N K Jemisin's GoH speech

[avevale_intelligencer]

la_marquise_de_ linked to this on Facebook, and I'm very glad to have read it. So I hope I won't get mistaken for Theodore Beale* or Mike Resnick or somebody if I say that there are a couple of things in there that make me go "Um."

One is this:

"what is hatred, really, but supreme indifference to the suffering of another?"

Um. No. Indifference is indifference. Hatred is hatred. That's why we have two different words. I hate David Cameron. I am indifferent to Justin Bieber. I don't want either of them to suffer, because I'm a wimp, but I would be very very happy if David Cameron (and his entire rotten party) were to disappear from public life, whereas when it happens to Justin Bieber it won't affect me one way or the other. [EDIT: I'm not by any means saying indifference is good, but t]here's a distinction, and it's an important one, because it's the distinction between an enemy and a bystander, and when we start redefining words to turn more bystanders into enemies I get antsy.

And the other is this:

"SFF has always been the literature of the human imagination, not just the imagination of a single demographic. Every culture on this planet produces it in some way, shape, or form. It thrives in video games and films and TV shows, and before that it lived in the oral histories kept by the griots, and the story circles of the Navajo, and the Dreamings of this country’s first peoples."

Now I've read the books that trace sf back to Lucian of Samosata (who was Greek, if I remember rightly) and I've argued that all fiction is fantasy and mainstream fiction just a tiny and rather dull subset thereof. But I draw the line at calling someone's oral history fantasy, and I seem to remember that fiction as such, let alone science, is (at least in our culture) a relatively recent invention, and while I'm the last to accord any undue importance to what was done by "a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys in the 1950s," I think they did something. As did the beardy old Brits at the same time, by the way.

Of course I'm lucky. I was born in the mid-50s, so by the time I graduated to written sf it was already blazingly obvious that the roll of the greatest writers in the field included such beardy old guys as Anne McCaffrey, C.L. Moore, Judith Merril, and Ursula LeGuin. I didn't know till much later that Samuel R. Delany was black, but then again I didn't know that Isaac Asimov was Jewish till he happened to mention it, and it never occurred to me to be startled by either fact. Sf, for me, was always something that anyone could do, regardless of race, gender, creed, orientation or whatever.

I'm all for the great Reconciliation that Ms Jemisin calls for. I want an end to division and inequality in sf as in the wider world. I particularly want people like Mr Beale to Shut Up And Go Away, because they are grotesquely ignorant, arrogant and choked with their own hatred and we don't need them. I hope these two minor and irrelevant quibbles of mine don't come over as an abuse of privilege. They aren't meant that way.


*Blogger and former candidate for the presidency of the SF Writers of America, Mr Beale is a racist, a sexist, and the kind of person who gives libertarians a bad name. He particularly enjoys abusing fat women, and attracts the kind of supporters who say spectacularly fatuous things such as "Nobody ever flooded Africa with non-Africans and accorded them special rights and privileges." I may be a duffer at history, but I'm not quite that bad.

Comments

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

You've hit the nub of it, with regard to hate vs. indifference: hate is an active emotion, in which one has a specific negative reaction to and desire for the person or thing hated. Indifference is ultimate passivity.

I think I see what she was aiming at, but that phrase misses the mark.

[howeird]

Agreemessage.
However:
But I draw the line at calling someone's oral history fantasy, and I seem to remember that fiction as such, let alone science, is (at least in our culture) a relatively recent invention

There is much in the Old Testament (which is maybe 5,000 years old?) which reads as fantasy, and maybe sci-fi. The sun being held still in the sky for Joshua -and the walls crumbling to his trumpeting, Elijah flown to heaven in a golden chariot, Jonah and the whale (okay, Big Fish).

And about those griots, as I understand it they were not just strict memorizers, but also entertainers, given to embellishing the histories to make them more interesting to the listener. And the Navajos were sometimes aided in their storytelling by a particular kind of mushroom.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I think (though of course I have no learning in the field of cultural history, so this is just unsupported bloviation) that our mindset has possibly changed a bit, even in as few as five thousand years, To embellish a story is one thing; to make up a story is quite another. And while I'm sure they could have done the latter, I think they would have regarded it as beneath them, and possibly even a betrayal of their craft.

A friend on FB suggested that in the far future mythologies would be made around the Marvel Comics gods. I disagreed, on the grounds that I don't think we have the capacity to make myths, because we don't even believe reality is real. Myths are made, like pearls, from a grain of reality. Jonah may not have been swallowed by a big fish, but I'm pretty certain that at one point he fell into the sea. The trumpets may not have brought down the walls of Jericho, but something did. Thor and Iron Man won't make the myths of tomorrow, but if we still had the trick of it, a story about a fireman on 9/11 might have.

And that's the difference. At some point we got fed up with passing on tales, and embellishing them, and plundering old history books for them, and mixing and matching, and started just making stuff up...and now we can't imagine a time when we didn't, we can't think ourselves back into the mindset that didn't even need to give a name to the willing suspension of disbelief, that enjoyed the embellishing of a story because the story was always the same and always true. We can't even imagine, most of us, what it was like truly to believe in our own gods. And while there's sadness in that, there's also a great invention which could be celebrated, I think.

[howeird]

In order to establish a lie, mix in some truth. Exactly. I think the mindset change has to do with credulity which has to do with education. 5,000 years ago if a respected elder said the sun stood still in the sky, he/she was a respected elder, and respected elders never lie. Today we know better. We have been taught that if the sun stood still in the sky it means the earth stopped rotating,and massive world-wide calamity would happen. 50 years ago we could look this up in physics textbooks, today we can look it up there or on the Internet. And we know respected elders can lie.

OTOH there are still millions of people who have been "educated" to believe, literally, that unbaptised souls will go to Hell, God will be angry if we drink milk when we eat meat, women who expose even an inch of skin must be stoned to death, and so on.

I think those are examples of respected elders "passing on tales, and embellishing them, and plundering old history books for them, and mixing and matching, and started just making stuff up".

But I do agree that most of humanity is over the creation of new gods. Maybe. When they gave Obama the Peace Prize I started to have my doubts.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

*headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*

That's exactly the mindset I'm talking about. Myths...are not lies. Gods, how many times? Just because the only kind of priest you can imagine is a hand-rubbing cackling Grand Vizier does NOT mean that's the only sort there ever has been. And you didn't read the bit you quoted before you quoted it, or you would have noticed that it's in two antithetical parts. There's a bloody verb in there.

I hope some day we get over being over things. Being over things is so over. And I hope some day you get the president you actually want. As long as it isn't a Republican.

[howeird]

My humblest apologies to your head and desk. There's a fine, fine line (according to Avenue Q) between a fairy tale and a lie. I was not envisioning Evil Intent when I said the elders lied. White lies, I think they are called.

As for Presidents, unfortunately the only one on the radar I would consider voting for is a Republican. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Look him up on YouTube if you're not already familiar with him. He a staunch Romney supporter, which means I won't actually vote for him.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Yes, but Avenue Q also says you can be as loud as the hell you want when you're making love, and that was very seldom my experience. :)

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

There is a difference between writing (creating - oral history too)
a) something which is intended to be literal truth
b) something which is supposed to be myth
c) something which is supposed to be allegory
d) something which is supposed to be fiction

The Bible seems to be spread between a and c. Science fiction is spread between c and d. That does not mean the two are the same, even when they overlap.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Exactly. And it should also be noted that e), something which is intended to deceive, is not the same as any of the others either, even if there is overlap. And there can certainly be overlap between a) and e) as easily as between e) and any of the others.

[coth.livejournal.com]

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Yes, well, Mr Dumpty can dinkle my shiny prescriptivist perfanicals. Never liked that egg; never thought he represented the views of the author either. :)