Social Justice in SF&F

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by CWatkinsNash

I've had favorite books / movies / etc that were "products of their time", so to speak. The fact that times have changed doesn't reduce their value to me. Should I stop loving old tv shows and movies that portray the expectation that women should be stay-at-home wives just because we've moved away from that?

Yes, your viewing of old TV shows should be restricted to Miss Marple, Murder she Wrote and Charlies Angels (Fast forwarding through any sexist bits).

Allo Allo is still OK as it is an equal opportunities offender
Fawlty Towers has been banned by the EU for mentioning the war.

Yes, I am being sarcastic

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

^That. And if extinction wasn't the goal, then even later: A most famous youth adventure series in Poland (not having a series title but usually referred to as "The Adventures of Tommy Wilmowski") depicts the life - from teenage to adulthood - of a boy whose father, a fugitive after the Kościuszko uprising, hunts living animals for Hagenbeck's zoo. The stories are choke-full with infodumps on local flora, fauna and culture of native inhabitants of the regions visited (what we call edutainment nowadays), always pro natives, as the Polish fugitives felt compassion with those being driven from or attacked at their home soil.

I grew up with that stuff.

Even more recently, there's a very, very famous British naturalist called David Attenborough, who presents nature programmes on BBC TV. He made his name in the 1950s and 60s as the presenter of an extremely popular TV series called Zoo Quest, in which he accompanied expeditions all over the world to capture live animals for London Zoo, which was an entirely accepted practice at the time. These days the idea of a zoo capturing large animals from the wild would be regarded with horror.

[Apache]

Yeah, nowadays they rescue the wild animals.
Apache

[fjtorres]

In my old neck of the woods the usual suspects would get all riled up when temporary licensed deer hunts opened up to cull the deer in the metroparks during droughts to keep the herd size to a sustainable level. Try explaining to the hand-wringers that waiting for starving deer to start wandering into downtown looking for food is waiting too long.

More to the point good fiction, especially good SF, needs to challenge the reader to look beyond the grimy everyday existence of this broken world and consider other possibilities, other lifestyles, other viewpoints, other cultures. Especially uncomfortable ones that go beyond the politically correct orthodoxy of the day.

Asking for litmus tests to filter out uncomfortable, "insensitive" material is asking for others to join you in a comfy coccoon of small mindedness that is incompatible with the best traditions of SF&F. A tradition that runs from HG Wells socialistic cautionary tales through Ellison's DANGEROUS VISIONS, to today's un-PC writers.

Folks like that should instead turn their focus on political science treatises and leave genre fiction for those able to distinguish between reality and narrative effect.

[Rizla]

Deleted.

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's fiction. No elephants were harmed in the writing of the book . Why not mention the thousands of human beings who die in the war at the end of the book? Isn't that equally distasteful?

Very obviously there is a chasm of difference between a herd of elephants slaughtered for giggles and a war between humans. The latter is called warfare, and is potentially a fair fight, while the former is senseless, wasteful carnage. You might equally erroneously compare the murder of defenseless civilians with warfare. Is the difference not glaringly obvious to you?

In any case, I found the mass slaughter of animals so off-putting that I put the book down. I don't think this is moral unique to modern sensibilities. I recall reading a memoir by an American Indian who deplored the unnecessary slaughter of animals.

[DiapDealer]

Are you saying you would have trouble finishing any work of fiction where the protagonist does something you personally find deplorable/abhorrent? How odd. And so very limiting.

[HarryT]

Rizla, I do think you're being a little over-sensitive, but obviously the choice is entirely yours to make. Animals at the time were treated as "resources" and nothing more. You can't judge a novel written 130 years ago by the standards of today's society.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Rizla, I do think you're being a little over-sensitive, but obviously the choice is entirely yours to make. Animals at the time were treated as "resources" and nothing more. You can't judge a novel written 130 years ago by the standards of today's society.

Here's one for you:

How about one written today but set 130 years ago?
(And not a time travel piece.)

Any problem with characters talking and acting appropriate to the milieu?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Here's one for you:

How about one written today but set 130 years ago?
(And not a time travel piece.)

Any problem with characters talking and acting appropriate to the milieu?

Certainly not. In an historical novel, characters should be accurately portrayed. Few things annoy me more than reading historical novels in which characters speak and act as they would do today.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Certainly not. In an historical novel, characters should be accurately portrayed. Few things annoy me more than reading historical novels in which characters speak and act as they would do today.

How about current or future settings with characters acting appropriately to their times and background but dishing out slurs and acting un-PC?

That acceptable?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Here's one for you:

How about one written today but set 130 years ago?
(And not a time travel piece.)

Any problem with characters talking and acting appropriate to the milieu?

Nope. In fact, doing anything else BUT talking and acting appropriate to the milieu would bother me (though I would probably just read something else rather than point out its faults).

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

How about current or future settings with characters acting appropriately to their times and background but dishing out slurs and acting un-PC?

That acceptable?

Why all the questions? Authors can make characters in a book behave in any way they wish. When you ask "is it acceptable?" the natural response is "acceptable to whom?". If an author wants to write a character who's a bigot and it's germane to the plot, I certainly have no problem with that. Do you?

If I had to like every character in a book I'd have a real problem, given that one of my favourite type of book is the murder mystery .

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

How about current or future settings with characters acting appropriately to their times and background but dishing out slurs and acting un-PC?

That acceptable?

Until we live in a world where no one EVER behaves abominably, or performs deplorable acts, or dishes out slurs, or acts insensitively, I will take no issue with fiction that includes those kinds of characters and portrays them accurately.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Why all the questions? Authors can make characters in a book behave in any way they wish. When you ask "is it acceptable?" the natural response is "acceptable to whom?". If an author wants to write a character who's a bigot and it's germane to the plot, I certainly have no problem with that. Do you?

If I had to like every character in a book I'd have a real problem, given that one of my favourite type of book is the murder mystery .

Because we had this conversation a while back over a certain author maligned by others and we were on opposite sides on that one.

The objections were about the use of the term "raghead".

Just checking to see if that one book/author was representative or an exception.
Cheers.