Benjanun Sriduangkaew and RotyH

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

David,

Were the deleted comments RotyH?

[David Selig]

David,

Were the deleted comments RotyH?

No idea. I think they are related to some incident on Valente's blog but I don't know the details.

[Darth Richard II]

That seemed perfectly rational to me, what was it about her defense that people found weak?

[kuenjato]

. Other than the fact that it's the same person, there's no link here: it's not like a Lovecraft, or even Card, where the problematic issues are right there in the work. There's a different decision to make here. Is this separable? Are we really rewarding the bad behaviour by buying the work? Or can we condemn the bad behaviour and still see the writing as another aspect of the person?

I haven't read more than a few paragraphs of her stories (posted on her website), but over at a review site someone described a 'gentle genocide' of the Other as the resolution to one of the stories, the particular Other being caucasians in this respect. Is this correct? Because if it is, it seems certain issues from RH are present in the work.

[Little Valkyrie]

I haven't read more than a few paragraphs of her stories (posted on her website), but over at a review site someone described a 'gentle genocide' of the Other as the resolution to one of the stories, the particular Other being caucasians in this respect. Is this correct? Because if it is, it seems certain issues from RH are present in the work.

You can read all of "Courtship in the Country of Machine-Gods" online, so maybe make up your own mind on how it works as a whole, but yes, pretty much:

It was a vast continent, with a long history. Not a gentle one, for in their memory-paper I read the eradication of another indigenous group followed by a theological scourge—born of some snake-woman-fruit myth—that swept through their states, incinerating reason as it went. Eventually recovery happened, but they’d spent so long in that quagmire it was a wonder to me, to us, that they overcame the barrier that kept them from the rest of the world.

...

One day I came home—back from a week in Umadu where I learned matrix-splicing—and found two Intharachit navigators housed with us. Like empty canvases their skin stretched, open to sun-stains that reddened their cadaverous cheeks and pointed snouts. Hair in thin yellow and dried-offal red clung lank to their skin, which poured salt and sick-smells. They did not look human.

Then, the solution to the unending aggression from outside:

The northern city was the wealthiest on the continent. I expected more from them than the swarming anthills of other Intharachit states. But what I saw was scarcely better, a riot of squalor and starvation. The air churned with disease, dust, despair. Pattama’s cultivar wasn’t going to be a retaliatory strike after all, but a mercy. A way out.

We introduced the strain into their rebreathers, which vainly tried to purify the filth it inhaled from the city’s throats. We put it into the tanks that processed fluid waste and recycled it into a semblance of water.

...

Our monitoring cortices went into a frenzy when the infected city came apart. I listened to some of the chatter. Cries for help. Emergency dispatches. Pattama’s virus had targeted their arteries; out of everything it was what we knew best. It thinned their plasma, and thinned it again, until what went through their veins was like water. From their pale, diluted mouths they retched pale, diluted hemorrhage as they clawed themselves open. This fluid, not blood anymore, puddled in their streets and soaked the tiny rooms in their beehive houses. It lapped at their windows and gave life to frail weeds in the interstices of their walls. They wept it in deep, wracking shudders, and died in throes of asphyxiation as their lungs drowned.

...

“How about gas? Their ventilation can’t be much good. Two of my people developed an agent that bonds to their circulation. It’s been effective.”

Surada gave a curt nod. “I’ve seen the footage. Brutally effective. Take a look at this, though.” A shape sharpened into focus on the viewport. “Thermal take from the symbiote. That’s a biomass right there.”

...

Kanrisa seized the voices’ chorus and shattered it into sixty-five permutations of itself. It punctured situational probabilities where the laws of physics were rewritten for an instant.

When it ended the biomass was gone, each particle threshed into nonexistence. The tunnels became a crater. So did twenty nearest cities within range of the blast. Half the spatial storm that enclosed Intharachit coiled and released under Kanrisa’s guidance. Most coastal regions were drowned under tidal waves.

We still had to spread Pattama’s virus to the surviving population, but it was a nominal gesture. Kanrisa had ended the war.

The aftermath was incandescent: as one we breathed, drinking in one another, as the city celebrated us not as heroes but as living stories. What we had done—decided by Kanrisa, mediated by me, brought into being by Pattama—was like nothing in living memory, and our living memory is immense in breadth and length. Pojama wanted for nothing but novelty, and we were that magnified many times over. Nothing seemed impossible. Kanrisa’s stigma vanished overnight. Through centrids we had grown in peace, and that was stagnancy. This was the first occasion after so long that conflict would jolt us forward.

We were so much wanted back then, pulled this way and that, sometimes parted. Great bursts of advances were made. Optimizing the voices, evolving deep logics of our cortices at exponential rates, leapfrogs in cybernetics. Though Intharachit lay in ruins each savant had brought back libraries of DNA samples we would append to our biodiversity projects and assimilate into our virtualization programs.

Ending: yay our heroes won and our heroine is reconstructing her lost lover who was killed.

[Myshkin]

I haven't read more than a few paragraphs of her stories (posted on her website), but over at a review site someone described a 'gentle genocide' of the Other as the resolution to one of the stories, the particular Other being caucasians in this respect. Is this correct? Because if it is, it seems certain issues from RH are present in the work.

Yes, in the story I read the protagonist and friends kill off the population of an entire continent, which was presumably a stand-in for the US. The protagonist feels little to no remorse about it, and the narrative seems to support the idea that the genocide needed to happen. However the narrative is first-person, which makes it hard to ascribe authorial motivation, and there are several other aspects of the story which, to me at least, suggest that we are being given a glimpse inside the head of someone who is the product of a remorseless society. But that's just my take, others will disagree. The story is problematic, but also intriguing and well written.

[Little Valkyrie]

Yes, in the story I read the protagonist and friends kill off the population of an entire continent, which was presumably a stand-in for the US. The protagonist feels little to no remorse about it, and the narrative seems to support the idea that the genocide needed to happen. However the narrative is first-person, which makes it hard to ascribe authorial motivation, and there are several other aspects of the story which, to me at least, suggest that we are being given a glimpse inside the head of someone who is the product of a remorseless society. But that's just my take, others will disagree. The story is problematic, but also intriguing and well written.

I'm not sure if the incredibly flat affect is a bug or a feature, yeah.

[kuenjato]

Yes, in the story I read the protagonist and friends kill off the population of an entire continent, which was presumably a stand-in for the US. The protagonist feels little to no remorse about it, and the narrative seems to support the idea that the genocide needed to happen. However the narrative is first-person, which makes it hard to ascribe authorial motivation, and there are several other aspects of the story which, to me at least, suggest that we are being given a glimpse inside the head of someone who is the product of a remorseless society. But that's just my take, others will disagree. The story is problematic, but also intriguing and well written.

Thanks to those who confirmed. As I haven't read it, I'll state no opinion at the time, except that the resolution is consistent with certain statements made during her time as RH (albeit not as profanity-laced, I'm sure).

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

A little genocide can make the world a better place? Gosh, that's not disturbing at all.

[Darth Richard II]

A little genocide can make the world a better place? Gosh, that's not disturbing at all.

It's not even original, it's just Enders Game. :p

[Crom Dubh]

Sounds like something HP Lovecraft would have written in the 1930s, but with Sci-fi-Africa switched for Sci-fi-America.

[sologdin]

perpetrators of genocide historically believe it's a good thing, so the narrator's perspective is at least 'realistic.'

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Sologdin,

Which is why a portrayal of genocide as a good thing sets my "what the hell?" sensors a twitter.

[Crom Dubh]

perpetrators of genocide historically believe it's a good thing, so the narrator's perspective is at least 'realistic.'

Sounds like the sort of justification she would attack in her blog.

[Myshkin]

Sologdin,

Which is why a portrayal of genocide as a good thing sets my "what the hell?" sensors a twitter.

I didn't read it as being presented as a good thing. Nor was it presented as a bad thing. It was simply presented.

[Gone]

I'm floored that RH apologized for her vitriol.

She even deleted the Prince of Thorns 'review' where she said that she stole the book, then didn't read it, then shat on it, and finally managed to bring my children into the post.

Now she suddenly has something to lose so she's apologising.

That's nice.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

If the protagonist engages in genocide and the world is "better" for it how is genocide not being portrayed as a positive thing in this story?

(Not to mention describing the artificial creation of an Ebola type virus to do the killing as a good thing)

[Crom Dubh]

I think Myshkin was saying that having a character endorse genocide in a story does not mean the author endorses it. On the other hand, having read ROTYH's blog, I think she might not object to a similar event happening in real life :p

[Myshkin]

If the protagonist engages in genocide and the world is "better" for it how is genocide not being portrayed as a positive thing in this story?

(Not to mention describing the artificial creation of an Ebola type virus to do the killing as a good thing)

The world was not presented as better for it; the character whose perspective we were given believed her world was better for it. There is a difference. Perhaps the author did want to present the genocide as a good thing, but that can't be known unless she tells us, and that's not how I read it. Have you read the story yourself?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

I have not. Well, not beyond what is presented here. Is it in one of the "year's best compelations"?