(no subject)

[alexseanchai]

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.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Yup.

Though the Puppies' problem also seems to be that if it's about a Woman or a Gay Person or a Black Person (note that all these categories are mutually exclusive; Audre Lorde never existed) then it Cannot Possibly be entertaining fiction instead of or as well as a political story. (Also note that obviously stories about straight white men are never inherently political.)

[silveradept]

Agreed. Same issue in the macro, except instead of it being mostly criticisms about works written about not-straight/not-white/not-men, that criticism is leveled more when it's written by not-straight/not-white/not-men. Because the default means it's about the work, and the not default means it's about the writer.

[alexseanchai]

True point.