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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The other unfair side of that is that when they say "we've all been there," it turns out to mean that people who haven't been there don't quite count as readers. We're told that fighting on a large-scale battlefield is universal but giving birth isn't, but a lot more people have given birth than taken part in trench warfare. I'm expected to care about the personal lives of certain strangers mostly because they're rich; most of us aren't rich, and even most rich people haven't been on reality television.

So, whose disbelief/skepticism matters here? If you're worried about getting past slush readers, the slush reader for a speculative fiction story is likely to have read a lot of speculative fiction, just as the person deciding whether to publish romance stories or mystery novels probably knows those genres. At some point, it may be worth saying "there are hundreds of millions of readers, I can't possibly interest all of them, who do I want to write for?" and look for ways to find that audience.

Yes true, both points.