Entries tagged with decolonization

I admit it: I was intrigued by the thought of a book by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, so I bought The Book of Elsewhere hot off the press, and I liked it quite a bit. Here’s a little guide to it.

Brief description: John Wick if he were 80,000 years old. (Not a spoiler; this is all over the advertising.)

tl;dr: I recommend this book to people who like SF&F that thoughtfully explores the experience of a preternaturally old protagonist (and who don’t hate John Wick).

Spoiler Free Review

This book follows the adventures of an 80,000-year-old protagonist with super fighting powers, trying to figure out how to become mortal. Nominally set in the present day, about half of it is flashbacks to various points in our hero’s timeline, which do a nice job of fleshing out his experiences and how he has affected the lives of others.

The book’s great strength is its protagonist, who is genuinely interesting and thoughtfully developed. Its great weakness is plot structure, of which is has little, and what it has is not very compelling. These two things are related. This book reminds me of nothing so much as God Emperor of Dune in following a very powerful, very old protagonist who, due to his power and age, just doesn’t have much at stake emotionally. This makes sense. In both cases, the protagonist has enough experience and wisdom to take things in stride and not be deeply fazed by just about anything from life to death to torture to betrayal, etc. The price of this plausible and thought-provoking characterization is low plot conflict and relatively little story momentum. The lack of momentum leads to a fairly week ending, though I think part of its weakness is also due to somewhat shallow exploration (and setup) of themes.

I think both these books could have pulled it off better, but not by all that much. This difficulty is partly baked into the concept. Actually, in both cases, my personal revision recommendation would have been to increase the prominence of the female presence—I’ll be vague to stay spoiler free.

The book gets extra points from me for the character of the pig, which is an excellent example of a non-human animal character who is not (much?) anthropomorphized but—as an animal—is an important character (like, for example, Moby Dick). Well done.

( Spoilery Review )

( Two Sociopolitical Critiques )

(Note: written a couple months ago, but not posted till now.) I got myself embroiled in an online chat-based dispute about how to address certain racist stereotypes that were voiced in a community I’m part of. This has sparked a lot of self-reflection on how I approached it, and I wanted to share some of that here.

I’m going to skip specifics, but in short, a racist stereotype voiced by a person from the Global North was called out by a person from the Global South, who also asked for a larger organization-level response. That response—at least the first stage of it—came in the form of an email denouncing racist remarks with clear (though not explicit) reference to this incident.

I voiced the thought that singling out that one person in the email was not the best approach. This ignited further discourse, which I would sum up as critiquing me for centering the feelings of a person from the Global North over the needs, feelings, etc. of the people suffering harm in the Global South. In the course of this critique, I was asked why I was centering the feelings of the privileged, and over the past day or so, I’ve thought about that a lot.

There is not just one answer.

Part of the answer is that, as a person from the Global North, I am more empathetic to that positionality because it is closer to my own experiences, and so I default to showing more empathy for that positionality. That is not a good reason, and—with no good excuse—I did seriously misread the social situation of that chat, in that I did not properly take into account the compounded harm to my comrades from the Global South. From that perspective, anything that further decentered their already marginalized voices intensified the harm to them, and I should have seen that and responded differently.( Read more... )

Review/Meta on Keanu Reeves & China Miéville's New Novel

On Activism, Strategy, Racism, and Global North/South