Sunday, August 16, 2015

I'm Sure You'll All Agree

I read the 100 “best” fantasy and sci-fi novels - and they were shockingly offensive

16 comments:

Todd Mason said...

Well this one, as I noted on FM, is remarkably feckless. Could've made a good point if the author knew wild honey from a hole in the ground, as opposed to misunderstanding half of what she read for the article, and that the least of her lapses.

As I've mentioned on FaceBook, I'll be damned if I'll let it go unchallenged, the notion of judging the entirety of speculative fiction by LORD FOUL'S BANE, the idiocy of Donaldson's novel extending to its title, and to take this NPR popularity poll at all seriously leads her to pair A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ and Raymond Feist novels, as a measure of how utterly misogynist fantastic fiction is...a bit like trying to measure the misogyny of contemporary mimetic fiction as a whole through a study of Hemingway and Harold Robbins. But they won a poll! Surely they sum the field!

Anonymous said...


I would encourage anyone who reads the linked piece to also read some of her "reviews" she links to. In several reviews I looked at she often quotes or summarizes from the novels. In those, she either misunderstands what she has read or is willfully misrepresenting what is in the novel. She is not a person to be taken seriously.

Matthew said...

It seems to me that nowadays there are people who's very job is to be offended by things.

Patrick Murtha said...

I consider myself politically progressive, and I am gay as well, but I find this sort of ahistorical politically correct nonsense to be depressing or annoying, depending on my mood. It is cropping up everywhere these days. There is definitely a contest on to see who can go through life the most offended.

Unknown said...

I thought it was pretty much nonsense. But fun to gripe about.

Rick Robinson said...

Obviously a person who does not grasp the concept of historical context. She probably also does not let her children run and play because it's "not safe", and swoons when Donald Trump speaks. Bah.

Jeff Meyerson said...

Come back when you grow up, girl.

But that's a song from before your time too.

Jeff

Don Coffin said...

Oddly, I don't disagree with what might be her point (I'm not sure, because I didn't think she was being very coherent)--that some of the SF classics are difficult to read from a contemporary perspective. But that's true of almost all fiction; the casual anti-Semitism in Sayers and Christie, for example, to say nothing of their treatment of Blacks; the role of women in most "hard-boiled" 1920s/30s/50s/50s (and even more recently) mysteries. And that's not even getting into "mainstream" fiction--try reading some early John Updike, and Hemmingway can be something of a trial.

One of my occasional fantasies is to imagine Erle Stanley Gardner's Donald Lam/Bertha Cool books re-written with Lam as a woman (who does all the work of solving the mysteries) and Cool as a man.

Deb said...

I did not read this article before I made my comment on the other sf post (the one about eight sf books with outdated technology that you should still read), but I said the rigid gender roles in a lot of classic sf is often disheartening because the writer had the imagination to create a technological wonderland, but no imagination when it came to women's participation in said world. That being said, I think the writer of this article is laying it on a bit thick.

Deb said...

I'd also add that the classism of (mostly British) sf of the 1950s & 1960s is just as bad. Jo Walton addresses this in her wonderful book about rereading her favorite sf, WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO GREAT? She says that many upper- and upper-middle-class writers (I recalls she specifically calls out Neville Shute) were appalled at how much the working classes started to "matter" after WWII, so there were a plethora if books where plague or war or natural disaster wiped out almost everyone and it was up to courageous, white, middle-class men and boys to save what remained of the world. It's really quite interesting when you start reading books like ON THE BEACH, NO BLADE OF GRASS, or DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS through that lens.

/But, as I said before, if a story grabs me, I can overlook a lot.

Unknown said...

I love WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO GREAT. And of course Walton makes a good point there.

Patrick Murtha said...

Not meaning to criticize anyone's use of language or their individual reactions, BUT, I don't understand we feel called upon to excuse, overlook, condemn, endorse, deplore, or celebrate the past when it is not asking that of us. "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." As a historian, I try to keep this L.P. Hartley quotation firmly in mind, and that way I am able to enjoy and learn from my visits to the past without that presumptive need to make my feelings known. I am very suspicious of those who broadcast their reactions to the past as a way of buttressing their political bona fides in the present. Ooh, slavery was bad! Fascism was bad! And misogyny and homophobia and colonialism and classism, bad, bad, bad! Who knew? Identifying these phemonena in the past and tut-tutting over them retrospectively is like shooting fish in a barrel, or setting up and knocking down straw men all day long. It's not an achievement.

Todd Mason said...
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Todd Mason said...
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Todd Mason said...

And to the extent it is useful, as such assessment can be (such as Walton's, or Joanna Russ's from 40-45 years ago), someone doing such a half-assed, in every way, job of it should not be rewarded with prominent placement in a politcal/cultural magazine that clearly was proud to highlight the editors' ignorance (see their headline) as much as that of the writer of this piece. There is nothing not, at least in part, wrong with this essay (as everyone notes above), which is why I brought it to the attention of those I have.

Jeff Meyerson said...

I agree about the Walton book and Deb's comments. I also like Walton's fiction.

This woman seems very young and very humorless to me.

Jeff M.