Entry tags:

books, racism, young adult literature

There's a discussion going around in some SF/F corners about a book; the title sounded familiar so I checked it out. Turns out I had saved this book to read at some point. It wasn't because of the premise, though—I didn't even pay attention. I saw YA, I saw fantasy, and I saw a wicked looking cover. I saved it.



However, I won't be reading it.

Tonight I was catching up on the discussions that made me dig through my to-read pile to find out why it sounded so familiar. The more I read the more horrified I became—really? I thought? Really? This post is the first I read, and the comments educational:

If you're writing about the European settling of America—even in fiction, and mayhap especially in fiction—you owe it to the story, to history, to the truth, and most certainly to the millions upon millions of dead Indians, to deal with the corpses. That many dead bodies do not fit under the rug.

Else, from where I'm standing, that story, that exercise in privilege, is in itself an act of harm. Might be the best story she's ever written, but if she disappears the Indians from a story of settling the American West—if she disappears the Indians from the Matter of America (and I believe the story of the settling is one of the key components of the Matter of America)—she's done something fundamentally wrong.

From the comments, transcribing a comment from Amazon:

But I was actively offended by the apparent erasure of indigenous people from this America -- there's nothing on the continent but forests and animals, making for a spooky sort of Manifest Destiny message as the mostly-European settlers make their way across it. The author appears to have considered what this absence would do to her alternate America -- for example, all place-names based on Native naming have been changed (e.g. the Mississippi is now the "Mammoth river"). But this actually adds to the problem, because it suggests Native Americans contributed nothing to early American culture but names. Also, though there are a few black people present among the settlers and Asians are said to exist somewhere, there doesn't seem to have been a system of slavery (or I missed it) or labor exploitation in this world. So I can't help wondering how this alternate America has been settled so effectively. Slavery was evil, yes, but it's also an inescapable part of American history because of the desperate shortage of labor in the country's early years. There simply weren't enough Europeans to do it all, grow at such a breakneck pace, and still feed themselves -- so who did the work here? It's not just that. This world has a railroad system, but we see no Chinese people, so who laid the tracks? For that matter, where are the poor white people, struggling to eat when (at one point in the book) there's a string of crop failures? If they're mentioned, I didn't see them.

This was enough to convince me I never wanted to pick this book up, cool cover or fantasy written by a woman or not. However, I kept digging. I kept digging and the more I did the worst it got. I read this post and felt sick.

Early on she thought that she would have African slaves, possibly even more than there were historically, because, and I quote:

...since there won't be any Native Americans to have already done a certain amount of prepping land for human occupation, nor to be exploited later.

Emphasis mine, and nobody called her on it. No wonder entire races were easy to eliminate; they weren't human. I don't think she was even listening to herself, having a cheery convo about her new book idea among friends and fans of her work.

In SF/F circles, this is being called MammothFail, another entry into the larger canon of RaceFail, where white authors just don't fucking get it. It started in the greatest depth at Pioneer Fantasy: Patricia Wrede’s Thirteenth Child, a review by Jo Walton at Tor. Links are being collected here with the most recent at the top. I think it's important—it's a discussion YA should have, as a group, because the YA SF/F readers of today are the adult SF/F readers of tomorrow, and the way SF/F looks and acts right now—it's awful. We should be demanding more from YA fantasy writers than this (and writers in general). This books should not have so many positive reviews. The fact that it does suggests how easy it is for white readers to completely accept a world in which native peoples were erased—in which native peoples weren't even human, because they weren't white. This is ridiculous.

Patricia Wrede has written an offensive book: a book I won't touch, and book I am posting about to actively discourage people from buying. When we give racism a pass in our entertainment, it makes it that much easier for us to give it a pass in reality, too.