Social Distortion
SF short stories about futuristic regrets, and a question about the aesthetics of *~*representation*~*
Welcome, creatures! I have returned from New York; I have been to Central Park Zoo; I have seen the flying foxes opening and flexing their great brown veiny wings. Also the Norma Desmond of snow leopards, extremely ready for its close-up. Now I am back.
Warm Sorry Mirror
On the train north I finished Ted Chiang’s new story collection, Exhalation. I loved Chiang’s first collection, Your Life and Other Stories; it helped me break a long spell in which, for whatever reason, I could not hook my attention on new SF/fantasy. The new collection has many of the same virtues as the first: complex, extrapolation-based worldbuilding, “what if mystical realities worked on scientific principles”; attention to the many ways human emotions respond to technologies which often were developed with only a small range of the possible emotions in mind; consciousness of life’s fleeting, unpredictable character—even when you can literally measure just how doomed you are. If you like these things, you will like this book.
The person who (iirc) first recommended Chiang to me liked Exhalation even more than the first collection. I didn’t share that view—for me, nothing so far has topped the phenomenal “what if golems are real, and cause labor problems, and also we know how many generations we have left until doomsday” story from the first collection. That was just a thrilling piece of speculative footwork, full of what The Art and Craft of Feature Writing would call “countermoves.” (In general Art and Craft is almost as good a guide to fiction as it is to the Wall Street Journal feature writing for which it was intended.) My favorite story in the new collection is the first one, about a time-travel gate which can’t change the past, but can change your perspective on it. This story exemplifies Chiang’s underlying warmth: He comes across as someone both cerebral and tender, and a lot of his work plays on that tension.
You can see how the same person wrote the time-travel gate story, the one about the mechanical nanny, and the final story, about a grifter and his accomplice in a world where you can chat with the AU version of yourself. All of these are stories about the constraints on our choices and the kind of freedom we can have within those constraints. They’re also stories about regret and repentance, Exhalation’s least-expected and most-welcome theme.
Chiang does not create particularly distinctive or memorable characters. For all the warmth of his authorial perspective, his characters feel two-dimensional: created to illustrate. That is mostly fine, but for me I think it sapped some of the power of the collection’s central and longest story, “The Life-Cycle of Software Objects,” about the relationship between people and virtual pets/children. That’s a story with plenty of angles, but I found myself thinking about its ideas much more than living out its longings and dilemmas. ...The idea I found most intriguing was that sex is a bright line for many (but not all!) of the humans. They sense that bringing their childlike software pets through puberty would offer the creatures new experiences, a new degree of reality. And yet they balk, because they feel something viscerally wrong in tweaking and guiding a software program so it sincerely enjoys sex. That’s different from tweaking and guiding the program so it sincerely enjoys learning, or playing, or eating, or hanging out with you. It’s different—somehow.
There’s a lot going on there (I liked that the humans were concerned for the software, and basically unconcerned about whether creating sexually-available software would be bad for the humans involved) but among other things it prompted some reflection on what it means to associate sex and “the flesh.” On some level you can’t have sex with software, for the same reason that you can’t give a Pokemon the Eucharist.
The Face of Another
You guys know that I’m working on this novel with two intertwining narratives, one dream and one real. The central character in the IRL narrative is a black woman, and I continue to think about how—and whether!—to do that. (I am still looking for black readers, and will pay for that, if you think you might be interested.)
I’d never bothered to develop an opinion on the ethics of writing from the pov of someone in a real group, to which you don’t belong, which is singled out for oppression. I didn’t bother coming up with an ethics because the aesthetics always did enough work: These kind of stories are so often bad!
The white writer’s version of a black person, the straight writer’s imaginary gay person, the rich writer’s idea of a poor person—these things go wrong so easily and go right so rarely. (Men writing women is an exception for fairly obvious reaons. Nobody’s gonna be all, “Men can’t write from a woman’s perspective!” because Anna Karenina will come and run them over with a spoiler.) People end up writing offensive caricatures, or banal pleas for tolerance; they keep their POV character isolated, a lot of homosexual emotions with no gay culture around them, or else they make their narrator talk and think constantly about being gay; they get overcautious and blunt their insights, or they define their characters by oppression and wallow in it, throwing around the ripped-from-the-headlines misery like Oprah with car keys: You get a crack baby! And you get a crack baby!
So I guess one thing I should ask, as I try to figure out how & whether to do this thing myself, is: Where has it ever worked?
I can’t answer that question when it comes to white writers with black protagonists. Off the top of my head, the only possible answers I came up with were April and Marshall in The Egypt Game, and Benjamin January in the only Barbara Hambly I’ve read, Fever Season. Not a lot of examples! And anyway, how could I know? With gay characters I feel a bit more confident, but I can’t think of any novels which would fit. Of my favorite queer movies, only two were both written and directed by people who, if a quick google can be trusted, are straight. One of them (Beyond the Hills) is amazing, but is also pretty isolated and about-the-oppression. I’m fine with that, the fact that we tell those stories weirdly often doesn’t mean we should never tell them well, but I’m interested in the ways in which even the best versions of “writing from the Other’s pov” follow certain patterns. Anyway and the other one is uhhhhh Cruising, which was literally protested for being homophobic, which it low-key is. (But it was protested for being high-key homophobic, which it isn’t!) Cruising is phenomenal for this question: It’s about both culture and individuals, and draws both halves of that opposition vividly; it’s about the ways in which stigmatized identity can attract and shift the identity of the apparently-normal observer; it’s got elements of the plea-for-tolerance but also the anger, surrealism, and intertwining of desire and shame which I expect more from intra-community productions.
So this is my question for you all: Are there examples of fiction you genuinely love, where the central/POV character is from a *~*marginalized*~* group to which you belong, but whose creators are not from that group and in fact stand in a privileged position relative to it? (Sorry for posing this in such a convoluted way but I want to both cast a wide net, and prevent answers of the form, “I am not Romani but I liked Rumer Godden’s Gypsy book a lot when I was twelve.”) And feel free to elaborate on ways in which those beloved works fit, don’t fit, or reshape/repurpose the tropes found in lesser attempts.
icymi
I watched a bunch of movies, inc. Raging Bull, A Serious Man (the Coen Bros’ Job movie), two ’80s – ’90s alcoholism flicks, and a fun indie horror.
Black and white mask via Wikimedia Commons.
By the very nature of my marginalized identities (queer and crazy) I often don't know whether someone shares them or is simply closeted.
I love love love the Chinese novel mo dao zu shi, which is *probably* by a heterosexual woman, although because she's Chinese she might very well be queer and closeted. It does have quite a lot of the "isolated queer" problem you mention though (the only non-protagonist gay character dies before the book begins). It also has probably my favorite autistic character of all time, Lan Wangji, although again I have no idea if the author has autism.
NBC Hannibal has a really deep understanding of what it's like to be autistic, psychotic, Crazy Not Otherwise Specified, and a victim of psychiatric abuse. I assume that Bryan Fuller isn't crazy because all of the things he says about being crazy in interviews are extremely stupid.
Revolutionary Girl Utena was directed by a cisgender and heterosexual man but I and many other lesbians and transgender people I know found it deeply resonant with our experiences.
It's not quite a marginalization, but I also want to mention that several of my otherkin friends have read Amends and they universally love Sharptooth. Some of the shibboleths aren't quite right, but you did a really good job of writing *what it's like* to be an otherkin.
Hi Eve. I have a movie example too, which is The Fits (eerie magical story about a Black girl directed by a white woman). I could also read for you. Just a disclosure that I'm not African American, technically. My parents are from Africa, Cape Verde to be specific, but I would like to help or pass this along to my friends.