Review: All the Windwracked Stars.

Bear, Elizabeth. All the Windwracked Stars. New York: Tor Books, 2008.

This evening I finished All the Windwracked Stars by Elizabeth Bear (matociquala), and I have to say, I liked it quite a lot, particularly since I think I spotted a few sly homages to Sarah Monette's novel Mélusine (neighborhoods named Britomart, young street man with a scar on his face...yeah). In brief, it's a story about Muire, an immortal valkyrie-by-a-less-sterotypical-name who survives Ragnarok, essentially, and then survives the human civilization that comes after the end of the world, and then comes to the brink of its own end, so that there is only one city left in the world...and the wolf who swallowed the sun, who betrayed both sides at Ragnarok, comes back to Eiledon to finish it off. Along the way Muire discovers that the souls of her brothers and sisters who fell on the last battlefield are coming back into the world, and that nothing is ever as it seems; more, I think, would spoil the book away. I have to say, I really like Bear's writing style--she has a way with turns of phrase and precise description. The Technomancer who rules Eiledon (she was a university dean before the Desolation, hah) winds up creating a race of sentient, but subservient, human-animal hybrids, and Muire's reaction to them was interesting--well, especially in light of recent events, it strikes me as a direct metaphor for awakening from racism, i.e. learning to see the Other not as an inhuman, massed group but as a group of non-other individuals, and to Muire's (and Bear's) credit Muire comes to realize the prejudice of her earlier attitudes, though I'd be interested to hear other people's reactions to Muire's final interactions with Christokos, the rat-mage. On the other hand, the subjectivity of Selene, the leopard hybrid who is the primary unman character, is wonderfully done, and this is a smaller issue in a book whose larger theme is the sheer perverse cussed tenacity of life. Life hangs on, and finds a way. It's not pretty, and it's painful, but there it is. Apparently there are a sequel and a prequel in the works, and I'm looking forward to both books. Oh, I almost forgot! Double bonus points to Bear for making Muire wield, of all things, a hardangr fiddle in her wizard's duel. That's right, a hardangr fiddle! Eight-stringed fiddle squee! Which reminded me, incidentally, of another thing I liked about the book--Bear takes the time to show us the characters from others' perspectives, even that of their enemies, which adds another dimension that's quite illuminating.

On the other hand, I picked up Ink & Steel the other day, and simply could not force myself past the prologue. I really don't need to read more Elizabethan fantasy. Let's give that one a rest and move on, shall we? Can't we have War of the Three Kingdoms fantasy? Or anything else but? 

Your daily cup of fail.

Disclaimer/reminder: This post is not about me.

That said, though, I find that I do have something more to say that's at least tangentially related to, or somewhat inspired by, the ongoing racefail contretemps (it's sort of like the Worm Ouroboros at this point--the Internet is an echo chamber, not a series of tubes), namely the intersection (as in Venn diagrams) between genre, racism, and place.

In one of the many posts I've read on this topic, someone (and I'll try to find the link) said that racism is the systematic privileging of white people over everyone else (I'm paraphrasing), which is very true. But when I read that, I immediately added an "in America!" on at the end of the sentence in my head, since there are very definitely countries (cough! Japan! cough!) where the racial hierarchy is not quite so clear. A number of people asked me about race in Japan after I got back, and I think I've finally come up with a pithy way to formulate what I observed, a la what my 9th grade history teacher taught us about Confucianist yin-yang theory: yin is superior to yang in all areas in which yang has no presence. Similarly, in Japan white people occupy a distinct position of privilege, but one that is very much subordinated to Japanese-ness, and Japanese people. But that's a different discussion.

All of which is to say, I think that most of the discussion so far as I have encountered it has been centered implicitly in America, the excellent posts of deepad notwithstanding--which is completely valid, though sadly unexamined, as most of the genre publishers are either explicitly American or local subsidiaries of global companies, and I think that most people in the discussion are residents of the States. [Why yes I am generalizing, and am open to specific corrections/rebuttals.] Moving along, I think part of the reason sff is still full of people who just don't get it is that it is explicitly characterized (I'm tempted to type "ghettoized") as a genre, out of the "mainstream" (though publishing in general is pretty white, judging by my bookshelf). I think another part of the problem is the paucity of literature in translation in America in general, and of science fiction and fantasy in particular. I mean, is Japan Sinks even still in print in translation outside of an academic context/edition? What about all the other Japanese science fiction that's great and completely untranslated? And while Japan is the only non-English speaking country I can speak of from literate experience, I'd be willing to bet the situation is quite similar in other countries. We're missing out on a lot of the world, and we don't even know it.

I think the root cause of the paucity of translated literature in this country is part of a story like cindy_pon's, or the white-washing of the Avatar movie. I think both of those stories are primarily artifacts of racism/the institutionalized privileging of white people/whiteness, but there's that xenophobic provincialism I hate at work too. In other words: I'm not sure that the thing keeping white Nobel laureates from having their work published and/or read in the States is exactly the same as what's keeping more chromatic authors, settings, characters, etc out of sf/f, but I'm dead certain they're related.

I had more to say about "genre" versus "not-genre", but I'm going to call it a night instead. I'll try to add specific links to this post as time permits.