Article: fantasy fiction offensive?

I'd suggest Round Table, but I'm not a mod.

This non-mod also thinks Roundtable makes sense.

Yep, I agree it belongs in RT, too. I've given the go-ahead.

Once it has been moved to RT, indianroads, you can retitle your thread.

And, we're live.

A gentle word of caution: A recent thread on the same subject launched itself to Arkham. As comfortable as we are, it's good to remember we're not in our own living rooms. So, some wise words from Lisa:

The basic premise of AW conduct is to respect your fellow writer.

It's worth remembering that we have a very large membership, and that you are discussing real people who may be hurt by your speculations.

Ask yourself:

Is it true?

Is it kind?

Is it necessary?

If you can't be absolutely positive that at least two of those are true, consider not posting.

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Hmm. I'm up to date on all these controversies and trying to think very carefully before I come down one way or another. Ultimately, I have thoughts on each issue the author raises, put together I can't say I reach the author's conclusion and feel somewhat annoyed they keep bringing up the plight of the poor bookseller caught in the middle of it. Sure, we're a miserable, desperate lot, but not for the reasons the author gives.

At first, I thought they were objecting to Amélie Wen Zhao being Asian and writing about white people. Aaargh the pearl clutching.
Then I read on.
FFS, have these idiots never heard of Russian serfs? Things were bad enough that they backed a revolution to stop the system! 'Cause if you have nothing, Communism sounds like a great idea.
Out of respect for a world I am not part of, I should refrain from asking why it always seems to be YA?
But do mystery readers form little mobs to attack Martha Grimes? Or cookbook users, oh, wait, there was some kind of flare up over some Southern cookbook author. But in general, this kind of carrying on doesn't seem...normal.

I think this sort of thing has become self-defeating.

I wanted to include people of color in my books. I still have a few PoC protags in short stories that I'm going to leave alone. But now I only include non-whites in the "drive by" sense. A middle-aged Asian man behind the counter of the convenience store. A Pakistani woman waiting in line at McDonald's. That sort of thing. I don't even try to portray them as three-dimensional people at all, and that's a shame. It's too risky. I just make sure that they're at least part of the world I create, if the story takes place in this one.

As far as secondary world fantasy settings, the whole thing has gotten to the point that someone will always be offended.

The thing is, it's so ironic. For a while, I thought I was going to have to expand my literary horizons and delve into different cultures. I was actually looking forward to it. I like folklore, and I treat it respectfully. This is often NOT the case with my cultural heritage, fairy tales. A lot of them were written by European Christians for European Christians, and any bastardizations seem to be okay.

So, the double standard bugs me, but there are lots of things I don't want to read. I'll get over it. I just think it's funny that the only thing I'm allowed to write about are experiences of Caucasians.

Really, it's come full circle. It used to be that if you were too Euro-centric, it was considered passively racist. And I get that--the whole, "Hey, we are here!" thing. But now, if I write anything that isn't Euro-centric, I risk being considered racist.

It's a return to "you are what you're born as". There's no way to be anything else, not even as a fictional character. I think too many people are looking for ways to be offended, and it's a shame.

But I also think it will pass. And in the meantime, for me it's worked out okay (except for the duology that I trunked because it had a half-Potawatomi love interest). For future projects, I do really know and love European folklore best. But things are so touchy now, I wonder if that last statement would be considered racist, too...

Is this an issue? Yeah, probably. Some of the people pushing the backlash TBH are kind of skeevy for their own reasons (there's a suspicious nexus between all these opinionists critical of YA diversity readers and those 'sceptical' of non-dysphoric transgender people, for example), but at the same time the backlash against YA writers of insufficient wokeness seems....excessive. And sometimes problematic for its own reasons ... it seems to be a movement of mainly white readers targeting writers of colour, disproportionately. It's also Americocentric AF: witness the French-Chinese author being dragged because her Russian inspired fantasy treated slavery as if slavery might have ever been anything other than an American problem.

Regardless, Twitter seems to be the common factor. I still think the cure is for authors to just ignore Twitter completely.

indianroads said:

I admit being alarmed when I saw this article, but cannot attest to its accuracy. If recall correctly the Spectator is a newspaper I saw on the stands in London, but I don’t know much about it. I hope it’s inaccurate.

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The Spectator is center-right. The Nation mentioned in the article is center-left. But really, both are business that churn out whatever content their audience wants to hear in a desperate bid to stave off their extinction in the Twitter era. If you analyze what their target audience wants to hear, it's easier to decipher the type of product they create. The Spectator's audience of crusty old white people wants to hear how young people who read the Nation are everything wrong with the world. The Nation's audience of woke young white people wants to hear they're more sensitive and less racist than all those other white people, like Spectator readers. And these two competing businesses supply that demand. It's just economics.

Speaking of economics:

People of color who work as sensitivity readers say the publishing industry is so racist it needs to give sensitivity readers more work? Sounds like a conflict of interest, to be honest.

This is something I worry about. I want to have diversity in my novel, but I worry I will be called out as false for it. I especially worry that since my book takes place in post Civil War south that agents and publishers may not want to touch it just because of the setting.

whuuu? I remember reading her work on SYW. I'm really sad to hear this happened.

The thing is, some books get called out for damn good reasons, although it seems the only ones that actually get pulled are from authors who give enough of a damn to care. Plenty of others stay on the shelves and sell buckets, because Twitter just isn't that much of an influence on the bulk of the reading public. (And don't get me started on certain authors who've been outed as creepers but somehow still end up on featured tables at B&N.)

I think it's very difficult to classify this as anything like a trend, even while feeling awful for authors who may have been unjustly piled on. Publishing is still overwhelmingly white and western, and Twitter mobs going too far in some circumstances doesn't change that. When they do go too far? ...Well, that's where I'd expect the publisher to keep backing the book, and help the author with any publicity damage control they could. But a lot of publishers seem to take a hands-off attitude on reader feedback, no matter how damaging it is.

As writers, I think we do have a responsibility to represent things with both subtlety and accuracy. If you're preemptively worried that something you write might have a different impact than you intend...yes, sensitivity readers wouldn't be a bad idea (although I'll say the categories I see represented tend to be very broad-brush and might not be specific enough for a particular book). But I think pre-censoring isn't the way to go.

When I don't like a TV show: I change the channel...

When I don't like a book: I stop reading...

When I don't like a radio station: I change the frequency...

Sometimes I want to read/hear/expose myself to new channels, frequencies, and content though - and in those cases, I try to go in with no ulterior motive.

As a non-published writer with no real teeth in this battle, I can't help but wonder - is this shaming or attacking of other YA authors possibly an attempt to chase other kids out of the pool, so to speak, so those that remain can have the pool to themselves?

There has been a lot of discussion about this over the past several months. At one point, the book was even pulled. The last thing I read suggested they are going ahead with it but with some changes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/books/amelie-wen-zhao-blood-heir.html

I haven't read it, so I can't say whether it handles slavery in a stupid or insensitive way or not. Articles I've read tend to be biased in one direction or the other. I've certainly read recently written fantasy novels that contain material that seems much further over the line than what is allegedly in Blood Heir, though, and they haven't generated this level of scrutiny.

For a long time, I thought writing a world without the kind of colonialism as existed in our own, where where skin color itself isn't what drives people's perceptions of status and normality. But I've heard murmurings that this approach is problematic too, because it ignores the lived realities of people within our own world (I was hoping to offer a fantasy world where racism, as we know it, isn't the primary obstacle people face, though people will still be culturally chauvinistic and invested in systems that are economically unequal).

Are there actually rules publishers follow (even if they are self generated) or do they ultimately base their opinions on what is ham fisted or culturally insensitive on the behavior of twitter mobs of people who haven't even read the books in question?

Couldn't a story set in an alternative or parallel world, where slavery or indenture followed the exact same pattern as chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas, potentially be criticized as embracing biological or cultural determinism?

I've certainly read plenty of fantasy novels that portrayed various forms of slavery with varying degrees of realism and sensitivity, and I don't recall any generating this kind of controversy.

On AW, we've long been telling ourselves that this is just how it is, that no idea is entirely free of problematic content or free of things that could be construed as problematic by some readers, at least. In our quest to create more diverse, inclusive and interesting fantasy worlds, there will be some disagreements, and yes, even blunders. We are supposed to research carefully, employ sensitivity readers (I believe Zhao did this), learn from our mistakes and from our critics, and move on to do even better with future efforts.

But this fracas over Blood Heir doesn't seem to be following the pattern with which I am familiar: a book receives some criticism, then it blows over. This book was almost cancelled.

What gives here? Like I said already, there are fantasy novels being published even now that make much more serious blunders and yet have received relatively little criticism and certainly didn't get pulled in production. There successful writers (many of them male and/or white) who are far more problematic, who have what can be deemed actual bad intent towards various groups, who still are getting contracts too.

Why are they picking on this particular writer while giving so many others passes? Is it because she is new? Are the standards higher, maybe impossibly so, because she is a PoC and a woman?

Jason said:

As a non-published writer with no real teeth in this battle, I can't help but wonder - is this shaming or attacking of other YA authors possibly an attempt to chase other kids out of the pool, so to speak, so those that remain can have the pool to themselves?

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I have no idea what motivates any specific person, but I suspect this isn't generally true, since publishing doesn't work that way.

I do think a lot of people are extraordinarily weary of fantasy settings that replicate white colonialism, and the relentless cluelessness of people who don't get why they're tiresome.

I also think YA twitter can be a little clique-y and scary, but of course most genre spaces have issues like that to some degree or another.

I don't think, in most cases, pulling the book is the answer. That said, I'm not overwhelmingly confident that the invisible hand of the market is going to help here.

We need more diversity in publishing - not just in books, but agents, editors, marketing people, publicists. It's a shockingly homogeneous industry at the moment, and that does nobody any favors.

Roxxsmom said:

Why are they picking on this particular writer while giving so many others passes? Is it because she is new? Are the standards higher, maybe impossibly so, because she is a PoC and a woman?

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I have no knowledge of this situation, but this wouldn't surprise me a bit. Folks with power who eff up don't tend to pay the same way. There's that YA author who famously lost his contract with his publisher, but his is the stuff I still see pushed at Barnes and Noble more than a year later.

One apparently heartfelt criticism I read of this book was that the author presents magic users as a class of people who are marginalized and enslaved because of the dangers posed by their magic. The argument made in this review was that restricting a group because of a risk they pose to others is not the same thing as restricting a group because of their culture, or race or heritage, and doing so could be hurtful to people who have been marginalized for unjustified reasons in real life.

This is true, and if the author was truly attempting to create an analogy between enslavement of magic users in such a society and the enslavement of real-world groups, then it might be an example of something clumsily done or of a failed analogy and should be critiqued as such.

Is it worthy of the level of excoriation this writer received, however? Should a book with a potentially (assuming it was even intended as such--I have no idea) problematic analogy be blocked from publication by online mobs who have only read a particular critic's take on it?

Note that the "magic user as feared/hated/controlled group" is a trope that comes up from time to time in fantasy novels and games, and I don't recall its ever receiving this level of outcry before.

lizmonster said:

We need more diversity in publishing - not just in books, but agents, editors, marketing people, publicists. It's a shockingly homogeneous industry at the moment, and that does nobody any favors.

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QFT.

And once the industry is more diverse overall, I expect there will still be disagreement about the best way to approach certain topics and about who is best suited to tell certain stories. Hopefully, this would result in expanded opportunities within the genre without shutting anyone out and more rational discussions of disagreements.

Roxxsmom said:

Why are they picking on this particular writer while giving so many others passes? Is it because she is new? Are the standards higher, maybe impossibly so, because she is a PoC and a woman?

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I don't think that's it. It's important, I think, to recognize that those leading the charge in these controversies are overwhelmingly American. As a culture we're insular and poorly informed, as well as being poorly read, about the rest of the world, particularly about cultural histories not our own. As a result, too many of us view the world through the small, distorted lens of our own limited understanding. (I think this Slate article encapsulates my own thinking on what went down. The statement by Zhao would seem to support my conclusion. YMMV)

As a reader, it is my earnest desire that mindful writers not capitulate. If you believe the criticism was justified, then work to improve. If not, then don't excuse, explain, or apologize. Stand behind your work. If you don't, we will find ourselves in a literary wasteland. It's also important to note that much of the pile-on in these controversies is by people who have not read the book in question. These people are joiners and followers, not leaders; don't let them lead you into abandoning the stories you worked so diligently to write well and mindfully.

It's a shame that Banned Books Week isn't until September because this year's theme as stated in this article by the American Booksellers Association (ABA) is "Censorship Leaves Us in the Dark. Keep the Light On!” While The American Library Association and the American Booksellers Association fight censorship at the legislative level, they recognize how it comes about and we should acknowledge that as well:

Since it was launched in 1982, Banned Books Week has been shining a light on censorship, and the fight for free expression is as urgent as ever. In recent years, attacks on the right to read have become bolder, as legislatures have introduced bills that would eliminate crucial safeguards for the right to read books that some people find offensive.

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Roxxsmom said:

Note that the "magic user as feared/hated/controlled group" is a trope that comes up from time to time in fantasy novels and games, and I don't recall its ever receiving this level of outcry before.

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It's a super commonplace trope in paranormal/fantasy. Just scrolling through my goodreads for books I've read so far this year, all of these authors wrote books that contained it:

Jacqueline West. Nora Roberts. Sarah Henning. Jennifer Ashley. Nadine Brandes. KF Breene. Sarah J Maas. Leigh Bardugo. Emily Duncan.

Ari Meermans said:

(I think this Slate article encapsulates my own thinking on what went down. The statement by Zhao would seem to support my conclusion. YMMV)

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Thank you, I hadn't seen this article and it seems to be one of the clearer-eyed takes on the controversy, I often feel it's hard to get those before lines are drawn and people fall into camps. I agree somewhat with elements of the original Spectator article, but I've read too many like it to quite reach the breadth of their conclusion. BUT I do admit to finding many of the call-outs I find online disturbing, can rattle off a long list but not gonna, and there are also books that have been pulled I kinda agree with (Jack Gantos, one of my favorite kidslit writers, reacted badly when his recent book got pulled, I can understand his reaction but kinda understand why the publisher did it).

WRD YA Twitter, I spend an appalling amount of time there, oftentimes being paid to do so, and believe it or not I think it can be a fun, empowering way to interact. I've had so many contradictory opinions over the years that it just doesn't pay for me to weigh in anymore, the grounds keeps shifting on every controversy and I have a hard time separating the bad faith actors from good people with opinions I may or may not agree with.