The Eiger Sanction

[chris_gerrib]

Apropos of nothing, I found myself thinking about diversity in fiction. One of the arguments against having non Straight White Males in fiction, especially historical fiction, is that the non-SWMs are "not representative" of the era.

Well, here's a fact - prior to the arrival of the Industrial Revolution in any given society, 90% of the population was engaged in subsistence agriculture. They were farmers and herdsmen, poor and living hand-to-mouth. Everybody else in the society, from kings to knights to wizards to the village blacksmith, everybody, fit in that other 10%. So, any non-farmer in fiction is inherently unrepresentative, and any other occupation would be even more unrepresentative, consisting of maybe 1% of the population. Maybe 1%.

Yet how many historical fictions have you read about farmers? Even if the main character starts as a farmer, something happens to make him leave the farm. In short, pretty much any piece of historical fiction you've ever read is "un-representative."

Here's the truth - all characters in fiction are unrepresentative. In the zombie apocalypse, 90% of humanity are dead and zombie-fied, yet the story is about the 10% who aren't. If the characters weren't exceptional when the story started, they become so over the length of the story.

In short, anybody trying to tell you that we should only have "representative" characters in fiction is offering to make change for a nine-dollar bill in threes.


(with apologies to The Eiger Sanction)

Comments

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

and no women on their review staff

That's an oddly specific recommendation; what difference does that make?

pretty hard to find stories with well-rounded characters of multiple races, or LGBT characters or characters that are not of binary gender or realistically disabled characters

In my experience, that's because this becomes the point of the character, why he's included - either as an element within the story or simply for PC cred (“See how hip and with-it my story is?”)  If it's irrelevant, there's literally no reason to bother laying it all out, and if it's relevant it tends to dominate the depiction of the character.

One notable exception - from forty-five years ago, which may be why - is Wilson Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun, where not until the final chapter is it revealed that the main viewpoint character is black.  It's a zinger, and powerful in the story context, but this had simply not mattered to anyone, including him.  (“Are you being disagreeable, civilian?”  Surrounded by military officers, being a civilian was what mattered more.)  *

Books and movies, particularly SF, tend to be set when they're made as much or more than their fictional setting.  It's a matter of style, which is to say fashion, which is to say fad.  If you like the fashion, the result is pleasant - the 1976 movie Logan's Run is howlingly dated, but fondly remembered for that very reason, not because anyone takes the story seriously.  (In truth the production could have been done far better, if anyone had really cared.)  Likewise, I'm pleased to have a massive coffee-table compendium of the 1929 Buck Rogers newspaper comics, wherein Wilma Deering, 25th Century Action Girl, is a flapper!  Bobbed hair, narrow figure and all - and she's charming!  (But then, so is the strip, imbued throughout with a quirky humor and sense of fun that never intrudes.  When Dick Calkin died in 1940 the strip became generic, stupid, the product of lesser minds.)

If you don't like the fashion - the Fifth Columnist “nuke-freeze” propaganda of the 1980s, the feminist make-believe and toxic misandrism of the 1990s - and before, and after; not until recently did I discover that what I suspected at the time was correct, that at least one SF author wrote stories with normal, sane characters and then global-searched-and-replaced all the gender pronouns, producing the feminist-approved mockmen and eunuchs that alone were being published at that point.  Correct Thought speaks with one voice…

Well, then, as you say, simply don't read it.  Move on.  Which, I gather, SF fandom is doing now, dwindling year by year, dispersing to other venues.  (Romance novels aren't what they used to be - as long as hero and heroine find a happy ending together, it can be time travel or vampires or alternate history or, indeed, pretty much what science fiction used to be, before it became an engine of Politically Correct propaganda and “social engineering.”  That's where I was going, with my alternate-history wartime spy-drama romance of an albino neo-Wiccan heroine and a PTSD combat-veteran hero.  A ball-busting mockman she ain't; she IS disabled, and a complete outcast, and strangely enough, so is he…)

People don't want what the Left pushes at them - they never do - and they “vote with their feet.”





*  Apropos of that, in his memoirs astronaut Michael Collins mentioned a fascinating what-if footnote:  The application to join NASA did not question the applicant's race.  The only reason there were no black astronauts during the Moon Race era was because none qualified.  (Damn few of anyone did!)  … Save one.  A USAF Major, combat pilot, engineering degree, “The Right Stuff” all the way - and as it happened his ancestry was (primarily) African, not European.  If he had not died in a training crash, one of the men who stood on the Moon could have been black.  The social and political consequences might have been far-reaching.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I say "no women on the review staff" because you seem to hate books with women warriors, and women reviewers are, in my admittedly limited experience, more likely to seek out and enjoy such books.

Also statistically women on the review staff, and percent of books reviewed that are by women authors do appear to have some correlation, and again, I would expect women authors to be more likely to write books that featured women in active roles you appear to want restricted to men.

Speaking of art affected by when it is made as much as the setting, of course it is. The consumers of the art live when it is made, not when it is set. Thus you see medieval manuscripts with David (of David and Goliath) wearing a cotte and hose, or Renaissance depictions of Solomon's wives wearing "gates of hell" surcoats. That is why 40s and 50s depictions of space suits, with their form-fitting gold lame and clear glass bubbles around their heads look so unlike actual space suits.

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

clear glass bubbles around their heads - Yes, and it's fascinating to see what an enormous difference exists before and after World War II.  The depictions of technical equipment, gear, became enormously more realistic simply because so many guys had had real-world experience with it as pilots, frogmen, firemen, whatever.

I love the 1950s Ley-von Braun-Bonestell-Collier magazine view of “Our Future in Space,” where “Because it's there!” was all the justification needed for a massive national outpouring of money and effort to Get Out There…

https://youtu.be/KeRaAFw5a5I


[Allen Steele's The Tranquility Alternative is set in that world, but in the present day, where - let's face it - that really WASN'T enough of a justification, not sustainably, considering what we haven't found out there.  So it's pretty much a ghost town setting now, duct tape on the seats of the orbital shuttle and the once-magnificent Space Wheel slowly falling apart - but the technology to develop what we DID find is coming out, slowly coming on line, with cutting-edge Eurotech companies getting to the Moon their way while the aging goldfish-bowl-helmeted “Greatest Generation” crew watches them go past…]

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

you seem to hate books with women warriors

Speaking of being “interested in credibility”…  It will suffice to say that if commanders could have armed cattle they would have, if that would provide additional usable troops.  If Disney's “Sorcerer's Apprentice” could have put swords into the hands of his marching servant brooms instead of water buckets - y' know?  The point being that apart from the (very) odd exception, if women COULD be warriors they certainly didn't lack for chances to prove it.  What they proved, everywhere and always, was that they are NOT - though this awareness does not follow the current Party line and is therefore doubleplus crimethink.

Yet women certainly are not helpless.

http://althistory.livejournal.com/41671.html

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Interesting that you should reframe "hate books with women warriors" as "interested in credibility."

So do you also dislike books with dragons? Do you also dislike books with faster-than-light travel? Do you also dislike books with functional magic?

Also I disagree with you about women "not lacking for chances to prove they could be warriors." In an awful lot of societies, they certainly did lack for such chances. In other societies they fought alongside men, if not in the same numbers. (There's a memorable passage in one of the Roman accounts of the conquest of Gaul, I think, saying that the Gaulish men fought hard enough but if one called his wife to stand beside him, she was even fiercer in battle. There's an account in one of the chronicles of the Crusades of one of the men-at-arms who was a woman--it's just like a paragraph and mostly says that she was embarrassed with all the attention and wanted to get on with her man-at-arms job if the writer would just quit goggling at her now. There's Joan of Arc whose first "miracle" was single handedly defeating two mounted, armed, trained knights sent to bring her home--when she was sixteen years old. There were the Sarmatians, whose women fought alongside the men, and who may have been responsible for the accounts of Amazons. In archaeology there are the multiple graves, taken for those of men because they had swords in them and were therefore assumed to be warriors graves, that turn out to contain women's skeletons. They still have swords in them, which seems odd if they weren't warriors.)

But I'm threatening to make this all about women who fight, instead of focusing on the real point--if this is actually a case of being "interested in credibility" do you similarly dislike any books with dragons, magic or faster-than-light travel?