Global Diversity SFF Thread

[Sci-2]

eta:

Worth listening to. Immigrant experience, racism, magic, health issues, writing.

"Next thing you know, we're being chased down the street...all these racial slurs...now they caught us, what are you gonna do now?.....From a young age, ever since I could read...as soon as the words made sense, I loved reading...I loved insects...the spinal cord was damaged..."

"But you were able to write while you were in the hospital?"

=-=-=

Not nearly learned enough on the politics to comment, but Lavie Tidhar relates why he writes the fantastic to the politics of the Middle East.

The State of Israel originates out of twin science fictional impulses: the utopian vision of Zionism on the one hand, as embodied in Theodor Hertzl’s the novel-as-manifesto Altenuland (Old New Land), and the dystopian imperative of the Holocaust.

Seems pretty controversial, but worth a read.

[Datepalm]

Seems pretty controversial, but worth a read.

Not really. Rank cowardice, in terms of the role of the artist in politics. (Doing Darwish a disservice, imo.) And its kind of a mess. The tikva is from the 189somethings, Jerusalem of Gold from like the late 60's, Petra from the 70's and itself a semi-ironic idolization of ...1920-30ishes, I guess. Save for the Tikva, he's looking at reflections of reflections. I find his cultural argument unconvincing and his withdrawl from the questions of zionism...well, pointless. Its very much...written for foreigners. Hm, makes me wonder how similarly shallow and attenuated from reality all the other dispatches from world cultures in snappy liberal english bytes we see here are.

ETA - and now Petra is stuck in my head.

ETA2- I was wrong, it's from the 50's, (but apparently banned for a couple of decades, maybe thats my association.)

[SpaceChampion]

There's certianly a lot of french SF/Space opera in comics, not so sure about actual books though.

[cough]Jules Verne[/cough]

oh you mean more current?

[Sci-2]

Hm, makes me wonder how similarly shallow and attenuated from reality all the other dispatches from world cultures in snappy liberal english bytes we see here are.

I took that shit as an expected caveat. Maybe not always true, but yeah the idea that the majority of the world cares about diversity/feminism/gay-rights? Would need to see some serious evidence.

[Datepalm]

I think it does. Just...not the way the west does. Every culture has it's internal debates, and they're complex. This liberal 'diversity' thing calls for an engagement with other cultures though, but thats hard. In fact, it's virtually impossible without learning another language. So instead, lets get pithy simplistic little essays. Big surprise, they're shallow.

[Sci-2]

I think it does. Just...not the way the west does. Every culture has it's internal debates, and they're complex. This liberal 'diversity' thing calls for an engagement with other cultures though, but thats hard. In fact, it's virtually impossible without learning another language. So instead, lets get pithy simplistic little essays. Big surprise, they're shallow.

True that, good point.

[Galactus]

Isn't that kind of the problem with... life? In general. We can't ever fully grasp even relatively simple things, so we have to lie through our teeth in order to create approximations we can actually use. Yeah, of course a culture can't be summarized in a bunch of pithy statements. We can't even summarize a hydrogen atom in a few pithy statements. That's kind of a given, I think? Nonetheless things have to be summarized. We can't engage with everything directly, so we have to engage with it through all the unreliable approximations we can bring.

[Datepalm]

But we don't put a moral value on our summarization of the hydrogen atom. This whole thread is premised on a notion that it is in some way right to engage with other cultures, that its a thing that good people should do. That the lack of global diversity in SFF is a flaw, and not merely a technical one, but an ethical one. I think that this is, to put it mildly, nonsense, and Lavies post, if its illustrative of the kind of things Sci has so assidiously been populating the thread with, shows that it's also dangerous, self indulgent nonsense.

[Sci-2]

That the lack of global diversity in SFF is a flaw, and not merely a technical one, but an ethical one. I think that this is, to put it mildly, nonsense, and Lavies post, if its illustrative of the kind of things Sci has so assidiously been populating the thread with, shows that it's also dangerous, self indulgent nonsense.

I thought I was just abysmally bored and had long hours to kill between other shit. ;-)

ETA: I don't know if ethical is the right word though. Maybe.

My utility curve gives happiness when art deviates from the expected, but I wouldn't say this is always successful. Some books just suck. I also love SFF, so if I can get some cultural engagement without leaving the playground, so to speak, I'm happier for it.

[Datepalm]

Don't sell yourself short. YOU are to blame for the global dominance of the west! Go to the corner and read Mahfouz (or possibly Saladin Ahmed, whatever works) to feel good about yourself again. Do not collect 200!

(I read Lavies thing again. It's like that line in, I think, one of the Dirk Gently books, about "Dirk Gently having friends was like the Suez Crisis popping out for a sandwich" (paraphrase, some.) Its not that I disagree with it or think some of his interpretations are wrong or whatever, it doesn't even make sense. (Though if it did, I may add that Lavie taking potshots at Oz is a. bizzare and b. basically an Ashkenazi kibbutznik complaining that another Ashkenazi Kibbutznik* is writing about Arabs wrong. It's a cultural teacup so small theres no room to even shove some mint in. /no more bad wordgames, Datepalm. No more! Bad!)

*for a crude cultural translation, read this as "Ivy League educated white guy"

[Sci-2]

I can't judge Lavie's post, but I am tempted to pingback so he can comment here?

[Datepalm]

Honestly, I'd rather you didn't, because a. I don't like being impolite to a person (as opposed to to a text) and b. don't want to turn this thread into a debate on Israel, because, frankly, the board has shown little capacity to grokking that particular issue in a way that isn't, imo, biased and deeply uncomprehending. Which is somewhat what Lavie is pandering to with that post, I think. I mean, it may well be his real opinion, but it's a nonsensical one for any kind of fruitful debate inside Israel. (I was hoping there would be no pingback from the "Muslim Bechdel Paradise" thing as well, mostly for reasons of good manners and secondarily for reasons of being Israeli. I'm not allowed to have an opinion on anything relating to Islam and, y'know, maintain my national identity at the same time, after all.)

On the other hand, I don't want to say things to people's backs either, thats just nasty, so do as you like.

[Sci-2]

Nah, if you think it'll cause conflict not worth it. There was probably an auto-pingback anyway.

[Seli]

I'm always in lament that a rich history and selection of speculative fiction from Asia (Chinese), the wuxia genre, does not seem to have strong advocates in foreign markets. There are also some good SF stuff that are not being translated. I'm sure other languages have the same English-is-King problem, but I'm way more intimately familiar with wuxia and Chinese SF.

The Sense of Wonder blog has an interview with the editor responsible for some recent translations of Chinese SF into English (mostly Liu Cixin novellas). It is mentioned that Chinese SF is a relatively recent success.

Another interesting point is that they think that at the moment cultural barriers for translation of Chinese fantasy works into English are too high to publish translations. Which is understandable, but a bit of a shame.

link: http://sentidodelamaravilla.blogspot.com.es/2012/05/interview-with-verbena-cw-editor-of-liu.html

[sologdin]

tikva is from the 189somethings

comical that the srpskohrvatski translation of the term is pumpkin.

[Datepalm]

Also Russian. Yeah. Remember Kazaa? It was there someplace, in that gap between Napster and torrents - it means goat in russian, double aa at the end and all. They used to say "we'll get it off the goat".

Political update - it's Nakba day, and two groups of students spent an hour screaming at eachother in the middle of campus. (Do these people not have classes? And where were all of you during the strikes?) What I learned: Biladi, Biladi is only marginally chantable, HaTikva not at all. We need better anthems, if we're going to stay a violent region. Get to it, Lavie Tidhar.

[Galactus]

and two groups of students spent an hour screaming at eachother in the middle of campus

Ah... Uni. I kind of miss it.

Although I also like that you can have serious, engaging discussions about 17th century landholding practices *and people totally get why this is awesome and interesting*.

[Sci-2]

Mark Lawrence on Special Needs in Strange Worlds. (Very, very good read)

This disability from birth, especially profound disability, is something I’ve not seen addressed in fantasy. It isn’t something I demand to see represented. I don’t see writing as something subject to demands. It is however something I’m interested to see. The perspective of someone who has never tasted the full array of physical opportunities is unique and hard for an outsider to penetrate. There are insights offered by such privation, insights into what we are, into what makes us people, what we share at the core. That’s the reason I’d like to see such a character in a story. Not to fill a quota, not out of duty, but because it could be fascinating.

I’ve started two books with significant characters who have been profoundly disabled since birth. In one, ‘The Arithmetic of Magpies’, the character is a young woman with severe cerebral palsy (my daughter’s condition) at the heart of a high-tech hacking operation, prized for her particular skills, who finds herself being hunted by Orion – the avatar of the mythological figure – and plunged into a very strange conflict. All largely without stirring from the spot.

[aidan]

Today I published an article by Kate Elliott on diversity in Fantasy, it's called "It's Amazing the Things We Know, That Are Wrong."

I wanted to write a post about diversity.

It could open something like this: In a diverse world, is fantasy and science fiction literature open to the largest possible view of the world and its cultures? If not, why not? What am I as writer, as reader, and as viewer doing to promote and highlight a more realistic view of the world’s diversity?

But such an opening already presupposes that I’m writing from the stance of a cultural hegemony centering around Euro/American settings and its structural, political, historical, and religious backdrops. The phrase “a more realistic view” already situates me within a US-centric sphere. It begs the question: More realistic than what?

The instant I say “diversity” what I mean, whether I want to or not, is that I’m writing to an audience in which the default mode lies in being male, white, and mostly straight. Or, to quote writer Aliette de Bodard, the [phrase] “‘importance of diversity’ boils down to ‘why white people benefit from seeing POCs in fiction.’”

POC, for those of you who may not know this acronym, in this instance stands for ‘people of color.’ I agree with Bodard, and I want to add that for the purposes of this post, I’m speaking of diversity in its largest sense, to include gender, gender identity, ethnicity, race, religion, nationality, language, class, and so on.

I’m weary of having this conversation over and over again.

[SpaceChampion]

I really hate the term POC. I am not a colour. We could define "races" by who has wet earwax and who has dry earwax. It means nothing. In terms of science fiction authorship, if in the author's process of creating a fictional milieu is like all humans unable adopt a mystical "universal viewpoint" might as well be considered another layer of unreliable narrator, ie. unreliable author. There is no responsibility on the part of any author to reflect some sort of viewpoint of global diversity. Just accept they have a limited viewpoint, and enjoy their story or not.