have nuked the place.
Liz Bourke
January 29, 2014 @ 7:48 pm
No girls are not expected to enjoy reading endless boy orientated stories. That’s why there is a Romance, Paranormal Romance, Girl’s coming of age fiction
I think you are making a fundamental error in what is “girl” or “boy” orientated, related to the idea that certain things are intrinsically gendered. “Romance” stories are no more exclusively enjoyed by people who identify as female as “Blowing shit up” stories are exclusively enjoyed by people who identify as male.
The proportion of works, moreover, which feature male main characters are historically in genres outside category romance, disproportionate to the proportion of male people as a percentage of the total population.
But we see the idea that female people are expected to enjoy reading about male people more than male people are expected to be able to read about female people every time someone starts wringing their hands over the lack of “boy books” in YA.
But if you’re wedded to the idea that certain things are intrinsically gendered, – by nature, rather than by socialisation – you’re going to have a hard time even seeing the problem.
Antiqueight
January 29, 2014 @ 7:49 pm
I think I will comment here and just agree with geekgirlsrule on all fronts.
Demetrias
January 29, 2014 @ 7:52 pm
Because no one would complain if it was a straight white male with no redeeming qualities except good taste in women.
Tom Kratman
January 29, 2014 @ 7:54 pm
It’s a very illiberal book, anyway, Jim. But I confess it surprised me how much some gays _really_ took offense that the chief villainess was lesbian…who has good taste in women.
Chrysoula
January 29, 2014 @ 7:54 pm
…huh. Interesting. You see something new everyday, I guess. I know in my experience writing non-default characters (my focus tends to be neurodiversity and mental illness), readers who noticed the diversity were nothing but pleased by it. I don’t want to say, “But it’s so easy to write diverse characters without making it a Message Book,” because I don’t want to make this about ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ but I will say that while readers react well to a good story, they also react to well to genuine characters.
I can’t bring myself to read all 300 comments. But… yeah. This was educational. An insight into how some people think that can only improve my own writing. >.>
ULTRAGOTHA
January 29, 2014 @ 7:56 pm
Me, too. I picked up your books because I read the blog.
Demetrias
January 29, 2014 @ 8:04 pm
Could be nature or it could be socialization. Doesn’t matter. Romance writers write with women in mind as who am I going to sell this too. It exists to cater to the taste of a certain type of person. It doesn’t have to be natural. It just has to be true. If 80% of bodice ripper readers are women and 80% of space opera readers are guys, then it doesn’t matter if culture or nature made it so. It’s just obvious that the genre’s are meeting different people’s needs.
I don’t like ya fiction because I can never figure out why it’s ya fiction. I read Tolkien, Herbert and Heinlein in 5th grade. They should just get rid of it and let kids read what ever they want and find their own stories.
Demetrias
January 29, 2014 @ 8:06 pm
Default doesn’t mean you can’t change. It means unless you need to change it use this. Like the factory defaults on your car, stereo, or computer.
Sally
January 29, 2014 @ 8:16 pm
Shorter Correia: Since this does not conform to my prejudices and I am too unimaginative to imagine things otherwise, it is horrible.
Jim, can you also use your adamantium beard for good blogging causes? Now that Rothfuss has spilled the beans.
Pam Adams
January 29, 2014 @ 8:18 pm
Uh Jim,
I believe that you got FAME AND FORTUNE. I ordered it for you personally, along with half-a-dozen other Horatio Alger titles. Did you mean some other kind?
Muccamukk
January 29, 2014 @ 8:30 pm
No she’s not.
AMM
January 29, 2014 @ 8:39 pm
I think there’s also a certain laziness in using “default” characters. If you’re content with the default, you just draw your character with a few cartoon-stroke comments, and you’re off to slay your dragon. Throw in a conventionally beautiful/sexy “girl” as the prize for the default male hero, and you satisfy the dude-bros and dude-bro wannabes, which if you’re this kind of writer is probably your target demographic, anyway. Just string the tropes together, throw in one or two violations of the tropes, and you’ve got your book.
If you use non-default characters, you have to actually think about who they are and what their motivations are and how they’re likely to react to various situations. That’s work, especially if they’re not like you. You might have to do some research, maybe get to know some people who are very different from you. And then figure out how to get your readers to understand the character without lecturing or preaching. That’s work (and might alienate the usual target demographic.)
robin reid
January 29, 2014 @ 8:57 pm
Answering up here because apparently after a number of threads, the reply button disappears.
I’m in rural NE Texas where in the last week temps have been carooming between 17 F and 70 F, a wonderful roller coaster of a winter (and after the icestorm in November for which we lost power for four days, I’m really getting tired of the cold).
Jim C. Hines
January 29, 2014 @ 9:01 pm
Did you send it to my P.O. box? I’ve been fighting with a post office gremlin infestation.
An A to Z of Non-Binary Genders | shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows
January 29, 2014 @ 9:15 pm
[…] […]
joecrouse
January 29, 2014 @ 9:24 pm
Then you obviously do not work in an office full of women, Have never dealt an HR department run almost exclusively by women. At my office building there are LITERALLY I have counted this 7 woman for ever GUY across ALL departments and that has stayed pretty steady in any company which has an HR department that is more than 60 percent female. I work in IT I see EVERYTHING that you do including your emails and your archive emails. You have not noticed that every father figure on TV in the last 30 years is an unmitigated DOOFUS INCLUDING Bill Cosby. Have you noticed even MALE comics who rely on relationship humor bash men like some kind of whack a mole game? Yes Guys like Sam Kinnison and Andrew Dice Clay Bash women. Who else can you name? (incidentally they all had SHREWS for ex wives that made thier lives hell sharing that is therapeutic).
Hell the whole CULTURE anymore bashes men like pinata. A guy cant walk his kid (male and especially Not female) into the can to do what kids need to do without most thinking PERVERT or without store security giving you dirty looks and hassles. I cant Pick my Niece up in stores because she thinks its funny to scream bloody murder when I do. then laughs at me when I blanch thinking my ass is going to jail. The only person who is allowed to be abused MORE in the culture than a white male is an Overweight white male. Every problem in the world gets laid at the feet of the American White male.
Simon Dewar
January 29, 2014 @ 9:25 pm
People should write what they want to write and read what they want to read. A book that has transgender or gay or lesbian characters (or a transgender/gay/les/etc author!) need not be “message book” and can be a perfectly good story. Alternatively, it actually could be a “message book” and, even then could still be a fantastic read. If a story is good, people will most likely enjoy it. As others have mentioned, most stories – if not all – give some kind of message. Even if it is only an implied message, rather than a direct one.
Likewise, a perfectly good story can be told that does not include any trans/gay/les characters and that should be fine too. If it is a good tale, people should be able to enjoy it.
I don’t think there should be any compulsion or implication that gay/trans or heterosexual/cisgender writers should have to write characters of any kind. People should write what they want to write and what they want to read, or in the case of many of us, write the story that they are capable of writing.
If you’re a straight white male (or female) and you only want write about trans/gay/les characters; or you only wish to write about cisgender/hetero characters.. that should be fine. If you’re gay/les/trans and you only want to write about hetero characters or you only want to write about gay/les/trans characters that should be fine. No matter who you are — if you want to mix it up and write a story with a wide range of characters of different natures and orientations, that should also be fine.
If people dont like your book, they can not read it or leave you a poor review. If they like your book, they can read it and, if so inclined, leave a good review.
I’m not of the opinion that there is any arbitrary necessity or moral obligation for art to mimic life or, even if it does to a degree, mimic closely. Nor am I of the opinion that there is any arbitrary necessity or moral obligation for life to mimic art.
joecrouse
January 29, 2014 @ 9:28 pm
Well sir.. perhaps expanding your audience beyond message fiction or not being so blatant with your message fiction… you could expand your audience.
joecrouse
January 29, 2014 @ 9:30 pm
Show me a sustained liberal politics success in a population, please.
Jim C. Hines
January 29, 2014 @ 9:33 pm
Out of curiosity, have you actually read any of my fiction that you’re so swift to label “message fiction”?
Just when you thought it was safe… | madgeniusclub
January 30, 2014 @ 6:01 am
[…] the fun started. The Most PC Author In The Universe (otherwise known as Jim C. Hines) attempted to fisk Correia. As one might expect the fisk was more of a fizzle, since Hines as a writer has the hitting power […]
Rico
January 30, 2014 @ 9:33 am
Brian, did you notice that I asked several questions? Did you also notice that you failed to answer any of them and completely changed the topic? While I may disagree wholeheartedly with many of Mr. Hines beliefs, the fact that he tends to respond to direct questions is rather admirable, a virtue I find many left of center individuals to be lacking in.
Or should I just assume you agree with me and concede the point?
Grit
January 30, 2014 @ 10:08 am
@Joe: I work in IT as well, have been for the past 14 years. A woman knowing ANYTHING about computers, let alone know more about it than the people calling here for tech support is still something some men have issues with, and I am still subject to sexism, misogyny and harrassment simply because I am female. Now, I think it could be worse, and that maybe I shouldn’t complain about those few incidents in the past but let’s summarize real quick: a) I am not satisfied with your answer, please let me speak to your boss. b) I am not satisfied with your answer, please let me speak to your male colleague. c) Pictures with pornographic content as desktop wallpapers when I’m doing a remote support session. d) Skype conversations between the caller and some other male employee (while I was doing a remote support session) wondering who would win in a naked wrestling match? me, or one of their also female secretaries. e) Clients asking me if I’ll be attending some trade fair so they can finally meet me – not because I’m smart, not because I am very competent when it comes to my job – no, because my voice sounds so sexy and they think I must be one very attractive looking woman. This list can go on and on. And that is just in my work situation. Being a video gamer, active on internet forums, newsgroups, etc. since 1996, I can tell you that discrimination and harrassment simply due to my being female has happened quite a lot.
So, society making fun of white guys? I am shocked. Of course, the past I don’t know how many centuries where women had no rights whatsoever and were completely at the mercy of men, still are in some countries is not as bad as the fact that people make fun of white guys nowadays.
And I’m not sure that father figures on TV were doofusses (doofi?) I can at least think of one who wasn’t. More If I a actually make an effort.
Jon
January 30, 2014 @ 10:17 am
The legs thing makes me burn, and I think it’s partly because Correia seems to be arguing that the majority is the default, i.e., you need a reason to make a character who isn’t white, cisgender, straight, male, two arms, two legs, etc. Why can’t you have someone who just happens to have a different limb count? Andre Kajlich is a freakin’ awesome athlete and the division he competes in is far from what makes him interesting.
Since we’re pulling out Heinlein: Rod just happens to be black. Rico just happens to be Filipino. It’s a fairly minor point in both books. They “could have been” white. But the only reason to make them such would be “default”. In those worlds, or at least in those stories, race was a minor issue but people weren’t all the same. Contrast Farnham’s Freehold, where he wrote a story where race was a big deal.
I read MacFarlane’s point as “Can we ditch the defaults?” Sounds good to me.
Grit
January 30, 2014 @ 10:21 am
well, for one a fire spider is a clear message to arachnophobes like me. I get it, I get it…spiders can be cute…..I just don’t see it….
Jim C. Hines
January 30, 2014 @ 10:35 am
I’m none too fond of spiders myself, actually. One of the challenges I set for myself when I was writing was to try to create a spider I’d actually *like*. But I definitely get that Smudge doesn’t work for everyone 🙂
Grit
January 30, 2014 @ 10:41 am
there’s a huge spider every year outside of my kitchen window. keeps my kitchen clear of flys and all that stuff. I force myself to look at it so I am less scared. I also named him Alfred so I think we kind of bonded but one year he sent his girlfriend Wilburga into my living room and after a major freakout that lasted 3 days, I actually managed to remove her safely to outside. She was not harmed in the process. I was rather proud.
Some Guy
January 30, 2014 @ 10:43 am
Except Vox Day
Some Guy
January 30, 2014 @ 10:46 am
and then corrected himself when it was pointed out to him…
Some Guy
January 30, 2014 @ 10:49 am
I started to think you were lying about not reading it, but yeah, you didn’t because he said nothing about losing book sales to non-binary gender SF…
Some Guy
January 30, 2014 @ 10:57 am
How do you know you are an intellectual?
David Breslin
January 30, 2014 @ 10:59 am
Oddly enough, the bit that leapt out at me wasn’t so much the actual points you addressed but Correia’s little “mobility scooter” wisecrack. Tells you everything you need to know about where he’s coming from, and it’s really not good.
Tor.com column duly bookmarked- thanks. Following the backlash to the backlash is a great way to find the good stuff!
Jim C. Hines
January 30, 2014 @ 11:03 am
Fair point. I’d argue that SFWA was open to him, but he chose to violate the rules of the organization. But that would be a whole other blog post, and really isn’t one I want to get into.
Jim C. Hines
January 30, 2014 @ 11:05 am
Anonymous comments that read (to me) as sniping at other commenters without actually contributing to the conversation? That goes into the trolling category. Knock it off.
superbwg
January 30, 2014 @ 11:05 am
If you want what I consider (in my most humble of opinions) to be one of the best examples of gender fluidity in a story check out “Champion of the Rose” by Andrea K Host. Not only is the writing FANTASTIC, but her use of gender is as I mentioned before completely fluid. Even better she does not make a big deal about it, this is not a book to promote a lifestyle, or to check a box, she just writes a world where who you love is who you love, male, female, multiple partners, single partners, short term relationships, long term relationships, you name it. In the world she writes in it is accepted so it is just part of life (sorry not being very articulate, but I don’t know how to describe the normalcy of it). She also does not deny biology, fully acknowledging that to create a human baby takes an egg and sperm…but so what that should not dictate a how a family is formed or who you should love, in fact it is quit common for people to live in threesomes and foursomes, sometimes for the purpose of creating children, sometimes because they love more then one person regardless of gender. All this rambling to say this is one of the first books I have read (I am sure there are more…I hope there are more) where gender as it relates to love and family is so open and accepted and not turned into a very special message. Anyways there is my two cents 🙂
David Breslin
January 30, 2014 @ 11:26 am
It is actually very, very clear that “MacFarlane is wrong because I’m older than her!” is a satirical paraphrase: it is written in non-indented brown italics like all the rest of the commentary.
David Breslin
January 30, 2014 @ 11:31 am
…that is a GREAT line.
SuperPink
January 30, 2014 @ 11:36 am
Why are you mansplaining for Alex? Typical white cismale who thinks the poor female can’t defend herself. Shameful!
Grit
January 30, 2014 @ 11:50 am
Because intelligent words from a woman need to be translated into cismale so people like Correia understand it. On a side note, his name keeps throwing me off. I want to write Corellia all the time. I’ve played too many Star Wars games.
Alex Dally MacFarlane
January 30, 2014 @ 12:39 pm
I’m 100% fine with Jim making this post.
Tom Kratman
January 30, 2014 @ 1:05 pm
Note the fate of the MSF Doctor in H Hour, Sean, especially with regard to tail rotors. Though, admittedly, I used something newer than a Hind to provide the rotor.
Tom Kratman
January 30, 2014 @ 1:27 pm
Hell, there’s more than that, now that I think about it. There’s the chipped (as in, a chip for mind and body control and communication is implanted) bisexual, genengineered Chinese hooker in Caliphate: Heroic. Then there are the pederastic, cowardly Sumeri field grade in ADCP along with the similarly pederastic Brit Marine field grade: both villainous, in ADCP and Carnifex, respectively. Then there are the woman and the presumed gay but, as it turned out, bi male, shot for mutiny (two people, in the armed forces, acting together, to suborn good order and discipline) in Amazon Legion, and his spouse who hangs himself out of grief…bunch of married gays and lesbians in Amazon Legion, actually. Then there’s the gloriously brave but utterly suicidal replay by Tercio Gorgidas (the aforementioned gay regiment) and the Tercio Amazona of 54th Massachusetts’ charge at Battery Wagner, at Cerro Mina, on Terra Nova,in Come and Take Them.
Hmmm…you know, I’m having a hard time thinking of a book or series where I didn’t have someone who was other than straight male or female. Sometimes they were villains, of course, but not usually. And fairly often they were central. I know I’ve lost fans over it, too, but, meh, joke ’em if they can’t take a fuck. Still, one can’t afford to lose too many so, comfortable and confident in my serene and proactive acquiescence to the demand for more non-straight males and females in sci fi, I think I’ll rest on my laurels for a while…
Tom Kratman
January 30, 2014 @ 1:54 pm
Dunno, but there are differences between rednecks and trailer trash, even so.
Tom Kratman
January 30, 2014 @ 1:59 pm
“But if you’re wedded to the idea that certain things are intrinsically gendered, – by nature, rather than by socialisation – you’re going to have a hard time even seeing the problem.”
Unless, of course, there are certain things that are intrinsically gendered – by nature, rather than by socialization – in which case the problem would be people who assume the opposite.
I invite your attention to Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, for a serious look at what a preposterous pile of intellectual and moral dung is the entire notion of highly malleable Man, and the power of socialization.
Ken Marable
January 30, 2014 @ 2:20 pm
“I invite your attention to Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, for a serious look at what a preposterous pile of intellectual and moral dung is the entire notion of highly malleable Man, and the power of socialization.”
There’s a huge logical leap from denying the Blank Slate (aka nothing is intrinsic/innate) to nothing is socialized. Pinker is careful enough not to make that mistake. He only argues that the Blank Slate isn’t real, and we needn’t worry about that.
He absolutely does NOT argue that everything is intrinsic and socialization has no power, which you seem to be hinting towards. The guy is too smart to fall for that false dilemma.
“It doesn’t have to be natural. It just has to be true. If 80% of bodice ripper readers are women and 80% of space opera readers are guys…”
Not even getting into how that thinking is blatant self-fulfilling prophecy, but telling 20% of your readers that they don’t matter isn’t the wisest move for a writer either. Those who don’t match the norm do exist (whether it is men who like romance novels, or non-white scifi fans, or people who don’t identify with binary gender). Pretending that they don’t exist, that they don’t matter, is limiting your audience unnecessarily.
Tom Kratman
January 30, 2014 @ 2:42 pm
Didn’t say nothing was socialized, Ken. And a close reading will show that I didn’t make the claim for Pinker, either. But Liz seems to be arguing that everything is…which is nonsense. Liz is, to use her word, “wedded” to the notion that there is nothing about gender that is intrinsic. It’s a silly position, wishful thinking at its worst.
Indeed, one of my problems with Pinker is that he seems not quite to grasp that the human race exists at two levels, the individual and the collective, and that much of what we try to do in socializing the individual is for a collective purpose. The building of a sense of altruism, for example, doesn’t necessarily do the individual any good, beyond securing his personal gene pool, but is highly useful for society.
Telling 20% of my potential readers to kiss off would make perfect sense if it were necessary to retain the other 80%. In fact, though, that’s not the issue for me. I am already widely and thoroughly hated – and I like it that way – by about half the people who know about me as a writer. And the correlation between them and those who might want more, or even greater than proportional, portrayal of non-straight males and females approaches unity. I would lose nothing by ignoring gays, etc. If I don’t, and I don’t, you might consider it a form of special grace. That, or integrity.
By the way, calling something a “self fulfilling prophecy” in no way means that it is not a prophecy destined to be fulfilled. It doesn’t even reduce the odds that it is a prophecy destined to be fulfilled.
Kado
January 30, 2014 @ 2:43 pm
You win the internet.
Ken Marable
January 30, 2014 @ 2:55 pm
But the “power of socialization” is “a preposterous pile of intellectual and moral dung”, isn’t it?
Or is the Blank Slate a serious look at 1) “what a preposterous pile of intellectual and moral dung is the entire notion of highly malleable Man” and separately 2) “the power of socialization”?
Sorry, your wording was unclear and wading through that much hyperbole being thrown around, it sure seems to imply that it refers to both phrases.
Muccamukk
January 30, 2014 @ 3:07 pm
Alex, I really liked both your original post on Tor.com and your response post on your own blog. You’ve been very classy through all of this.
Tom Kratman
January 30, 2014 @ 3:17 pm
See of this phraseology works better, Ken:
“a preposterous pile of intellectual and moral dung is the entire notion of highly malleable Man, and the unlimited power of socialization.”
Mind you, I think it worked before, but that does seem clearer, no?
Kado
January 30, 2014 @ 3:26 pm
On the page where she dies! Real Men (TM) do not die.
King's Rook
January 30, 2014 @ 4:28 pm
I have no idea where you get the “extremely atypical” idea. Intersex conditions account for somewhere between 0.01% and 1% of all live births, which is to say that somewhere between one-in-100 and one-in-10,000 people — all people, everywhere — has an intersex condition. Which certainly makes it “atypical”, but not “extremely atypical”. You’ve met people with intersex conditions and probably never knew. Hell, it’s possible that THEY don’t know (which is extremely common in the case of XY karyotypes with androgen insensitivity; they often go through their entire lives with no clue. It’s not like most people get karyotyped.)
Simple Desultory Philip
January 30, 2014 @ 5:05 pm
So for now I’ll leave aside your willfully erroneous conflation of gender and sex, which are Very Definitively Not the same thing, as you could find out if you did a little basic reading on the topic. But let’s leave it for now, and STILL be confronted with, even in your Let’s Pretend Land where sex=gender and nobody can possibly have a gender identity that doesn’t correspond with their sex, this troubling little collection of facts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex.
Some guy named Jeffrey Eugenides wrote a book recently, called Middlesex, sold three million copies, won a Pulitzer. You’re an SF reader so you must have heard of it, since it’s obviously speculative fiction since there’s only Male and Female and Intersex people don’t actually exist, right? But probably you’ve never heard of it because I’m actually making up those numbers because any book about an Intersex person must be “message prose”, and there couldn’t possibly be an audience of three million people who would want to read a book like that, since it wouldn’t be “relatable” and would “inevitably… lose a large segment of readership that might have been gained otherwise”. Right? Right?
I know it’s hard to understand, but acknowledging that some people aren’t Male or Female isn’t “having labels shoved down [your] throat”. It’s allowing people to define themselves outside of YOUR Rigid Male/Female BINARY LABELING SYSTEM, ferchrissake. The condition of being biologically Intersex is perfectly normal. It affects one in a few hundred “People” to one degree or another. That’s about as many people as have Aspergers’ syndrome (and since we’re talking about it, nobody bought The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, either, since its non-neurotypical narrator is an obvious attempt to appeal to a “more diverse” segment of the population that’s “not large enough to support” mystery novels as a whole, and so it didn’t get adapted into a popular play and Brad Pitt totally didn’t option the film rights for Warner Brothers).
Look, nobody’s arguing – especially not Alex in her original post – that we put a bunch of minority-gendered characters in stories for no good reason (“I went to Subway and ordered a sandwich and the lesbian transwoman behind the counter rang me up and told me to have a nice day!”). All characters should be in service of the story. What you seem to be implying is that somebody’s gender identity can’t really ever be in service of the story unless the story is “All About Mary/Matt’s Genitals!” That’s simply not true. There’s a perfectly good reason to include characters that are genderqueer – they exist in reality, just like minority-race and minority-abled people do. And so, honestly, why the hell not? Maybe and author deciding to make the cop that responds to the intergalactic 911 call a transperson/alien instead of a ciswhatever, it’ll lead to some dialogue or development that makes the story as a whole richer and more surprising and interesting. And maybe instead of responding to your weird Ideas About What Fiction Including Intersex People Must Inevitably Be, you could, you know, read some books including those kinds of characters, and see how you feel about it. Some of it will be bad, sure. But so will dumptrucks-full of fiction you’ll encounter that hasn’t a single character that isn’t hetero/cisnormative. Of course you should evaluate the story. What you shouldn’t do is automatically assume that authors making a conscious effort to include queer or other minority characters in their stories is a Bad Thing because it Will Be “Preachy”, and set out to make this argument by repeating a complete and utter falsehood.
This thing with There Is Only Male And Female “for evolved lifeforms on planet Earth” is the first serious, profound mistake in your statement. (I mean, geez, let’s not even get into binary fission, vegetative reproduction, parthenogenesis – this is SF we’re into here, right?) And if you’re starting out with such blatantly false axioms, whatever it is you build on top of them is gonna fall right down. Happy wiki-ing.
HelenS
January 30, 2014 @ 5:06 pm
Her Hines? Please. It’s HIS Hines.
A Call to Stop Politicizing People’s Existence | SL Huang
January 30, 2014 @ 5:33 pm
[…] Then this happened. […]
King's Rook
January 30, 2014 @ 5:33 pm
Huh. Your one moment of experiencing what women and people of color spend their WHOLE LIVES facing, and you got so angry you wanted to nuke them. Do you think that’s given you any empathy for those of us who get that sort of shit every day?
Simple Desultory Philip
January 30, 2014 @ 5:42 pm
Why assume that adding a genderqueer character is automatically an author grinding an axe? I’m not saying it never is. But I don’t personally from my own extensive reading get the impression that all (or even the majority of) such characters are written in because authors are trying to Advance the All-Important Queer Agenda. Alex’s blog will be reviewing existing fiction, yes, and some of it may be overtly thematic in that regard (we haven’t actually seen any of it yet), but she states as her dream that she’d like more people in general to write intersex or trans characters going forward – which basically means SPECIFICALLY people who DON’T have an axe to grind, because if that was their “personal message” or they wanted to preach about it, they’d already be writing that way! The irony of you saying authors should “speak in many voices, not just the one that appeals to them”, in the context of arguing AGAINST authors who maybe hadn’t thought about it before trying out genderqueer voices for some of their characters, it hurts my head.
Tom Kratman
January 30, 2014 @ 5:50 pm
Yes, some. And another small increment from walking through the tent full of Egyptian Army officers, looking for my brigade XO. I was pretty cute, back in the day, and it isn’t just the Greeks at that end of the Med who are historically notable switch hitters. I found getting hit on by men creepy beyond words. Possibly, too, some from feeling a certain prejudice against my (really, you wouldn’t believe just how) beautiful Panamanian wife in a place, the old Canal Zone, that detested Panamanians almost en masse.
But, despite those things, I have found that the solutions generally preferred and, where they’ve had the political horsepower for it, tried by liberals and the left simply make it all worse.
XtinaS
January 30, 2014 @ 6:00 pm
“By the way, I tend to agree with Alex, now that she’s clarified that, no, straight men and women need not cease to literarily exist.”
That was made clear at the very beginning of her essay.
XtinaS
January 30, 2014 @ 6:03 pm
Starship Troopers: just a science fictional story, no message there at all, no sir!
XtinaS
January 30, 2014 @ 6:07 pm
“I read good writers because they write good stories, starting with Heinlein and Asimov. […] Agenda-driven politically based message “fiction” designed to promote conformity with whatever groupthink in in vogue is another. It falls into a genre I call “crap”.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v133/Drewski217/LOL/gifs/dcgd4j.gif
MadLogician
January 30, 2014 @ 6:15 pm
I arrived here via the reference on the Skepchick blog.
One thought (from a 60-year-old, if it matters): the proportion of transgender and other non-default persons among convention-goers and Hugo voters is -way- higher than it is in the general population. I’ll be at a convention next week with about 100 members, and they’ll include at least half a dozen transgender people of various flavours and two or more who’ve had full surgery.
The proportion of such people among SF readers in general will be somewhere between the two.
I’ve enjoyed some of Correia’s books. An early commenter had bounced off what sounds like one of his Monster Hunter International series. If anyone wants to try his work I recommend instead his other main series, the Grimnoir Chronicles.
Jim C. Hines
January 30, 2014 @ 6:40 pm
The “creepy” reaction you describe isn’t uncommon. Men often tend to react badly when they find themselves treated the way we’ve treated women.
Simple Desultory Philip
January 30, 2014 @ 6:43 pm
This is a very good reference for writers and allies who would like to refer to genderqueer people respectfully. http://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender
Of course some people will always be offended. But it’s not all a complete mystery. Really.
dave
January 30, 2014 @ 6:57 pm
[Let’s see … empty insults, no contribution whatsoever to the conversation … we have a winner for First Comment Fed to the Goblins! Thank you, Dave. The goblins appreciate your contribution. They have a fondness for empty calories. -Jim]
Tom Kratman
January 30, 2014 @ 7:11 pm
Oh, I can’t say I’ve ever been treated badly, Jim. It’s the idea itself that I find – okay, pun slightly intended – distasteful. If it had been a woman, especially an attractive one, and, yes, that’s happened, too, I’d have been, and was, fine with it.
I had to explain once to a fan on Baen’s Bar that it’s not the fact of homosexuality, per se, that creeps us straights out. Pretty much as we never let ourselves think of mom blowing dad – though the odds are really rather good that it’s happened – we don’t, most of us, anyway, let ourselves think about two guys in bed together. Instead, what creeps us out, usually, is when the signals are wrong. I’m talking the exaggeratedly masculine, maybe leather-clad (maybe leather _freak_) guy, the masculine acting and sounding woman, the very feminine guy. It seems to trip something that we’re either hard wired not to be able to deal with, or culturally conditioned not to be able to deal with, or both. Extremely feminine women bother us not at all.
That actually touches on one of my concerns with the idea of more repesentation in sci fi for non-straights. Most of us, to include me, are probably not going to be very good at it, unless it is in very particular circumstances that tend to make gender irrelevant…in which case, we perhaps shouldn’t usually bother anyway.
Simple Desultory Philip
January 30, 2014 @ 7:55 pm
Last time I checked, Alex wasn’t the Queen of All SF Writers Ever In The ‘Verse, with magical Genderqueer Rule Enforcing Powers, such that when she states clearly, as a consumer and writer of the literature, what changes she would like to see happen in the future in the genre, it will suddenly make all the computers of all the writers around the world lock up and disallow them from typing things about big strong manly white hetero men, and replace all such extant text with kissing scenes between transaliens and hermaphroditic robots. “Mandate”, my behind. Snrk.
Jill
January 30, 2014 @ 8:03 pm
I hope I can say this the right way.
You know, the first time I encountered the concept of non-binary gender, I was confused. And I was uncomfortable with it. What did the writer mean, gender wasn’t binary? Of course it was! There were boys and there were girls. They might be gay, they might want to be the other gender … but ultimately, there were two, except in rare cases. That’s just how it *is!* High-school biology taught me that! It was science! In other words, I reacted much the same as many of the detractors here.
But. I kept reading, because I wanted to understand. And I came to realize that even through cisgender (so I came to realize) me was uncomfortable with the idea, that didn’t mean this wasn’t a very real issue to very real people out there. And so, just maybe, I needed to challenge myself a little more. Maybe I had to wrap my brain around the idea that I was unintentionally more narrow-minded than I thought. That there was more out there. Just because I didn’t understand didn’t make it less true.
It wasn’t about “message fic.” Heck, the first time I read about a sympathetic GAY character, I was uncomfortable! (I was in a rural high school in a small town in the late ’80s, what can I say.) But it was a good story and I kept on reading. And today I go back and I read that book and that’s just one more part of who that character is. The message wasn’t the point. But it became one anyway … because it made me question things I thought I knew. And that was a *good* thing!
What I’m trying to say is that something sure as heck doesn’t have to be so-called “message fic” to contain characters that challenge us just by being themselves. And some of us like to be challenged. We might still be uncomfortable. We might not entirely understand. But we WANT to.
Sorry for the long post. But thanks for this, Jim, and Alex for the original column.
M is for Message Fiction: The Post-Binary Gender Fray | The Other Side of the Rain
January 30, 2014 @ 9:27 pm
[…] already been a ton of debate about it all (some of it’s been honestly heartwarming and great). I’m late. So, I will not be directly responding to Larry Correia or the legion of dickish […]
Simple Desultory Philip
January 30, 2014 @ 10:11 pm
WHY do we need a default again? SF isn’t a freaking computer. It’s not an automated system where you then have to press 2 for Spanish. It’s not a piece of consumer electronics. It’s art. ART. Think of analogies to “characters” in other art forms. What’s the default “theme” in a symphony or “hook” in a pop song? The default “subject” in a sculpture or still life, or “shape” or “color” in an abstract painting? The default “article of clothing” in fashion design? The default “sample” in EDM or hip-hop? Seriously, what the hell.
When authors sit down to write some SF, why on Earth or Gallifrey should we expect them to – or BE OKAY WITH – them starting out automatically with some default hetero-cis-white people in their heads? Where’s the creativity? How about just not having a preconceived notion about who your characters ought to be to begin with – regardless of what the plot of the story is about?
Because you know what? PLENTY of people will still write SF about hetero cis white men and women doing hetero cis white things, EVEN IF WE END THE DEFAULT. Ending the default doesn’t mean the Genderqueer High Mufti Of SF will come into all the houses of the SF writers and force them to put drag queens randomly everywhere in their stories. What ending the default DOES look like? Well, mainly it looks like just RAISING AWARENESS THAT IT EXISTS, encouraging authors to think about using minority characters as an option equally valid as using historically normative ones.
The default is really just writers not thinking about the default. But they SHOULD think about it. Because like say, it is not just a setting on their DVD, it is their ART, and sometimes livelihood. If there was something that you didn’t really think about much that, once you started, made you by its very nature reevaluate whether you had been unconsciously limiting yourself artistically, why WOULDN’T that be a good thing? Why is it so threatening to think about authors taking advantage of an expanded range of options for characters every time they begin to create one? Some writers will still come to the conclusion that the default wasn’t limiting them at all, because the story they were and are trying to tell is a story about historically normative characters and wouldn’t benefit from added diversity. There’s nothing wrong with that. But wouldn’t you rather they were doing it as a conscious choice? Wouldn’t you rather know that you were reading characters that were made the way they were because they furthered the story that the writer was trying to tell, and not just, like, because the writer didn’t stop to think for a second about what other options they might have had?
End the default! Cool. I’m all for it.
Jubal
January 30, 2014 @ 10:14 pm
Joe, do me a favour and try to show me a sustained politics success in a population, please. In a relatively short time frame, say, four hundred years.
Simple Desultory Philip
January 30, 2014 @ 10:26 pm
Thank you, goodness, the zero-sum thing drives me absolutely up the wall. As if there is a finite amount of SF that will ever be written, and encouraging authors in the future to choose from a wider array of character identities when they are crafting tales is somehow going to ensure that none of those future authors ever decides to write about hetero cis white people ever ever ever again. Sigh.
Tom Kratman
January 30, 2014 @ 10:32 pm
No, little or nothing is ever clear at the beginning of an essay, and especially not when someone is calling for change. Bottom line up front? Nah; bad technique, persuasiveness-wise. Better to argue in a spiral, which, precisely because it’s better, is what one should expect from intelligent people.
Tom Kratman
January 30, 2014 @ 10:36 pm
Doesn’t really help, you know, because the preferred terms change. Indeed, that change is one of the minor bits of evidence in support of the “hunting for offense” case. Think here: Negro to Black to African-American to I really stopped paying attention and went back to what black folks _I_ care about – Soldiers, Sailers, Airmen, and Marines use – which is simply “black.”
Simple Desultory Philip
January 30, 2014 @ 10:47 pm
It’s as though the only reason some people can think of to put a genderqueer character in a book is to Advance The Great Galloping Genderqueer Agenda With “Messages” That Will Kill My Fun!!!!! An author couldn’t possibly just make some characters different than the historical norm because, you know, some people are different from the historical norm. Sigh.