mckinley's dragonhaven & the cultural generation gap in social debate

[cimorene]

∞ Robin McKinley's Dragonhaven and why it's not a "Dragon Book"

I spent most of yesterday reading Robin McKinley's Dragonhaven. It was engrossing but my least favourite of her books I've read in years (passionate Sunshine, Deerskin and fairytale-McKinley devotee, here). Partly, I think, I was surprised that it's not a ~Dragon Book~ á la Anne McCaffrey or Naomi Novik, or Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, or Bruce Coville's YA Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher (which, btw, is recommended, because Coville does good YA modern fantasy, and it has thoughtfulness although not the scope and humour of Wrede's high fantasy). (I am aware of the existence of highly notable Jane Yolen YA dragon books and I think Andre Norton ones as well, but I never really read them.) It's not, subgenre-wise, a dragon fantasy, but a first contact story. As such I was reminded most strongly of CJ Cherryh's Foreigner, Vonda McIntyre's Starfarers series, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman's 2006 Philip K Dick award-nominee Catalyst: A Novel of Alien Contact. These are the first contact stories that have stood out the most in my mind. Even though Dragonhaven is about half JT, Dragon Hatcher-type story (or like that US kids' picture book where the boy rescues a baby loch ness monster and keeps it in his baththub and then the public pool), and half first contact, it still struck me as a contact story overall. A slight source of disappointment was the fact the protagonist was male. I've grown to be able to count on good female protagonists from McKinley. I guess most women will feel like writing a dude story every now and then (Diana Wynne Jones and CJ Cherryh do it all the time), but I kept comparing it to the vaguely-imagined outline of what such a story with a female POV-character could have been. And then there's this, I don't know, generation issue that I think might be at work, because the protagonist starts out a child and then grows up, and his age just... didn't ever ring right. (There are extenuating circumstances in the book - the kid is homeschooled on a wilderness preserve and isolated from a great deal of technology as well as from a peer group his age - but then again, he does have TV. And books. And plenty of face-to-face contact with people from outside. I'm still discussing it with myself.) And that brings me to

∞ The Generation Gap

I've been thinking about it a lot over the last few months: I belong to a generation that is just settling into its adulthood, and the conflicts with the last generation are beginning. It's not just in sff either: it's hard to explain the social life, the day-to-day wired reality, and the social consciousness of someone of my generation to someone brought up prior to the 1960s (there seems to be a grace period there, perhaps because those people are our parents, perhaps because society started changing when they were still young adults and so some of them managed to follow).

I felt this sense when I read that long essay by Elizabeth Moon, VP of the Science Fiction Writers of America, fertile producer of woman-centric military space opera books during my childhood and icon to my mother: she chronicles all her lower-class cred and childhood relationships with latin@ culture, then characterises the increasingly widespread call in the sff blogosphere for pros to speak out against institutionalised racism in the genre as "guilting", dismissing the passionate expressions of people's social consciences, the pain of their social realities and the voices of cultural movement as "tactics" which she states are wrongheaded and strongly implies are dishonest. This is the unintentionally-silencing voice of my grandparents' generation (though she's not quite that old), the ideological appeal to the individualism so saturated through their formative years that they don't necessarily realise that it is individualism or that there's anything in it to problematise. I see this thought as related to the thought put forth by veejane here although by "old guard" I think she means book fandom versus media fandom to some extent, and not a question of age.

I've felt it when trying to explain to psychologists, parents' friends, and casual middle-aged acquaintances about them thar newfangled intartubes or more significantly about the relationships we make on them and how yes, they really are really real. Simultaneous real-time interaction, or e-correspondence, or a friendly acquaintanceship built up through occasional comment interactions in blog posts. We've all felt it in the years-long lagtime between social reality and reality as seen on tv, between consumer electronics demand and the first manufacturers bringing a supply of mp3 players, webphones, pocket computers, ebook readers. And we've all felt it when we read slash written decades ago, that aura of otherness that a lot of us call "Old Slash" or "Classic Slash". Many of us have felt it in books set in the future and pervaded with the ethos of the past: golden age and pulp sf, Star Trek with its charming reflections of Cold War culture, and New Wave 70s-80s sf and its pre-Internet predictions of what the future would be like. I suspect it's just that some of this is more obvious, that's all. Oftentimes there's a recognisable flavour to books written by members of my parents' generation (that is, people who started to publish around the time I was born, with a little leeway to either side), one that I've only now started to recognise - quite naturally because until recently there wasn't any newer generation around. And hey, that's not exactly a bad flavour. I like most of my parents' friends most of the time. But every now and then one of the Things That Makes Us Different will come up, and I'll find myself on one side of the dinner table ranged against all their friends on the other (my parents usually just try to change the subject at this point). And sometimes it's just a kind of impatient or off feeling and I can't even put my finger on the source of it, but I know it's because they're old.

There are some things that it's better to talk about with your agemates, and I even I, raised with an amazing amount of over-identification with my parents and almost entirely shunning folks my own age, got this from a young age. It's not only whiny teenagers who have the sense that their parents just don't get it. As we get older, selecting for generation-mates gets easier to do: I mean, some day I'll HAVE be given a shrink who knows as much about the Internet as I do and I won't have to say that I am not substituting "fake" relationships for "real ones". If I just wait. Hey, that time on the Internet makes it a lot easier to engage in my generation's dialogues instead of rehashing the dialogues of my parents' (Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull &WS) and grandparents' (Elizabeth Moon) generations that are never going to be finished, for some of them. (If you ever meet either one of my grandfathers, and I will tell you this for FREE although you don't know their names so it won't help much - DON'T TALK ABOUT RACE WITH THEM. You're just wasting your time. If they try, you should ask if he's read anything else interesting lately or what is his latest mad scientist scheme for turning the farm into a golf course, respectively.)

Comments

[isilya]

Oh god, Robin McKinley. I read Dragonhaven and thought it was weird book. I somewhat enjoyed the first two thirds of the book, but then it just veered into something oddly distasteful for me. I particularly loathed his wife giving birth in the dragon haven.

P.S -- Have you seen Robin McKinley's "I still think Obama is a white guy with a tan" comments?

I haven't read EMoon's essay, THANK GOD, I don't think I my blood pressure could bear it. Insert an off-tangent rant here about how ALL of EMoon's female protagonists I have thus far encountered have been brutally raped. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me THRICE shame on me. It goes without saying that she's been firmly crossed off my list.

I don't know what my issues are going to be when I'm older. Transgenderism? Polyphobia? Ableism? Sizism? I hope that my nieces and nephews (or grand-nieces and nephews!) feel able to at least have a conversation with me about my prejudices, and that I will listen.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Sorry about the delay here (no need to respond, I know you probably won't have the time). I have seen McKinley's essay and read it twice - the first time before I read DH, which I'll admit probably influenced me a lot although I made an effort to put it aside, revolting as it was, even though I only skimmed it on the first pass. But it threw me off a lot more the second time, when I took the time to really go through and think about it, and start getting pissed off about the huge, institutionalised pattern of white people thinking it's their privilege to decide when people of colour are coloured enough, underprivileged or oppressed enough, even insulted enough ("logically it doesn't mean that, so therefore it wasn't offensive so therefore you aren't offended, you're just oversensitive or mean").

Yeah, I've never been a fan of Moon - not to the extent of reading more than 1 book cover-to-cover and I don't really remember the plot; it was 10 years ago -, but I guess it did matter to me that my mom was, and I suppose I feel that it's nice to know of the existence of space sf with female protagonists simply because they're so goddamned rare. I also tried to read some of David Webber's Honor Harrington shit, and after far less than 1 book couldn't stomach it - at least Moon was female, I thought, even though I found her books faintly boring and rather offputting both (I don't remember the details and I didn't know there was a pattern of rape, though).

[sophiawestern.livejournal.com]

First, I loved loved loved The Hero and The Crown by McKinley and everything since that has just been a disappointment. I have read and re-read that book so ofter that my cover fell apart on my old edition and I had to buy a new one.

I think that relationships on teh interwebs are becoming more and more acceptable. Five years ago, my friend Monique (who I met via online journalling in 1999 pre-livejournal - yes, I've been keeping one of these for TEN YEARS) came to visit me in New York. I made up a story about how I met her because I was embarassed. I wouldn't do the same thing now - some of my closest friends I've met via the internet through a local NYC online forum about saltwater fish. Half of my friends met their boyfriends through match.com or craigslist or eharmony. More and more of my real-life friends have blogs.

Ironically though, my mom I think understands that very well as she interacts with people through ediets.com and ravelry (a knitting site). I believe that she met up with people from the knitting site at some kind of knitting conference and I know she's met up with people from ediets - and they are her facebook friends.

That's right, my mom is 63 and she has facebook friends from teh interwebs. What is the world coming to. :)

[aynatonal.livejournal.com]

Big fat WORD on the issue of the POV character voice in Dragonhaven. I found the childhood parts particularly to be just very tin-eared and unbelievable enough to repeatedly jolt me out of the narrative. Also, I found the main character to be inarticulate and unsympathetic, which didn't help. Very disappointing, since I'm also a passionate fan of many of her earlier books.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Yeah: I kept trying to make excuses for the protagonist as I was reading, but the construction of childhood was - not just his experiences, but his attitudes, his voice - bizarre. For that matter, just his use of language and rhetoric was completely wrong, to my ear. - I suppose she's just much better at high fantasy; modern fantasy and YA aren't for everyone. I think part of the problem with the modern setting is that she wasn't able to maintain the fourth wall well enough - it felt like the author's personal politics were intruding way too much, probably rather unbelievably, into not just the character's views but even the events of the fictional world.

[aynatonal.livejournal.com]

Re-reading my own comment, you've expressed my issue better than I did. It's not that he's entirely inarticulate--that would be unbearable in a different way. It's that his moments of inarticulateness read as a clumsy feint in the direction of verisimilitude, to distract from how inappropriately articulate he is most of the time. And it's not that most young people in fiction aren't wildly lucid and possessed of far more powers of perception and insight than actual young people, because they often are. But there was indeed something very off-ish about her construction of childhood (I like your way of putting it) that kept jolting me as I read.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Heh, thanks. Yeah, that's it. The "dumbness" that she made a point of - talking about how he considered himself dumb, and trying to show things that he failed to understand, while making him capable of scoring high across the board - it showed an unbelievable level of naivete. If a teen (because he was 12 at the beginning) is capable of sufficient abstract analytical thought to score cross the board tops at writing, foreign languages, and standardised tests (and the modern ones of these test analytical thinking directly - the SAT has a huge section of vocabulary, critical reading comprehension, word analogies...!) - then that kid KNOWS that he is intelligent, and he's bound to be aware of the world around him. The half-awareness she tried to show felt clumsy.

And it's not that it's impossible for a child to be that articulate, since the viewpoint for most of the book was what, aged 14-16? He could simply have been very intelligent, which, along with the reader's willing suspension of disbelief... that would have been enough. But the attempts to make him appear selectively clueless or provincial... ick. Fake.

[vass]

The Generation Gap

*nodnodnod*

I tried to explain RaceFail to my mother, and I got as far as "it's a generational thing. You know, like how some people think it's OK to call Obama 'articulate'?" And that was how I found out that she thought it was OK to call Obama articulate. I explained the problems with the term, and she said "That's political correctness gone mad." DDDDDDDD: My mother used to teach sexual harassment awareness. Political correctness used to be a good thing for her.

[dreamnnightmare.livejournal.com]

v nice essay. But do remember that as older people starts 2 use teh internets they starts to get stuff. even maybe grandparents.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I think that some people are too old to really absorb the new social structure of the Internet from it. To my grandparents - both the uneducated crazy ones, and the highly intelligent and fairly open-minded ones - the Internet is just a sort of occasionally-accessed method of communication with the people they already used it to communicate it. They're still at web 1.0, using the web as a replacement for the old forms of communciation, when the capability of the internet is really so much more.

I don't mean this to apply to you. I think it depends on how much contact you have with computers, how long you've been used to the idea, as well as how open your mind is to such things...