Social Justice in SF&F

[jgaiser]

Boy... She'd be pissed if she read Huck Finn. All those N* words...

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Male chihuahua or female chihuahua?

Elderly black transsexual Latino Buddhist Native American lesbian neuro-disadvantaged communist male chihuahuas with a Chinese-Japanese-Russian-Jewish-Arabic-Polish-Syrian-Indian ethnic background. It is of the utmost importance to be as diverse as possible.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Elderly black transsexual Latino Buddhist Native American lesbian neuro-disadvantaged communist male chihuahuas with a Chinese-Japanese-Russian-Jewish-Arabic-Polish-Syrian-Indian ethnic background. It is of the utmost importance to be as diverse as possible.

A book with such a main character would be more Horror than SF, I think.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

A book with such a main character would be more Horror than SF, I think.

Ah, but think of the diversity.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Fj, do you mean gender? I think SF&F is the genre.
Perfect typo.
Oh and there are not enough chihuahua main characters.

Yup.
On both counts.
We need more chihuahua SF.
Maybe in a remake of A BOY AND HIS DOG.

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

A book with such a main character would be more Horror than SF, I think.

It might be transgenre.
We can make a film of it for Cannes.
Are there any thespian transgenre actors on the site who will work for free?

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

We need more chihuahua SF.

Pity that The Hound of the Baskervilles isn't SF. I can just imagine a chihuahua as the terrible, hellish Hound.

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by Rizla

I tried reading King Solomon's Mines. At one point the protagonist slaughters a large number of elephants for the sake of a meal. The waste and gratuitous carnage was repulsive to me and I believe would be repulsive to any reader of any age sensitive to the suffering of other creatures.

I think you are sadly mistaken. Between the 1830s and 1890s (maybe 1880s), the American Bison was nearly made extinct by white hunters who wanted two things from them, their hide for buffalo robes, and their tongues as a delicacy meat. In most cases, the rest of the meat (usually between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds) was left to rot. The number of bison in 50 years dropped from the millions to at most a couple thousand.

The point is that people did, and people wrote about things, in earlier generations that we today would consider appalling. Many of our founding fathers wrote that they deplored slavery, but kept slaves anyway. I'm not sure that any current publisher would publish Huckleberry Finn if it were written today. But classic and seminal works of any era should be taken in the context of the era in which it was written. I suspect that in 25-50 years, if Liz Lutgendorff is remembered at all, they will be appalled by the views she espouses today.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by bgalbrecht

I think you are sadly mistaken. Between the 1830s and 1890s (maybe 1880s), the American Bison was nearly made extinct by white hunters who wanted two things from them, their hide for buffalo robes, and their tongues as a delicacy meat. In most cases, the rest of the meat (usually between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds) was left to rot. The number of bison in 50 years dropped from the millions to at most a couple thousand.

And this was encouraged by the US Government to help in the defeat of the Plain's Tribes.
Apache

[HarryT]

"Big game" hunting was a popular subject for children's books certainly as late as the early decades of the 20th century. The original "Tom Swift" series of teenage adventure stories, for example, contained a title called "Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle", published in 1911, (the book's title, purely as a side-note of possible interest, subsequently formed the basis of the word "Taser", the electric stun-gun used by police forces today) in which the eponymous hero commits mass slaughter of elephants, rhinos, etc, for the pleasure of the activity. Social attitudes to hunting were very different then to what they are today, and hunters at the time took a positive pride in killing the last members of what would today be called "endangered species".

[darryl]

The attitude of the author of this article is appalling. The self-righteousness and lack of understanding is appalling.

[haydnfan]

This is the same problem that I had with Anita Sarkeesian's critique of video games. Both cherry pick and turn a blind eye to anything that contradicts their pov. They might still have a point, but the most simple conclusion is that they are largely ignorant of the body of works that they are criticizing.

Focusing on this one, Octavia Butler, Kate Elliott, Elizabeth Moon, and Jack McDevitt to name a few off of the top of my head all have strong female characters.

[darryl]

It is letting one's own ideology overpower all else and precluding any possibility of enjoying some great writing. A lack of any flexibility of mind. The author loved Ancillary Justice, which I thought was a good book and a worthy Hugo winner. However, in doing so she seems to be blind to the very many characteristics of the society portrayed which are downright abhorrent by todays standards and particularly by some of the standards of todays "progressives". Gender may no longer play a role, but their is still violence and intimidation in sexual relationships. The Government is a dictatorship. Wealth distribution is vastly unequal. Diversity is not only not prized but is despised. The Society is expanding by force. It does not regard members of any other culture as being "civilised" and perhaps not even human, justifying any brutality. Only when the new "colonies" adopt the characteristics of the main society do they achieve civilised status. Even then the newly acquired planets seem to be parcelled out amongst the privileged with many of the existing population essentially existing as slave labour.

I am simply highlighting the hypocrisy in condemning sexism etc. in these older works because of ideology whilst at the same time picking one aspect of a more current book whilst ignoring all sorts of ideological objections. Quite apart from anything else we are dealing with works of fiction!

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by darryl

The Government is a dictatorship. Wealth distribution is vastly unequal. Diversity is not only not prized but is despised. The Society is expanding by force. It does not regard members of any other culture as being "civilised" and perhaps not even human, justifying any brutality. Only when the new "colonies" adopt the characteristics of the main society do they achieve civilised status.

In fairness, what you've said above would be a good description of most societies throughout human history.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by HarryT

In fairness, what you've said above would be a good description of most societies throughout human history.

I don't disagree, Harry. I am simply pointing out what I consider to be the hypocrisy inherent in this article. For example, objecting to sexism in the Forever War because a male character was promoted further than a female one? If nothing else, it was probably an accurate portrayal of society at the time the book was written. Yet the author of the article seizes on the treatment of gender in Ancillary Justice whilst ignoring some of the even more "offensive" elements. But wa are talking fiction and worthwhile fiction in both instances. It is as pointless to take offence to random plot elements as it is to base ones approval of a book solely on one particular plot element.