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hawkwing_lbOne book I read the week before last and didn't mention in my last post on such things is S. M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers.
Lancers is a book - see here for cover copy and Publishers' Weekly review - that at one level I enjoyed very much, and at another level disturbed me immensely.
As an adventure story, Lancers works supremely well. It has dashing young army captains, royalty, brave princesses, determined scientists, evil villains, cross-desert treks and fights on trains, not to mention airships. Airships are supremely cool. The story hits most of my favourite high points. But the world it's set in?
After asteroid impact rendered most of the northern hemisphere uninhabitable in the late 19th century, the government of Britain evacuated to India, where they assimilated into the caste system and rebuilt their empire.
And I'm having a hard time putting my finger on why the setup disturbs me as much as it does, until I remember that the last Stirling novel I read was Conquistador, an apologia for the segregated, bigoted society of Dead White Men.
Lancers isn't as blatantly - hmm. Now I must figure out how to put it - isn't as blatantly white as Conquistador, but it still supports a status quo that privileges Dead Western European Men over everybody else.
Why do I say white? Why do I take issue with it, anyway?
It's a term - an idea - that has taken on its immense cultural significance in the Americas, but western Europe has long been infected by it as well, and it's a term that feels appropriate, despite - or perhaps even because - the novel is set in a society composed largely of brown people. The dominant paradigm still seems to be Western European, with all its uneasy history, with all its colonial excesses and repressions.
Give me a good reason why the maharajas of India wouldn't have ended up in control of the Empire, rather than the emigrant Brits.
Just one.
And tell me, why, again, the Russians have to be the bad guys? Why are they the ones who turned to cannibalism and worshipping Chaos and the end of the world after the catastrophe that changed their world?
I'm serious here. I'd like to have that question answered.
It's a conceit of the story. Yep, I know that. But I'm not culturally conditioned to see things the same way Stirling seems to be seeing them, and I'm not liking what the assumptions implicit in both Lancers and Conquistador seem to say.
Privileging one group of people - whether they be united by religion, wealth, gender, or skin colour - above all other groups is to my mind a Bad Thing. I don't care what group it is. The Protestant minority in Ireland after independence in some areas suffered as much or more as some among the Catholic majority did during the Protestant Ascendancy. And yet, privilege is almost always invisible to the privileged, because it is a status quo that benefits them, and that couldn't possibly be in any way bad. Writing books that support this paradigm - whether that support be conscious or no - is likewise not a good thing. It reinforces the invisibility of privilege. Which in turn makes it harder for the less privileged to achieve equity or parity of any kind.
It seems to me Lancers reinforces the paradigm that presents the past and current western European (which has large similarities with the North American) cultural mode as superior. And that utterly ruined my enjoyment of the actual story part of the book.
---
In other news, I think I'm coming down with something. I ache, I sniffle, I'm tired all the time. Also, getting my brain to work in any adequate way is like winding a broken clockwork toy: it really doesn't want to go. I'm currently reading a memoir by Nanda Herbermann, a German woman who spent two years (1941-1943) in Ravensbruck concentration camp. It's thought-provoking, but now I really, really want (and can't afford) to get my hands on a copy of the history of Ravensbruck written by French résistante and camp survivor Germaine Tillion. I've checked, and you know what? My college library, probably the most comprehensive library in the country, doesn't have a copy.
This pisses me off. Books of this type and historical significance should be available forever. Even the book I've lusted after since I was fifteen and read twice over when my local library acquired it on loan from the British system for me, the one that would be the near ultimate adornment of my own personal collection, M.R.D. Foot's history of SOE in France is still to be found in print (I'd actually thought it'd been out of print for the last thirty years, and I'm surprised and pleased to find this isn't so), though for an abominable sum. But Tillion's seminal history of the notorious women's concentration camp at Ravensbruck? Out of print. Gone. Caput. History. Available from the barest handful of second hand vendors.
Colour me annoyed.
Lancers is a book - see here for cover copy and Publishers' Weekly review - that at one level I enjoyed very much, and at another level disturbed me immensely.
As an adventure story, Lancers works supremely well. It has dashing young army captains, royalty, brave princesses, determined scientists, evil villains, cross-desert treks and fights on trains, not to mention airships. Airships are supremely cool. The story hits most of my favourite high points. But the world it's set in?
After asteroid impact rendered most of the northern hemisphere uninhabitable in the late 19th century, the government of Britain evacuated to India, where they assimilated into the caste system and rebuilt their empire.
And I'm having a hard time putting my finger on why the setup disturbs me as much as it does, until I remember that the last Stirling novel I read was Conquistador, an apologia for the segregated, bigoted society of Dead White Men.
Lancers isn't as blatantly - hmm. Now I must figure out how to put it - isn't as blatantly white as Conquistador, but it still supports a status quo that privileges Dead Western European Men over everybody else.
Why do I say white? Why do I take issue with it, anyway?
It's a term - an idea - that has taken on its immense cultural significance in the Americas, but western Europe has long been infected by it as well, and it's a term that feels appropriate, despite - or perhaps even because - the novel is set in a society composed largely of brown people. The dominant paradigm still seems to be Western European, with all its uneasy history, with all its colonial excesses and repressions.
Give me a good reason why the maharajas of India wouldn't have ended up in control of the Empire, rather than the emigrant Brits.
Just one.
And tell me, why, again, the Russians have to be the bad guys? Why are they the ones who turned to cannibalism and worshipping Chaos and the end of the world after the catastrophe that changed their world?
I'm serious here. I'd like to have that question answered.
It's a conceit of the story. Yep, I know that. But I'm not culturally conditioned to see things the same way Stirling seems to be seeing them, and I'm not liking what the assumptions implicit in both Lancers and Conquistador seem to say.
Privileging one group of people - whether they be united by religion, wealth, gender, or skin colour - above all other groups is to my mind a Bad Thing. I don't care what group it is. The Protestant minority in Ireland after independence in some areas suffered as much or more as some among the Catholic majority did during the Protestant Ascendancy. And yet, privilege is almost always invisible to the privileged, because it is a status quo that benefits them, and that couldn't possibly be in any way bad. Writing books that support this paradigm - whether that support be conscious or no - is likewise not a good thing. It reinforces the invisibility of privilege. Which in turn makes it harder for the less privileged to achieve equity or parity of any kind.
It seems to me Lancers reinforces the paradigm that presents the past and current western European (which has large similarities with the North American) cultural mode as superior. And that utterly ruined my enjoyment of the actual story part of the book.
---
In other news, I think I'm coming down with something. I ache, I sniffle, I'm tired all the time. Also, getting my brain to work in any adequate way is like winding a broken clockwork toy: it really doesn't want to go. I'm currently reading a memoir by Nanda Herbermann, a German woman who spent two years (1941-1943) in Ravensbruck concentration camp. It's thought-provoking, but now I really, really want (and can't afford) to get my hands on a copy of the history of Ravensbruck written by French résistante and camp survivor Germaine Tillion. I've checked, and you know what? My college library, probably the most comprehensive library in the country, doesn't have a copy.
This pisses me off. Books of this type and historical significance should be available forever. Even the book I've lusted after since I was fifteen and read twice over when my local library acquired it on loan from the British system for me, the one that would be the near ultimate adornment of my own personal collection, M.R.D. Foot's history of SOE in France is still to be found in print (I'd actually thought it'd been out of print for the last thirty years, and I'm surprised and pleased to find this isn't so), though for an abominable sum. But Tillion's seminal history of the notorious women's concentration camp at Ravensbruck? Out of print. Gone. Caput. History. Available from the barest handful of second hand vendors.
Colour me annoyed.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-09 06:50 pm (UTC)I can enjoy a good book with airships and the Raj as much as anyone, and I wanted to like it, but it kept on somehow cheating on its own terms, so I gave up on it profoundly dissatisfied.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-09 08:50 pm (UTC)(Btw, I hope you don't mind that I added you to my f-list. I read and enjoyed both The King's Peace and The Prize in the Game -I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Farthing soon, too - and I'm forever reading your LJ on other people's f-lists.)
no subject
Date: 2006-09-10 11:52 am (UTC)I did ask
Now talking about books may not rank high in the vain world's eyes, but it's quite good enough for me.
I'm glad you liked my books. I'm always especially glad when someone likes Prize because it didn't sell and so I tend to think of it as the neglected orphan of the family.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-10 03:27 pm (UTC)I have to say, I couldn't help liking The Prize in the Game. The Táin Bó - the whole Ulster cycle, really - was pretty much my first introduction to heroic myth. Coming across it as the backbone of a really good novel is guarranteed to meet with enthuasiastic response. From me, at least.