alexseanchai | (no subject)

Observation inspired by lecture video: It is easier to create a believable story within a dominant culture than a non-dominant one. Especially if the intended audience is the dominant culture. Professor Larison was talking about how "we've all been there" with the details of the picnic scene in the Flagstaff story, but stories like NK Jemisin's "The Effluent Engine", we really, really have not all been there. Jemisin's protagonist's experience of racism is not common to all of Jemisin's audience, in particular the white parts of said audience. Jemisin also has an uphill battle in that she's writing speculative, not realistic, fiction ("The Effluent Engine" is specifically alt-history steampunk). Prof. Larison says to write to convince the most skeptical reader; in the case of a speculative fiction writer, that most skeptical reader is guaranteed to not be a speculative fiction reader. It seems to me that these are similar, though orthogonal, problems.

There is something fundamentally unfair about this.