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bladesparkTo go off on a totally different tangent... (I am drunk tonight, so hopefully this is coherent.)
I've been reading a Tim Powers short story collection. The guy is a *ferociously* good writer. Good prose, fascinating concepts, good characters, all that. And yet although on one level I'm deeply enjoying it, on another it's just leaving me high and dry.
I dunno, I guess I've caught the SJW plague or something, but it's SO obvious the guy is a straight, cis, white dude and that's the only perspective he can write. 100% of his protagonists are male. They almost all live in California, even. :P
Even in the *fascinating* dark reincarnation setting where certain people can shove out infant souls to be reborn again, and can't always choose as who, so end up another sex than they started sometimes. Even *THERE* his protagonist was a man lucky enough to be a man this time, and never mentions having been antything else.
He just notes the oddness of meeting his fellows and finding some of them mis-matched from how he knew them.
It's a FANTASTIC story, and yet on one level it leaves me cold. The author probably never even considered writing it from the perspective of a woman as a man, or man as a woman. Those characters appear because the conceit demands them, but other than a "fuck, that's weird to *see* in somebody else" it's not addressed. ZERO interest in what it *really* feels like to be that. And zero conception that maybe it could be good? The "wrong" gender of people is treated as part and parcel of a "wrong" situation, lined up with a child who has an adult mind and is drinking far too young, etc. It's not explored, it's *barely* considered, and it leaves me enjoying the well-written story and yet still deeply disappointed at the cis-het-obliviousness of it all.
And it's funny, really, because his style reminds me just a little bit of Alice, my trans-kinda-girlfriend, who is ALSO a ferociously good writer, but who would have done that specific story a million times better, because she would at least have scattered thoughts that cared and considered the situation more deeply about such a story.
I'm still going to finish the collection, the stories are interesting, but they just feel so *lacking* in perspective, so samey-samey with every other bit of "interesting" conceptual sci-fi I've ever read, that's so heteronormative, cisnormative, etc. that it barely pauses to think when its own premises present fascinating worlds to us, because the straight cis author is too boring to actually care about the potential of his own ideas. Bleh.
I've been reading a Tim Powers short story collection. The guy is a *ferociously* good writer. Good prose, fascinating concepts, good characters, all that. And yet although on one level I'm deeply enjoying it, on another it's just leaving me high and dry.
I dunno, I guess I've caught the SJW plague or something, but it's SO obvious the guy is a straight, cis, white dude and that's the only perspective he can write. 100% of his protagonists are male. They almost all live in California, even. :P
Even in the *fascinating* dark reincarnation setting where certain people can shove out infant souls to be reborn again, and can't always choose as who, so end up another sex than they started sometimes. Even *THERE* his protagonist was a man lucky enough to be a man this time, and never mentions having been antything else.
He just notes the oddness of meeting his fellows and finding some of them mis-matched from how he knew them.
It's a FANTASTIC story, and yet on one level it leaves me cold. The author probably never even considered writing it from the perspective of a woman as a man, or man as a woman. Those characters appear because the conceit demands them, but other than a "fuck, that's weird to *see* in somebody else" it's not addressed. ZERO interest in what it *really* feels like to be that. And zero conception that maybe it could be good? The "wrong" gender of people is treated as part and parcel of a "wrong" situation, lined up with a child who has an adult mind and is drinking far too young, etc. It's not explored, it's *barely* considered, and it leaves me enjoying the well-written story and yet still deeply disappointed at the cis-het-obliviousness of it all.
And it's funny, really, because his style reminds me just a little bit of Alice, my trans-kinda-girlfriend, who is ALSO a ferociously good writer, but who would have done that specific story a million times better, because she would at least have scattered thoughts that cared and considered the situation more deeply about such a story.
I'm still going to finish the collection, the stories are interesting, but they just feel so *lacking* in perspective, so samey-samey with every other bit of "interesting" conceptual sci-fi I've ever read, that's so heteronormative, cisnormative, etc. that it barely pauses to think when its own premises present fascinating worlds to us, because the straight cis author is too boring to actually care about the potential of his own ideas. Bleh.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-26 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-26 03:27 pm (UTC)(Where _x_ is any flavour of not white, male, het, cis & abled.)
no subject
Date: 2019-06-26 06:32 pm (UTC)