B.R. Sanders's Blog, page 17

Guest Post: How to Build Great Fictional Fantasy Cultures

I am beyond excited to turn my blog over to Kameron Hurley today! Kameron Hurley is the author of The Mirror Empire (which I loved) and Empire Ascendant (out now–which I also loved) and the God’s War Trilogy (which is now in my TBR pile waiting to be loved). Hurley has won the Hugo Award, Kitschy Award, and Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer; she has also been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Nebula Award, the Locus Award, BFS Award, the Gemmell Morningstar Award and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Popular Science Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Year’s Best SF, The Lowest Heaven, and Meeting Infinity. Her nonfiction has been featured in The Atlantic, Locus Magazine, and the upcoming collection The Geek Feminist Revolution. Now she’s here to tell us about worldbuilding.

If you are tired of seeing the same pseudo-patriarchy, fake-medieval societies in your purported fantasy novels – fantasy! In which anything is possible! – then please raise your hand.

Yes? All right.

So was I. If you’re a writer who wants to build truly new and unique societies, it takes some work, I won’t lie. We’re all raised with certain expectations of how the world is and what it could be. One of the most insidious jobs of many governments is to scrub out anything from history that doesn’t support the idea that this particular government is the most natural, logical form of government and that all of our fits and starts led us here and we have reached the pinnacle of progress. Very rarely do we realize that social history is not progressive; it’s more like the Wheel of Time. Throughout history we’ve had far more progressive ideas about abortion, same-sex relationships, and a multiplicity of genders than we do today in the West. Not to mention radical ways of governing and organizing ourselves that don’t involve a few men decrying their word as law from atop a high mountain.

It’s worth mentioning this because even though we approach the writing of fantasy knowing that we can, in theory, do anything (because it’s fantasy!), we still encounter a lot of mental roadblocks on the way to making something truly unique. The voices bubble up, voices from critics, from peers, from less imaginative teachers – you can’t do that, that’s not OK, that’s not realistic, that’s silly, that’s wish-fulfillment, that’s crazy, that’s bad.

But I, for one, got into writing speculative fiction because I liked being silly, and crazy, and bad and not-OK, and I liked to fulfill wishes. I liked to push at the edges of things and see what happened.

So let’s start building something different.

Organizational Structure

When I’m building a new society I like to start very broadly with how each individual society organizes itself from the top down (if there’s a top at all), because this is going to bleed into the family structure, and then into the culture. If you have a hierarchy, who’s at the top? Priests and kings? Men? Women? Or are genderqueer folks in places of power? In fact, how many genders are there? (some Native American societies had four). In my Worldbreaker Saga, I have one country with three genders, where the relative power and authority of each gender goes: male, ataisa, and female. I have another with five genders where gender means nothing as far as power goes, but can mean something politically and influence how people organize themselves into political factions.

The reality is that humans have been around with brains like we have now for well over 100,000 years. If you think there’s a way we haven’t organized ourselves at some point, you are probably wrong; so it’s not that it’s never existed, just that we rarely see it. So hop to it.

Family Structure

How are your families constructed? Do multiple generations live under one roof? Is there

Amazon | Goodreads

marriage? If yes, what’s the point of it all – love, cementing family alliances, politics, purely religious custom? What types of genders are allowed to get married? Is there a limit on number of spouses? How are the children raised?

One of the biggest issues I have with the creation of fantasy societies is figuring out what happens to the children in cultures where all the able-bodied folks of whatever gender are working outside the home. This is easily solved with multiple generations living under one roof – it makes sense for young and middle-aged people to go off and work in fields or join the army if there are generations at home to look after children. There is also, of course, the idea of communal childcare, which we definitely don’t see enough in fantasy. The two-parent household is a relatively recent Western invention. If you feel crazy trying to raise a child with just one other co-parent, well, you’re right to feel that way – it’s terribly unnatural and not something humans have typically done. Moving away from extended families in the rise of the industrial era has radically changed how we view what parenting looks like.

Customs and Extended Culture

This is where I see a lot of folks fall down. It’s all very well and good to create fabulous ways for people to organize, but we then have to follow that down the full length of the rabbit hole. How does the way we organize ourselves bleed out into all the other aspects of our society? I would argue that here in the United States, our emphasis on maintaining one’s position through violent patriarchal oppression carries over into all aspects of our society: gun violence, rape, brawls, abusive relationships, and more are all heavily influenced by the power structures within which they happen.

When I created a polyamorous pacifist society in my Worldbreaker Saga, I needed to explore how that would extend into how people interacted with one another. I created a consent based culture where the age of consent was 12. What that meant was that after the age of 12, it was illegal to touch a person without their consent unless they appeared to be in life-threatening distress or were harming someone else. There was no death penalty or corporeal punishment. If you did something moderately bad, you were shunned. Terribly bad and you were exiled.

These are the sorts of things we need to think about when constructing cultures. Every decision you make will impact another decision. This extends to magic, too.

Magic

I almost didn’t include this one, because to be honest, writers already spend more time constructing their magic systems than their cultures, but these things should be intertwined. How magic users are treated in each of the cultures I build depends heavily on what sort of place they come from.

Amazon | Goodreads

So in my violent, hierarchical society where different families vie for the throne, all magic users are expected to become government assassins. Those not suited to it are still relegated to some form of government service. In my consent-based culture, they can run off and do as they like, but if they choose to do that and end up harming someone it’s exile for them, so isn’t it just easier to get training in one of the religious temples? Another society rounds up all their magic users and segregates them into camps, ensuring they are controlled in much the same way as the men in their culture are.

The Butterfly Effect

Finally, a note on the butterfly effect. You can’t change one thing about a culture and have everything else be the same as a 1950’s magazine ad. Oh, Ok, you can but it’s lazy and boring. Giving human beings magic, or putting them in a world full of sentient plants, or saying that polyamory is the law of the land, can’t be the only thing you change if you want a fully realized fictional world. If you want to create truly unique and interesting cultures, you have to follow the change throughout the inner workings of a society to its logical (or fantastic!) conclusion. Technology, childrearing, religious practices, work habits, the relationship (or not) between employees and employers – all of these should be considered when you’re building a world, and all of these things should inform and influence one another.

Because this really is what you’re doing: building a world from the ground up. And if it’s meant to be a fantastic world, shouldn’t it be at least as interesting and complex as our own?

Book Review: EMPIRE ASCENDANT

Amazon | Goodreads

FTC disclosure: I received a free digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

Notes on Diversity:

As with The Mirror Empire, a huge and deliberate amount of diversity is on display in Empire Ascendant. The second installment in the Worldbreaker Saga digs deeper into the explorations and subversions of power and marginalization that were introduced in the first book. For example, more is revealed, very deftly, about the way gender and sexuality function in Dhai Prime vs. Mirror Dhai vs. Saiduan. Issues of dis/ability dig in deeper and deeper, especially in Lilia Sona’s storyline.

While The Mirror Empire was almost exclusively populated by brown people, Empire Ascendant introduced characters I, at least, read as white (in Tordin). The focus remained very strongly on brown voices still in Empire Ascendant.

Review:

It took me forever to write this review because this book sat like a stone in my heart.

Kameron Hurley warned us all on twitter that Terrible Things would befall the characters introduced in The Mirror Empire, and she did not lie. But she also didn’t give the whole truth. Empire Ascendant is a deeply complicated book. Yes, it is dark and brutal. But it is also almost bizarrely hopeful. It was these hopeful moments, these moments of hidden triumph, that made the book work for me.

I confess I typically struggle with second-books-in-trilogies. I think, in many ways, Empire Ascendant suffers from what I can only think of as Two Towers syndrome: after doing such a beautiful job pulling together so many disparate stories in the first volume, Empire Ascendant (like Two Towers) then splits those narratives apart. The story fractures again; the driving force of the book is not ‘how are these threads connected?’ as in The Mirror Empire but ‘what happens now that we know that they are connected?’

As a reader who gloms onto characters more than onto plot, these in-between novels are often difficult for me. I am guessing that Empire Ascendant fits well into the overall arc of the Worldbreaker Saga, but the long breaks from one narrative thread to the other left me wondering and drifting a little as a reader. That said, the book still worked for me because in every thread I was invested. In every thread, I still cared about the narrative.1

I’m trying to write this review without spoilers, so I’ll speak now in generalities about things I wish I could dissect in much greater nuance and specificity. The book delves deeper and personalizes the Tai Mora in ways I loved. Empire Ascendant complicated relationships I thought were stable from the first book and stabilized relationships I thought would never work from The Mirror Empire. Many Terrible Things happen. Many decent people are forced into making brutal and vicious decisions because this is a time of war and invasion.2

But healing happens, too. Oh, god, how I wish I could talk about spoilers here because I want to talk about some the the healing arcs in this book so badly. About how one character’s arc so beautifully mirrors something from the first book and in such an unexpected way. About how a character I’ve been rooting for since the beginning gets something–finally–that they deserve, even as the world seems to fall down around them. About the secret kindness delivered to one character that I hoped for but did not think was going to happen, but did. About how one character, when it seems like the entire world has beaten them, rises again: fierce, vicious, brilliant as ever. Self-destructive and walking a knife’s edge, and precisely, exactly what is needed in that moment in that place–and, again, mirroring someone else’s arc in very clever, very subtle ways.

There is much brutality in Empire Ascendant–and portals, and wastelands, and bizarre murderous alien bug creatures, and Bad Plants–but there is gentleness, too. And regrowth. And small moments of justice that very well could lead to larger moments of justice.

Oma is the star of change. Change is a brutal force–brutal, but, at heart, ambivalent.

1I rarely do this–partly to keep from influencing my own reactions to books, and partly because usually I don’t sit with a book so long before writing a review of it–but I read a couple of other people’s reviews of Empire Ascendant to get the juices flowing before actually writing my own. Some people have had trouble, it seems, connecting with the core plot, or character’s motivations for doing what they do in service of it. I have not had that problem.

At Sirens last week, I gushed over Mirror Empire and listened to other people’s critiques of it. And again, those critiques (that it’s full of terrible people, that it’s not a particularly realistic of portrayal of genocide) are valid. Other people bounce off books I don’t.

These books treat me, as a queer and genderqueer reader with disabilities, with so much respect that I am, frankly, so hungry for them that I am, I think, taking them utterly on their own terms. I fell in love with The Mirror Empire because I felt seen by it, recognized by it, like I could exist in that world with a fullness that is unavailable to me in this one, and I engaged with that book at a deep level because of that. My devotion in no way waned while reading Empire Ascendant. I drank both books in like a man dying of thirst drinks water. I can recite the intricacies of the plot to you in my sleep.

2One critique of The Mirror Empire I’ve heard that I don’t fully agree with is that the book is about bad people doing bad things. I think, actually, the books are about mostly decent (and/or deeply broken and complicated people) doing fucked up things they have to do in order to survive. That’s different than, say, Alex in A Clockwork Orange, who truly is a Bad Person doing Bad Things because he is Bad (until the ending or whatever). But, you know, YMMV.

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Disrupting Publishing Linkspam: 10/13/2015

It’s that time again: that time every week where I round up links to articles written by marginalized people pushing back against oppression in publishing. I’m aggregated as many marginalized voices as possible from as many vectors as possible, and the more intersectional the better. As always if you’ve read something I missed please link it in the comments.

“Reasons I Checked Out Of the Diversity Discussion Du Jour” by Awitin Mo

3. And this is just ranting, of course, because I’m afraid

and unwilling to engage, won’t give people a chance

to prove the rightness of their positions, the purity of their intent.

Besides, this haze of getting by, forgetting and being forgotten

“On Writing Diverse Characters…And Moving Past Passive Aggression” by Suleikha Snyder

Yeah, that’s what I do. And that’s what exhausts me, what makes many label me as histrionic or one of those Angry Women of Color who doesn’t want white people writing diverse books. Inevitably, one way or another, the hurtful book will still continue to hurt me. I will be the Bad Guy. Sure, sometimes it can be fun, even vindicating, to be the Bad Guy. But, mostly, it eats at you. Because you know that calling out race-fail is ultimately worse than writing something racist. That’s the lesson we’re taught. Being a whistleblower often means you get the blowback.

“Why The Mikado is Still Problematic: Cultural Appropriation 101” by Desdemona Chiang at HowlRound

The truth is, no one can make anyone do anything. As long as there’s a privileged person who feels immune and entitled to produce The Mikado or any other kind of work that marginalizes others, those works will live on until the social climate changes.

For the record, I don’t think that hiring Asian people makes The Mikado OK. In my opinion, the show was born out of a fetishistic impulse that reduces the Japanese culture to an object of curiosity, and I don’t think that can be validated or corrected by “appropriate casting” without serious reconstructive dramaturgy.

“The Numbers So Far” at the Cooperative Children’s Book Center Blog

Meg Rosoff Throwdown Roundup

“Sunday Morning Reads” by Edi Campbell

I do need to read about a queer black boy to read about marginalized people. I doneed the children’s book world to be much more literal about what, about who needs to be represented and I need that more than I need to read about self absorbed middle class white kids in apocalyptic England.

I need mirrors like Jeremiah Nebula to remind me that I can face my fears. I need him to remind me how fearfully white the world is and if I need this book as my mirror, then my queer little black boys need books to prop themselves on it like a crutch.

“This Is How The Industry Lives Now: Five Signs You Might Be Suffering From White Privilege” by Camryn Garrett

2. “There are thousands of books:”Where? Do you know any of them? Do you know that there are thousands of books about white people, and yet, we’re still expected to read them? In the past, white books were all that were offered. Racial minorities are just beginning to have their stories told. Yes, there have been many success stories, but for each of those, there are about ten authors being shot down.

PS: Stories about racial minorities written by white people don’t count.

“This Is How I Live Now: An Open Letter To Meg Rosoff” by Kaye M. for Medium

This is how I live now. I sit knee-to-knee with other castoffs from the accepted literary status quo. We compare the titles where we’ve seen glimpses of ourselves, quick darts of a reflection across the Mirror of Erised, never seen full-face, never given a mouth beneath the wide, hungry eyes.

Roundup: October 5-11, 2015

Behold! My Sirens 2015 haul.

Wanderings on the Internet

SIRENS 2015 WAS AWESOME AND I WISH IT WASN’T OVER AND I CAN’T WAIT FOR SIRENS 2016. Did you miss it and wish you hadn’t? You can read my notes from the sessions if you want.
ICYMI: Zharmae has picked up a second series of books about elves set in the same universe as Ariah! Who’s excited? I AM EXCITED.
If you are so inclined, check out the Supernatural Haiku Project.

Writing Update

The Search continues. Sirens was in Denver, but it was all the way on the other side of Denver, so it took two hours by transit to get there. Ample writing time! I wrote about 9k words, bringing the current draft up to 128k words total. Sorcha is machinating. Shayat is defying current orders. As one does.

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Short Story Rec: “All In A Hot And Copper Sky” by Meg Arkenberg in Lightspeed, September 2015

The whole story is free to read here.

I was your replacement, your stand-in for the survivors, because I was a survivor myself. (And what good are survivors otherwise, but to read our sorrows and grievances against the dead, to listen to what the dead cannot hear?)

Meg Arkenberg’s “All In A Hot And Copper Sky” unfurls slowly; it’s like watching a doctor unwrap bandages on a wound. You catch glimpses of the damage, you know there’s something there, something vicious, but it’s slow methodical work to get to the thing underneath. And like a doctor unwrapping a bandage this story is also deeply intimate–a singular, personal character study of a woman who is not allowed, never allowed, to stop grieving someone she lost because her dead lover is a famous killer (savior? the jury of public opinion remains out) from a failed space colony.

The narrator, Dolores, survived. Dolores survived everything: she survived the failed colony which only had survivors, arguably, due to her lover, Socorro’s, actions, then she survived Socorro’s death, too. But survival is not escape. Dolores lives the rest of her life in the shadow of Socorro’s actions, carrying the weight of her lover’s choices forever.

It’s a haunting story. Like “Dustbaby”1, it’s about grief, but it’s about an altogether different kind of grief–a kind of ferocious and public grief that can’t be escaped.

~

1I will not deny that I am a sucker for stories about grief. For reasons.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Sanders Signs New Series With Zharmae!

(download PDF of press release)

B R Sanders Signs New Fantasy Series With Zharmae!

A Tale of Rebellion promises action, romance, and more elves!

DENVER, CO. 7 Oct. 2015 — Following on the critical success of their novel Ariah, the Zharmae Publishing Press has signed B R Sanders once again! Set in the same rich and diverse fantasy universe as Ariah, this series explores new corners of that world, new tensions and new characters.

About A Tale of Rebellion

The humans of Elothnin went west, hungry for wheat and space, but the elves were already there. When the humans burned the elves’ homes, the elves rebelled. For forty long years the rebellion smoldered, but the elves have been beaten back into the gnarled forest, forced to rely on guerrilla tactics and strange bedfellows.

Rethnali has only ever known the rebellion. Born and bred to it, raised by a great elvish general and now a captain herself, Rethnali’s whole life is ruthlessness and strategy. Over the course of four books, Rethnali’s will is tested. Some friendships fray and tatter; surprising new ones blossom. She puts herself and her soldiers in danger over and over again, all in the name of winning back the lands stolen from her people. Sacrifice–what will she sacrifice to see this rebellion through to its end? And who will she be once all those sacrifices have been made?

About B R Sanders

B R Sanders is a genderqueer writer who lives and works in Denver, CO, with their family and two cats. Outside of writing, B has worked as a research psychologist, a labor organizer and a K-12 public education data specialist. B’s previous novels, both set in the fantasy universe of Aerdh, are Resistance and Ariah.

B is social!

Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Newsletter

About The Zharmae Publishing Press

The Zharmae Publishing Press is a Pacific Northwest based Independent Publisher. We

aim to deliver stories with depth, that cut to the heart, and appeal to everyone, from Science Fiction to Memoirs and everything in between.

Zharmae is social!

Website | Blog | Twitter | Facebook

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Disrupting Publishing Linkspam: 10/6/2015

It’s that time again: that time every week where I round up links to articles written by marginalized people pushing back against oppression in publishing. I’m aggregated as many marginalized voices as possible from as many vectors as possible, and the more intersectional the better. As always if you’ve read something I missed please link it in the comments.

“Reflections By and About White People” by Donna Miscolta in The Seattle Review of Books

People of color account for 33 percent of Seattle’s population, according to 2010 census figures. How much enjoyment will this often marginalized group receive from an anthology in which nearly 90 percent of its writers are white?

“Writing Better Trans Characters” by Cheryl Morgan for Strange Horizons

There is such a thing as “cis gaze”; that is, a book can be written because cis people are fascinated by trans people. They want to see us doing those weird trans things that they think we do. Or they want to see us as victims that they can feel sorry for and rescue.

“The ‘Acceptance’ Narrative in Trans YA” by Vee S. for Gay YA

The problem is, the cis protagonists don’t actually work through their transphobia. While the “acceptance” narrative takes the cis character to task for being “mean,” it doesn’t challenge the transphobic beliefs or actions of the character. It doesn’t call out their judgement, fetishization, or objectification of the trans character. It doesn’t challenge the notion that trans men and women aren’t really men or women; that trans people are pretending, or putting on an act; that it’s ok to be wishy-washy on pronouns.

“Normalizing Marginalized Identities in Fantasy and Science Fiction” by Malinda Lo

There simply are no black-and-white answers to writing fiction with characters who are traditionally marginalized, and the first thing writers should do is accept this. Whatever choice you make as a writer can be questioned by readers and critics, especially when it comes to writing diversity, which has often been done poorly and thoughtlessly. Again, whatever choice you make can be questioned, so it’s important to think carefully about why you made those choices, keeping in mind that your book is yours, and your duty as a writer is to be true to the story you want to tell.

“Becoming My Own Audience” by Dahlia Adler for Queer Romance Month

Sometimes what happens when you write queer YA is you realize you are really getting into writing queer YA. And you are feeling a weird, dull ache when you write certain scenes and realize you’ve written yourself into places you never expected. That you’re writing wish fulfillment you never thought would be your wishes.

“Hidden Voices: How Being a Teen in the At-Risk School System Almost Silenced Me” by Kara Barbieri for #WriteInclusively at SCWrite

They saw us as statistics. They saw the black criminal and the white drug addict. They saw the violent teenage boy and the emotional teenage girl. They saw the pregnant whore and the gangbanger father. The illegal immigrant and the child of a family that couldn’t afford the cat-food they called lunch. And slowly, we began to conform to those statistics. Because when someone says you’re broken, or stupid, or dangerous, or irredeemable enough times, you begin to believe it. Slowly, we were molded into the mindset they had for us. Our voices, once loud, were getting softer and softer.

Roundup: September 28-October 4, 2015

click image to play game

Wanderings on the Internet

Free interactive fiction alert! Lullabies and Moss is live and playable! Imagine you’re in a forest. Imagine night is falling. Imagine shit starts getting weird. What choices do you make to survive?
Psst…this week is Sirens 2015! If you’re in Denver and you’ll be at the conference, come by! I’ll be talking about worldbuilding on Friday, and I’ll be doing book signings on Friday and Saturday. More info on that is here.
Hey! My press is publishing free horror shorts all month long! Keep your eyes peeled, because I’ve got one in the pipeline :)
All season 2 haikus are up now at the Supernatural Haiku Project tumblr.
Also, stayed tuned because there’s a big announcement coming up Wednesday (just FYI).

Writing Update

The Search keeps going! I’m definitely in the endzone, and I’ve started making notes about the direction I want the rewrite to go in, but I’ve still got to write this draft to the end. 5k more words this week brings the draft up to 119k words in total.

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Book Review: OOGA BOOGA [contains minor spoilers]

Amazon | Goodreads

FTC disclosure: I received a free digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

Notes on Diversity (this section has some spoilers):

The first thing you need to know about Gerry Walker’s Ooga Booga is that it’s a book written to interrogate and extrapolate the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement. In other words, it’s a book steeped in Blackness. All the central players in the book are Black, and their Blackness is key to the plot: the book literally hinges on genetic differences between Black and non-Black individuals. I…had questions about this, which I’ll get into in the review downstream, but suffice to say the cast was predominately Black. Walker makes a point of acknowledging that Black individuals come in all different skin tones, too, which is another key element of the plot I’ll get to in a minute.

But. The book goes utterly sideways with regard to its representation of queer characters. A prominent character is queer–I thought at first, just a pleasant happens-to-be-queer character– and is revealed to be a classic duplicitious conniving snake-in-the-grass queer character. There was literally no reason for this that I can think of. He was just…the only queer in the book, and he was heartless and evil. Because. Reasons.

Also, there is an Fat Evil Scientist who is at times jolly. FYI.

But. Walker does use the speculative fiction conceits he introduces in the book to explore, with some nuance and respect, the intersections of race, poverty, and sudden dis/ability to great effect.

What I’m saying is in terms of diversity–specifically in terms of intersectionality–Ooga Booga tries very hard. It gets some things right and gets some things wrong.

Review:

The Black Lives Matter movement mattered1. It mattered enough, actually, that Black boycotts finally shut things down. Corporations finally noticed the full brunt of Black earning power. A trap was set. Some years in the future, Black people begin to fall prey to a mysterious disease, one that strikes them down, strips them from language, replacing it with something called New Speek–a burst of undulating, ever-changing consonants and vowel sounds that can’t be learned.2 As the New Speekers transition, they are ripped from their homes, taken to camps. They lose their jobs. Reentry to society is troubled at best when they do regain English. And, inevitably, there are shootings. The context Walker sets up here is pitch-perfect. It is absolutely eerie. The first chapter, which chronicles New Speeker Patient Zero–a five year old girl–is heartbreaking.

From there, the book redirects its attention onto Vanessa Landing, a white-passing biracial woman who transitions to New Speek at literally the worst possible moment. Her world comes crashing down around her. She loses her high-powered job and is shunned by her former friends. Her veneer of whiteness is shattered. As she rebuilds her life from the ground up, she does so fueled by righteous fury at how Newspeekers are being treated. She becomes an activist, campaigning for their rights. Into her orbit comes her faithful assistant Fisher Coach, a rising rap star named Perry Ironside (who raps in New Speek as Ooga Booga), and her eventual husband, the dull but immensely malleable Eric Dickerson. From there the plot drifts between very a solid political thriller and a frankly saccharine star-crossed romance.

Ooga Booga has its strong points. Walker’s analysis of how Black people are corralled and controlled is cogent and full of horror. New Speek is brilliant–a perfect double edged sword, at once potentially dehumanizing those it affects while simultaneously giving them a secret way to communicate and organize resistance. And, really, given the way Black people are already forced to code switch New Speek as an extrapolation is not far off the mark. Ooga Booga is best when articulating these tensions and exploring them.

But Ooga Booga has deep weaknesses, too. I think the book would have been stronger if  it had focused on a secondary character, Cam Ventura, who never regained English after transitioning to NewSpeek. He is forced to run and scramble and organizes Newspeekers from the fringes of society. Vanessa Landing herself struck me as an odd choice–why focus on someone so white-passing? Her claims to to her Black identity in the text are inherently validated by her ability to speak New Speek, but never once does anyone interrogate her light-skin privilege or the fact that perhaps she is adopted by the mainstream as an acceptable figurehead for Newspeekers precisely because of her ability to pass as a white woman. Once in the text Vanessa makes mention of the Black community’s need to address colorism within its ranks, but nothing past that is mentioned despite constant mentions of her light eyes and blond hair and pale skin. This, combined with the reliance on lazy tropes (evil queer, evil fat person) and the constant stream of questions I had about how New Speek functioned and who transitioned and why left me distracted while I read the book. After the extraordinary first chapter I never fully engaged with the text again.

Your mileage may vary. My guess is that some people will read this book and be able to skim right past the tropes that rubbed me so wrong. Some people are not nearly so over-thinky as me and will not have so many questions about why some members of the population transitioned to New Speek while others did not. For those people, this may be a five star book. For me, the strengths and weaknesses of Ooga Booga existed in a near-equal and uneasy balance.

1This is clear in the back cover copy, which you can read in the Goodreads or Amazon blurbs, but it wasn’t actually clear in the text of the book until, I think, 70% of the way through. As I read the book, I thought I was reading a sort of alternate-universe book where the events happening were that universe’s version of our Black Lives Matters movement. When it was revealed that no, actually, it was the same universe but the book was set thirty or so years in the future I was momentarily confused.

2The Big Reveal here actually seemed to have more to do with melanin production than African ancestry directly. This raised questions for me–were there dark-skinned Asian individuals who transitioned to New Speek? If the main character, Vanessa Landing, a biracial women who is extremely white-passing can transition to New Speek, then how precisely is it tied to melanin production? I know I’m overthinking this, getting far too deep in the weeds here, but I have questions. And this conception of Blackness kept leading back to a one-drop-rule line of thinking wrapped up in discussions of “melanin production” without unpacking that there are other racial categories that also produce melanin. It just read as clumsy to me, or possibly unfinished.

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On Writing Race While White

In my corner of the internet, there is a sense among some that it can be hard out there for a white writer.1 My corner of the internet is one concerned with diversity in publishing, oppression in publishing, and how to dismantle white supremacy in both the structure of publishing as an industry and in literature through characters as representations. The focus is not on race exclusively–race is one axis of oppression, one that intersects with other axes of oppression (gender, sexuality, dis/ability, class, citizenship status, language, size). Shit is complicated, is what I’m saying. But for the purposes of this this post, I’m locating myself as a white person interested in issues of race in publishing, which puts me in a position of privilege for this discussion.2

I’m not writing this post as a how-to for others, but I am articulating this for my own clarity. Take from it what you will.

So. I am a white writer that looks at publishing and sees yet another institution rife with racism. I see writers of color, and I want to support them how and when I can. I listen to the laments of my partner, a woman of color, as she talks to me about how she can’t find any good representation of herself in the books she wants to read, and never could as a kid, and what a weight that is on her.

I am a white writer who, once upon a time, did academic research on racial identity theory, power, and privilege.

I am a white writer who is raising a white child with a woman of color and a white man. That is tricky water to navigate.

I am a white writer who thinks about whiteness a lot. I am a white writer who wants to interrogate whiteness in fiction and in the publishing industry.

But in this conversation, I am still a white writer.

I’ve come to realize in working through my white privilege–which is an ever-evolving thing, a continual thing, you never finish that process–that much of the work on my end is learning to shut up. To stop talking. To be quiet. To give space. To listen.

I forgot to do that when it came to writing. I got arrogant, I think, like a lot of white writers do, and I dove into the diversity thing with both feet. I have one published story out already written from the perspective of a South Asian girl–it’s called “Beneath the Dane Hills”, and you can read it for free here. I’m not a widely read author, and I doubt more than a dozen of people have read it. I haven’t gotten pushback for it, but that doesn’t mean I got it right. That doesn’t mean that was my story to tell. I’m copping to that here. I’m linking to the story here not for cookies but for call-outs; this is an invitation for people to read it and tell me what I did wrong, where I overstepped, if they feel up to it. Because in hindsight, I don’t think I should have written that story from that perspective.

My thinking was this as I wrote “Beneath the Dane Hills”: why couldn’t the MC be a POC? There wasn’t any reason why not–except that I actually don’t know shit about that lived experience. Oops. And as I drafted the story, Pooja’s ethnicity became part of the story. The racism she experienced wove into the meat of the story. Of course it did–that’s part of her everyday life. But it’s not part of my everyday life, and there’s no way I got the specifics right. It’s just a guess. Pooja is queer, and a baby butch, and from a low class background; for those pieces I could draw on my own experiences. For those parts I know I’m tapping into something real. But her racialized experiences? All I’ve got to go one is research (I did do research) and hearsay. But that’s not enough. Not if someone actually like Pooja reads it and it rankles her because of course that’s how a white writer would write it.

That’s how we get it wrong. We think we know, but we don’t. Even when we really, really

I have social power over writers of color. Me publishing inauthentic MC of color contributes to a white supremacist publishing industry. :(

pay attention, we don’t know. We don’t know the specificities, the actual wounds that are dealt from living in racism. We’ll never write it authentically; it’ll only ever be an approximation. Do I want to add to the tidal wave of ‘just approximations’ that people of color have vomited back to them over and over again on the daily? I…don’t think I do.

I have three other stories on the market right now that do the same thing that “Beneath the Dane Hills” does. See? I kept doing it. I’m trying to decide what to do with them. Do I wait until they’re rejected, then quietly file them in a drawer? Do I pull them from consideration? Likely they will be rejected anyway. Once they are rejected, then what do I do with them? I had a thought to self-publish them, post them for free, make them available to be read, but at no cost so that they are not taking any spaces from writers of color or profits. But they are still out there, proof that I did do this and available for critique.

There are still ways for me to write about race. And I still should. I tackled issues of race, for example, in Ariah. It was a central theme throughout–Ariah experience racism fairly constantly. Many of the elves are coded as Black (dark-skinned, kinky hair). This is a different way to handle race, though. Its what I think of as the Ursula K. Le Guin spec fic sidestep:

As a young, White, upper-middle-class writer, I chose, in Jennifer’s terms, to play safe. Most of my characters in fantasy and sf are people of color, but they’re in the “future,” or on another planet. Heather in Lathe of Heaven is Black, but it’s in the “future.” Genly Ai in Left Hand of Darkness is a Black man from a future Earth, nobody in the story has white skin, everybody is definitely Other — but “alien” in the sf sense, not in the sense of cultural alienation.

black elves fighting racism! similar to but not the same as Black people’s experience of real-world racism

So, I do this in my Aerdh universe books and stories, and I feel comfortable interrogating racism and its devastating effects through this distanced lens I’m running less of a chance that I’ll step on readers’ toes by getting specifics wrongs like I will in something like “Beneath the Dane Hills” where I’m drawing on real people’s real lived experiences of oppression. The Aerdh universe is drawing parallels with those lived experiences, but there’s not an expectation of a one-to-one match, so there’s less of a chance of a reader wanting to throw the book across the room (i.e. getting seriously microaggressed) when their direct experience isn’t precisely/completely represented.

Note that to do this sidestep well I still have to do my dang research. I still have to read a ton about power structures, how racism develops, how it functions, how its nasty tendrils seep into everything around us. How it manifests in a thousand different ways. I still have to listen and learn from my friends of color. And I still may get it wrong. And if I do I have to take the criticism and absorb it thoughtfully.

I guess, in sum, I can write whatever I want. No one is going to stop me but me. I am trying to write well–both in terms of quality and in terms of ethics. I’ve been asking myself, of my pieces, what space is this taking up? How will a reader of color react to this on finding out that a white writer wrote it? What don’t I know? Given how much, of late, I’ve been rubbed wrong by straight writers writing Tragic Queers what am I writing wrong about race without even knowing it?

I should just…stop. Unless I’m 100% comfortable, I should stop. There are places to push yourself as a writer, and there are places to stay comfortable. This is a place, I think, where I should stay comfortable, because to write into narratives of real, existing people of color about their own experiences with race3 is to write past those actual people. It’s an intrusion.

I’ll keep reading and promoting the work of writers of color writing their own experiences. I’ll keep addressing it sideways. I’ll keep writing white characters interrogating whiteness. I’ll keep speaking up, personally, about whiteness. But I don’t think I should keep writing stories like “Beneath the Dane Hills.”

~

1The internet is a many-cornered place. There are plenty of white writers out there utterly uninterested in this discussion and/or unaware it’s taking place. But many white writers are thinking through these issues. Kayla Whaley has a really good post about these issues. The blog Reading While White is excellent. My take on this is that it isn’t actually hard out there for us because it isn’t about us. If we’re uncomfortable, it’s because we’re centering conversations on ourselves that shouldn’t be centered on us in the first place.

2Not At All Interested in denials of white privilege in this space. Just, nope. Not At All Interested in that. Comments are moderated on my blog, and comments contesting that white people have privilege over people of color will never see the light of day.

3That doesn’t mean people of color will never, ever appear in my fiction that is set in the real world. Or that they will be the main characters. I don’t think I should whitewash my fiction; that’s not the answer either. But it does mean that I really shouldn’t write stories about real-world racism when I don’t experience it. I just…I’m never going to get that right, and trying to write that, and then having the audacity to try and sell it when there are writers of color out there doing it a million times better. Fuck. I am so white and entitled and I am sorry.

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