Good Examples and Horrible Warnings

[branchandroot]

So the latest wave of Racefail, centering around Wrede’s new novel and currently being documented by naraht, has led one of my favorite authors to leave the virtual house without her pants. I am appalled that Bujold has let herself do this. To be sure, racial issues have never been one of her strengths. Ethnic and national issues, yes, but everyone in her books tends to be white. Except when they’re heretical invaders who are especially repressive of women and queer people, which, um… yeah, not a shining moment given the isolation in which it stands.

Contemplating this, however, made me think about a few white authors who did manage to get something right and keep their awareness live. And I wanted to document them as examples and possibly useful starting points for authors who wish to likewise learn to keep their pants up. I am in no way suggesting that any of them Got It Right, since I don’t think any author ever manages that on any issue, but these are a few who got something right.

There's Barbara Hambly. Her Benjamin January novels, set in post-Revolutionary New Orleans and environs deals well with the wildly complicated social hierarchies surrounding slavery, race, skin color, freedom, sexuality and cultural background in that place and time. In a way, it probably helps that one of her genres is horror, because she can give that full play when dealing with the horrifying aspects of race relations. Similarly, in Patriot Hearts, her novel about the first four First Ladies, when she writes of Jefferson and Sally Hemings, she deals head-on with the double standard that Jefferson lived as a political proponent of freedom and as a plantation owner who enslaved other human beings, including the mother of some of his children. Hambly herself does not assume she has done a perfect job with these issues, which shows a reasonable ongoing awareness.

Another author who comes to mind is David Weber. In Weber's case, I think he did a good job with a different angle. He has envisioned a future world in which race and gender are, in most of his created world/nations, no longer much of an issue. His characters are of decently varied racial and national extraction; his heroine, Honor, is, by current standards, mixed race. These are not major standards by which most cultures evaluate a person anymore, though; instead they are presented as somewhat similar to a person's accent--a sometime cue to their planet of origin. Planetary origin can be a source of discrimination or hostility, but this is not, happily, arranged along racially loaded lines. That took some attention to detail, which is exactly what any author should be giving to her or his work.

This does not, however, mean that everything is pink, fluffy bunnies, and this is another way I think he does well. Bigotry and prejudice are alive and well; there are plenty of groups who are discriminated against in Weber's future universe. The base problem has not simply been erased. Humans have not miraculously fixed themselves just because the focus has changed. And sometimes he gives us a character with enough in-universe historical acumen to make explicit comparisons between the now outmoded forms of discrimination and the new ones, and point out that both are equally non-sensical.

Jo Clayton (not to be confused with Jo Walton) is especially good at writing about the ways race and class can become intertwined. Part of the dramatic tension in her stories is always made up of the conflict between privileged and non-privileged groups, and the axes of privilege in her stories are realistically tangled among issues of gender, race, class, religion. She has a good touch with showing the ways in which those issues shift over time, too, when she has a character like Brann who lives long enough to see one privileged racial/national group be superseded by another.


So what about you? Are there any authors you would point to who get something right?

Comments

[cimorene]

I'd say CJ Cherryh's Foreigner novels are an example of how a science fiction version of the colonization narrative can be thoughtful and nuanced about all the issues it should be while using alien species as an allegory for race as is traditional in sf. Also definitely one of my top favourite sf universes.

[branchandroot]

*nods* I haven't read those in particular, but Cherryh in general seems to do a good job with all the issues surrounding cultural assimilation.

[feuervogel]

There's a new atevi book out! In hardback, though, so I'm going to wait for the paperback. (Because I can't stand having multiple formats for the same series. *grump*)

She does a bit of colonization stuff in the Alliance-Union books, too. I'm thinking of Downbelow Station and 40,000 in Gehenna. On Downbelow, the natives are Ewoks (they are!), and on Gehenna, they're dinosaurs. Gehenna throws in the ethical questions of the azi (cloned humans who are programmed to act a certain way) *and* a sort of re-colonization thread (when Alliance finds them again.) Complex, and I love it.

[holyschist]

Insofar as I can judge, I think Elizabeth Moon does a good job of portraying a far-future where white is not the default (to varying degrees--white isn't abnormal in the Serrano verse, but it's unusual enough to be remarked upon in the Vatta verse)--most of her main characters are of color, although it's not always clear what their Earth ancestry is (but it's far-future enough that it does matter). At the same time, her far-future universes are not utopias, although the main tensions aren't usually racial.

Not only that, but she has awesome female characters of all ages. And I'm awfully glad she didn't decide writing a 40-something black (*) female spaceship captain wasn't too hard.

*Heris Serrano's race is ambiguous, but I and several other readers I've talked to think she's probably black, although there's probably a lot of Latino in the Serrano family, too, judging by the names.

[branchandroot]

*nods* I really like that she doesn't make it a Big Thing, too. From her characters' pov, that's just the way everything is.

[ex_bacchus495]

Before her death, Octavia Butler was one of those authors who addressed race/class/gender issues head on. Right now I'm working on an article about the "Dark Matter" anthology which features speculative fiction from black authors. It's an older book, but I still think it's relevant.

I'm not too familiar with what's happening with Bujold. I've read one of her books with the slave character Cazaril, but as far as I remember he was white.

[branchandroot]

*nods* Most definitely.

*wry* Thing is, Caz was a prisoner of war and only briefly a galley slave; he spends the entire book being an aristocrat, as he was born. Well, and a saint. Bujold just doesn't deal with racial issues. At all.

[mecurtin]

um, Ursula LeGuin. The gold standard for white-writers-getting-it, IMHO.

[branchandroot]

*nods* Earthsea, definitely. Some of the sf, especially the early stuff, a little less spiffily; she was heavier-handed when she was young.

[pseudo_tsuga]

MT Anderson, who wrote Octavian Nothing that flips the usual portrayal of the American Revolution on its head. It's very hard to describe without spoling the books so I will just quote oyceter:

"It's a look into 18th-century science and the American Revolutionary War and a critique of that war. It's also a brilliant pastiche of letters and diaries and, of course, Octavian's diary. Also, just in case you were confused like I was, it's definitely not about Roman senators. It's also much more than all the elements above, but saying what it is would be ruining the surprise."

[branchandroot]

*interested* Okay, I'll have to put that one on the to-read pile. *grins* Can't resist something set in my time-period.

[avendya]

China Mieville, I think, does a decent job with race.

[branchandroot]

I haven't read Meiville myself, yet, but given what I've heard that makes sense.