Isn't that exactly what happened with MZB? Bad things that were never called out explicitly, or ignored when they were, in favor of the beloved but imperfect subculture?
I sort of debated on whether to answer this more extensively, or to just say, "Well, yeah, obviously."
But here I go.
First of all, "Well, yeah, obviously."
Second of all, I don't know Jo Walton, I've never met her. I read her LJ sometimes, mostly (at one point) to get pointers to Tor.com columns, but otherwise I don't have a connection. So I'm speaking mostly as a reader of her book.
Third of all, the deliberate ignoring of the SF community on this issue was/is, obviously, a problem.
But I really think that this is book which is, in large part, an exploration of the after-effects of both a recent trauma, and a childhood abuse history. It's also about someone who is transitioning to a new culture and having to figure it out. Two new cultures, if you include the SF club, which I do.
Yes, there is a patina of The Golden Age of Science Fiction (as in, 13), but it really could be about a chess club and be doing the same things.
The people who glorified it for being All About Someone Reading SF Novels didn't... really get the point.
But if it's not about science fiction, then the story could just as easily be a young woman fleeing a family curse by joining a different unpleasant subculture, say the Jehovah's Witnesses. Would it have won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the British Fantasy Award had it been about that?
And if you later learned that the author was herself a Jehovah's Witness, how would that shape your interpretation of the book?
Well, honestly, I doubt it, but I also don't take that as an indictment of it.
Of course, I also like the book and think it was worth reading, and you don't, so that's fine.
(Also, incidentally, I actually thought she was using Heinlein to reinforce the fact Mor's wrong about her Bad Boyfriend. Which is something non-SF readers could get from context, and something most SF readers would have gotten in the way she intended it.)
Oh, I think it's worth reading! I just have a very different interpretation. It's like reading the first third of a memoir where the narrator has just left juvie and pawned her crazy mother's jewelry to go on a road trip to Seattle with her junkie "musician" boyfriend, and suddenly you hit a sign that says, "And everything was okay after that, or even better. THE END" and all the pages after that are blank.
The biggest problem is not even calling things out IMPLICITLY. I don't think those scenes are examples of the author pretending everything is fine. At all.
No, of course not. It's pretty clear reading that scene, in the way it's told, that this is the character believing something the author doesn't. It's a clever bit of writing, calling out that stupidly naive at best sex positivity, actually molestment activism of a certain kind of sf writer of the time.
Yeah. Re the naive-at-best sex positivity, one of the hazards of growing up with no sensible, realistic ethics around sexuality is what happens when you try to come up with rules from scratch, without realizing that all your unexamined biases from your own upbringing and experience are going to go into those rules. The hippie era was full of that kind of stuff.
Normally, I'd agree. But I've seen fen well into the 21st century make the same goddam argument, with the same appeal to writerly authority. Some of them have even posted here from time to time.
Which makes the novel the story of a young woman fleeing her evil mother and finding the strength to defeat her in an evil subculture. Is that really what she intended to write?
In what way is the subculture depicted as anything like as "evil" overall as the mother is? Every subculture I have ever heard of has abuse enablers, unfortunately. That doesn't mean some of them aren't much better than others, in that department and elsewhere.
Well, her fan dad tries raping her drunkenly by page 80. That's not exactly a strong recommendation. His love of science fiction and the bottle are the things which define him.
As for her mother... well, I freely admit I was not in sympathy with this book. It was hard for me not to read it as the story of a troubled young woman who had a mental illness that expressed itself in delusions about her mother and fairies, who believed the world changed ex post facto because of her personal magic.
That doesn't help matters. His love of science fiction is due to witch influence? Is this supposed to be a good thing?
Maybe all of science fiction in that fictional universe is a construction of witch powers to entrap magical practitioners into worlds of delusion and emotional failure. And maybe we're all Starfleet officers who have been deluded by Q.
No, but his being a distant, abusive, alcoholic weak dude is either a) partially because of the abusive family dynamics, or b) because of abusive family dynamics plus magic, depending if you want to take it as a fantasy or not.
(I think it's reasonable to look at it either way, personally.)
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seth ellis (from livejournal.com)2014-06-12 01:21 am (UTC)(link)
I haven't read the book, but this exchange is giving me the impression that her dad is a drunken abuser because it's her mom's fault and she drove him to it, which on the face of it is not a healthy narrative construction. I hope this is not in fact the case.
It's really not clear why he's a drunken abuser. It's clear that the mother is an emotional abuser and manipulator (I think there's enough objective evidence to conclude that that's not all in the narrator's head), and that the narrator vastly prefers the father although she sees some of his faults (and his other faults are clear to the reader despite the narrator's passing over them). Perhaps his faults are caused by the situation he's in, or perhaps his faults lead him into that situation - the text doesn't take a stand on that.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2014-06-10 09:02 pm
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But here I go.
First of all, "Well, yeah, obviously."
Second of all, I don't know Jo Walton, I've never met her. I read her LJ sometimes, mostly (at one point) to get pointers to Tor.com columns, but otherwise I don't have a connection. So I'm speaking mostly as a reader of her book.
Third of all, the deliberate ignoring of the SF community on this issue was/is, obviously, a problem.
But I really think that this is book which is, in large part, an exploration of the after-effects of both a recent trauma, and a childhood abuse history. It's also about someone who is transitioning to a new culture and having to figure it out. Two new cultures, if you include the SF club, which I do.
Yes, there is a patina of The Golden Age of Science Fiction (as in, 13), but it really could be about a chess club and be doing the same things.
The people who glorified it for being All About Someone Reading SF Novels didn't... really get the point.
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And if you later learned that the author was herself a Jehovah's Witness, how would that shape your interpretation of the book?
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Of course, I also like the book and think it was worth reading, and you don't, so that's fine.
(Also, incidentally, I actually thought she was using Heinlein to reinforce the fact Mor's wrong about her Bad Boyfriend. Which is something non-SF readers could get from context, and something most SF readers would have gotten in the way she intended it.)
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As for her mother... well, I freely admit I was not in sympathy with this book. It was hard for me not to read it as the story of a troubled young woman who had a mental illness that expressed itself in delusions about her mother and fairies, who believed the world changed ex post facto because of her personal magic.
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Well, there was the little matter of his entire life being run by witches.
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Maybe all of science fiction in that fictional universe is a construction of witch powers to entrap magical practitioners into worlds of delusion and emotional failure. And maybe we're all Starfleet officers who have been deluded by Q.
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(I think it's reasonable to look at it either way, personally.)
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