In which she weighs in on Thirteenth Child

[zeborah]

A few years ago, Patricia Wrede talked a fair amount on rec.arts.sf.composition about a novel she was writing, "Thirteenth Child". It had megafauna and magic in pioneer America, and sounded very cool. Here's how she described it in one discussion:

"The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna)."

And not one of us said, because I think none of us realised or thought: You can't eliminate a problem by pretending that it doesn't exist. So we carried on talking about renaming Europe (and, sporadically, about tomatoes) as if Native Americans didn't exist.

Cut to 2009. RaceFail happened and I read a whole lot of links. One was about how "Little House on the Prairie" glosses over the terrible way Native Americans were treated by settlers like Laura's family. Another was about how Elizabeth Knox's "Dreamhunter", set in a recognisably New Zealand analogue, had no Mäori at all.

A couple of weeks, a month? ago "Thirteenth Child" popped into my mind again. Maybe I was looking at her website. And I thought, "Oh, wait a minute. She erased all the Native Americans. That's... not so good...."

And a few days ago Jo Walton reviewed it on Tor.com, and a bunch of other people said essentially, "She what?" Discussion has ensued there and on various LJs and other blogs [Edit 11/5: Updated link]; I really recommend reading at least the Tor.com thread if you don't understand what the problem is, because there are people there who have explained it way better than I can.

So why am I writing this if I'm not going to talk about it?

1) Because... Well, I've known Pat Wrede online for years. Dear friends-list: I'm totally not bashing on her; she's a great person. I like her tremendously, respect her a huge amount, and owe her a mountain for all her writing advice. I know she didn't mean to hurt people; it was out of ignorance and thoughtlessness. But she still wrote what she wrote.

And it wasn't only her ignorance and thoughtlessness. It was mine too: if I'd known or thought, I could have said something then when there was time to fix it. It was that of all of us on rasfc. I wonder if it was indirectly because even then rasfc wasn't really a comfortable place for people who might have been more clued up and likely to notice and speak out about the problem.

People are asking, in various LJs, "How could no-one in the writing and publishing process have noticed?" And... I don't know how to answer that. And I don't like having been a part of that not-noticing, of that failure. But I have to acknowledge that I was.

2) And because (though I haven't yet, I think, seen this being said in this context) sometimes I see people saying that people who notice this kind of thing are just being oversensitive, reading too much into it, imagining it, making it up, shifting the goalposts, etc. As if the complaints are completely arbitrary.

So I want to testify that they're not made up from whole cloth - otherwise it'd be really odd that I'd come up with the same objection to a book I was predisposed to think highly of independently to a bunch of other people who came up with the same objection. They're not arbitrary. It's even possible for white people to learn how to predict them. Now if white people could just learn how to predict them in time to not publish the mistake....

(Comments are screened due to me still not having time to create a comment policy. I'm going to be asleep, and then at work, but I'll unscreen stuff as I can.)

ETA 12/5: I'm not in future going to unscreen any comments that include a strawman. In particular, comments arguing against a position that no-one has in fact promoted. If you think that what you're arguing against isn't a strawman, then please include a cite for where you got it from. Thanks!

Comments

Re: In which she weighs in on Thirteenth Child

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I agree totally with what you've said about it not being the book I thought she was writing. And I don't even find the main character very interesting. :( However, I will plod on with the book, if only to be one of the few people in this debate who have actually read it!

I sort of take the point some people are making about being able to condemn the premise without having read the book, but not entirely. If Pat had written the book you and I were expecting, the premise would still sound the same, but would not really be problematical.

I thought her point was going to be that previous attempts at occupying the North American continent had failed and only in more modern times, with the aid of powerful magic and better technology were the settlers going to have any chance at all. And I expected monsters from the start and so far all I've had is boring family stuff. :(

Re: In which she weighs in on Thirteenth Child

[zeborah]

Hmm, I think the premise would sound different. That is, I don't see the premise as being "America with magic, mammoths, and no Native Americans" (which could be expected to have monsters from the start, and constant struggle to survive) so much as "Little House on the Prairie with magic, mammoths, and no Native Americans" (ie a very family-centred book set in a frontier world impossibly similar to that of our history).

Re: In which she weighs in on Thirteenth Child

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Indeed. But I obviously wasn't paying enough attention at the time because I only commented about three times in that thread, once on gold mining techniques and a couple of times in a sub-thread (which I may have hived off, Turnpike allowed me to do that) about bilberries/whinberries/wimberries. I never followed plot wrangling, alt history or linguistic threads because I could never keep up with them.

I've never read Little House on the Prairie nor seen the TV show (I think there was a TV show?) as it wasn't my kind of thing when I was a kid and isn't really my kind of thing now.

Re: In which she weighs in on Thirteenth Child

[zeborah]

There was a TV show and I'm glad I've never seen it; reading summaries on DVD boxes is bad enough; it just ruins the stories without adding anything I could tell of redeeming value. The books (which start with "Little House in the Big Woods") were childhood favourites of mine - and still are, really. But... they do gloss over, knowingly or innocently, some nasty things, and it's important to have those things remembered too.