cimorene

naraht has been collecting links for a new round of RaceFail which I have seen called RaceFail:Colonialism, or something like that. I haven't seen any one-sentence summations of the sequence of events going around, but basically Patricia C. Wrede, beloved YA fantasy author, has a new YA alternate history out:

This is an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America (“Columbia”) was discovered [by Europeans] empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical.

...and some people pointed out ways in which this was problematic, causing some other people (including Wrede's friend, well-known FSF writer Lois McMaster Bujold) to react with the Tone Argument, the Talk is Cheap argument, the Censorship argument, etc.

Patricia C. Wrede has always been a Euro-centric writer, which is common and even expected in the field of high fantasy. You might recognize her name, if you're unversed in SFF, from my user profile, where the beginning of Dealing With Dragons stands me in lieu of a biography blurb. My favorite novel from age 6, DWD is part of children's fantasy The Enchanted Forest Chronicles and stars Princess Cimorene, who was certainly the most important role model for me as a child (not counting people I knew personally - obviously my dad and mom were my actual most important role models).

If you Google "Cimorene fanfiction", all of the top page of results - minus one - have to do with me, not with Wrede. I've been Cimorene online for about 9 years now, so... I feel I should speak, although I have nothing to say yet that hasn't been said already, often by passionate and incredibly long-suffering fans of color who are less likely than I to accidentally wound someone through their own unconscious racism. As I read all of

naraht's links, though, I post the ones that speak to me the most, with descriptive notes, to Twitter. Here are my links and notes:

Seeking Avalon: There's Something About Tor Writers, aka There's Something About White SF Writers (My note: LMB is a Baen writer, so the 1st title is obviously not broad enough)

Kaigou: Sleeping with the Status Quo (Long, but AWESOME - read it all!)

Gloss: My Shame Was Only Exceeded by My Fury. "To claim that the Story transcends mere social concerns, as Bujold does here and others have done for a long, long time, is not just lazy and thoughtless. It's dangerous and selfish and reactionary."

rensreality: Like Words on a Chalkboard... "Okay, I think an author should be able to tell the story they want to tell. I really do but, sheesh, why does it always have to make me either a magical creature, an exotic savage or erase me from history altogether?"

Avalon's Willow comments at Tor.com: "White learning moments? Not actually all that special."

sixquarters: [activism] The Thirteenth Child. (Exactly the refutation of the "Talk is Cheap" argument that I would want to make.) "How many of them have, in other contexts, talked about the power of words? Do words only have power when they want them to?"

fiction-theory: You're Hurting My Head Again, SFF. "And let's not even consider the possibility of writing a novel where Europeans live and keep their hands to themselves and the people of the Americas get to ride the magic mammoths and have awesome adventures? Because that would require considering them as interesting and worthy of respect as Europeans, and obviously, that isn't happening."

And finally, sami's Derailment Redux: Lois McMaster Bujold Hypocrisy Special Edition, a point-by-point refutation of LMB's two comments at Tor.com.