The Matter Of Seggri Pdf
Vinay Pettyjohn
Interesting coincidence - I was looking up Piers Anthony just recently, because I had a vague memory that some book by him had done "white people as endangered species" with way less racist fail than that "Save the Pearls" series, primarily because it was set in a future where the vast majority of the human race had intermixed to the point of homogenisation, and therefore ALL present-day ethnicities had almost vanished. So there were some white kids AND some black kids AND some asian kids, maybe some kids from other races too, all being raised in separate little fake villages otherwise populated by standard-brown people in [color]face, where each village was assigned to re-create whatever historical culture the People In Charge had decided was appropriate. (The book is Race Against Time - the Amazon reviewers only have complaints about the quality of the storytelling, not about racism, though of course that doesn't guarantee anything.)
But yeah, do I trust Piers Anthony to not fail in multiple dimensions when writing a teenage girl who's been raised in something resembling a medieval Chinese village? Oh hell to the no.
This happens to me a lot...
Spouse has the example of having bought Disney's The Aristocats for the kids and then realized it has one incredibly racist scene that I think may have been cleaned up in later additions. In general things have to be fairly blatant to affend Mr. Sparky, partly due to racism in his (abusive, neglectful) childhood.
Not really upon revisiting, but Spouse was all enthusiastic about The Ugly Truth, and I figured it would be fairly enjoyable because Gerard Butler's ass, etc. It's not a feminist work, and what annoyed me most about the plot was the fact that Katherine Heigl's character didn't sleep with the guy she'd been after the whole movie before finding True Love.
But the main thing that weirded me out is that I perceived her character as mentally ill, but no one in the movie looks at it that way. She hides in a closet, at work, because she's afraid a segment she produced will be poorly received. I am familiar with this type of behavior, having done it, and people don't tend to smile on it. Her character is the boss, but she has bosses, and friends, and no one suggests, even jokingly, that maybe this level of anxiety is unhealthy/dysfunctional and something she could get help with.
Mythbusters has tons of "insane" and "crazy" thrown around like there's no tomorrow. It's started to bother me a lot, even though the connotations is usually awesome-cool rather than evil-bad.
I've noticed on rereading that while Le Guin has great touch for sexual orientation being present in her worlds, they tend to be trans-excluding. I can think of Gethen's unvoiced fixed-gender persons who are not treated very nicely by the dominant cultures, and in one of the stories in Birthday of the World collection there's a woman in O presenting as man. But most of the cultures presented are very strictly gendered and there's not much room for other expression. Particularly 11-Soro (in Solitude) and Seggri (in Matter of Seggri)seem just downright horrifying, especially for transwomen. (I'd love to talk about Solitude more. It's a lovely story of bare bones civilization, it's all so visible when the clutter of social dominance is removed. But I am an introvert, in an introvert culture, and I assume other people would read it very differently.)
I find myself wondering how the Calormenes in the next Narnia movies are going to be handled. I remember being annoyed even as a kid that they were obviously both Middle Eastern and evil for no good reason I could figure out.
So far they've managed to avoid the issue, but once they get around to making The Horse and His Boy and the Last Battle...I just don't see how they can stay true to the books without pissing off the entire collective Arab community.
I myself am an atheist, and I used to read Randi's weekly newsletter, for about three months, before I could no longer put up with it. Randi is one of the worst anti-theist bigots I have ever come across.
Tom Clancy was one of the first authors I read, along with Michael Crichton, Stephen King, and John Grisham, when I was in my teens and just discovering novels that were not Christian fiction, so I was really into his work. I checked out "The Sum of all Fears" from the library the other day, and...wow. How can an author whose name is almost universally synonymous with "too much research and detail" be incapable of writing a woman that rings true to me? And how can a 900-page novel only pass the Bechdel test because of a half-page conversation?
I'm actually thinking about a short deconstruction of it, not because I'm upset, but because it's just annoying. This would be my first decon, and it might be too long for me to handle.
Well, there's no rule that it has to be based on content. A series of thematic posts could work, for example; each one touching on the 900 pages' collective problems with X, next week with Y, next week with W (just to surprise people).
I re-read the Little House series as an adult. (Books, not TV show. I watched the TV show a few times growing up but was never a regular viewer, in part because I was a literary purist and was offended by Michael Landon's lack of a beard.)
I knew going in that these were really racist books. The thing that really caught my attention was the extent to which the fact that Ma and Pa are going something totally fucked up in "Little House on the Prairie" (where they deliberately settle on Indian land) is actually called out by Laura and vigorously squelched. (She asks, where will the Indians go? West, her parents tell her. She asks something like, will they be upset? and won't they eventually run out of west? and her parents tell her to shut up and go to sleep.) When two Indian men come into her house, she describes people who are starving to death -- she doesn't say, "these men were starving," but she describes the fact that she can see every one of their ribs, jutting out against their skin. As a kid, I didn't realize what she was describing but what's really shocking (not problematic, exactly -- in a very weird way this book was LESS problematic than I had expected from my memories of it!) is that she doesn't hide, at all, what they're doing. She's really honest about it; it's right there, in front of you.
No, what really took me by surprise when I re-read these books was how absolutely terrible the parents are. My mother pointed out to me at some point that Pa dragged the family away from Wisconsin, which has some of the most fertile farmland in the U.S. and where they had family members and a support system, and moved them again and again. Every time they moved, their situation got worse, and at the point when they really SHOULD have said "on to Oregon!" Ma put her foot down and they wound up in the Dakotas, on really terrible land. (If you're going to farm in North Dakota you probably want irrigation sprinklers, which Pa couldn't very well install in the 1880s.)
But while Pa is shiftless and irresponsible, Ma is emotionally abusive. I mean, she openly favors Mary, AND she does it in ways that enlist outsiders (like when she instructs the girls to ask their beloved aunt whether she likes "golden curls or brown curls" better -- WHAT THE HELL, LADY?) She pretty much set them up in a horrible rivalry, which got derailed by Mary's sudden disability (but then Laura's long-time jealousy was used to make her feel responsible for her sister.)
Laura's sense of irrational responsibility was used to manipulate her into illegally teaching school. She was FIFTEEN when she became a teacher (and everyone knew it; there were lots of winks and nudges because presumably someone who was old enough -- i.e., sixteen -- would have refused a posting this terrible). She was sent to live with total strangers, one of whom repeatedly threatened everyone else in the house with a knife.
This isn't just a matter of "times were hard! things were different!" She led a terrible life, that got romanticized a great deal by her uncredited co-author, Rose the Libertarian.
(I knew that Rose had changed things -- for example, they weren't actually 25 miles from Independence, on their farm in Kansas -- they were something like 5 miles away, and she changed it to 25 miles to make it more dramatic. So after re-reading the series, I tracked down some biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder to see what else got changed. The bit I find most fascinating: during the Long Winter, which really was every bit as awful as she describes, the Ingalls family had a whole additional family living with them. Some people got stranded in DeSmet when the trains stopped running, and SOMEONE had to take them in. Laura loathed them; they were whiny and complained all winter. So she wrote them out of the book. I would really love to read the version where they were there!)
Race Against Time, huh? I can speak to that, I think, as I've read it at least twice.
SPOILERS, if you're interested.
.
.
.
.
.
The idea is genuinely interesting and starts out truly creepy because of the Zoo Humans implications, Truman Show Style.
But you're correct that the characterizations of the non-white, non-modern characters is .... not great. Also bizarre: why the aliens choose to raise the white people in modern times familiar to the reader, but the colored people in significantly older more exotic settings.
And then the ending moral appears to be that inter racial romances don't work because of historical racism - once the black girl finds out about slavery, she clings to the hulking black guy and never looks at the white guy the same way again.
Yeeeeeah. :/
Well, the writing isn't awful. It still may interest you as a concept, albeit done problematically.