Pixel Scroll 12/21/16 Ancillary of Green Gables

(1) MARS’ VIRGIN FIELD EPIDEMIC. Nautilus writer Christopher McKay, in a piece called “Make Mars Great Again”, says that Mars has life because of microbes sent aboard non-sterile Mars probes, and if the planet gets warmer in a century these microbes can be used for terraforming.

Mars is currently inhabited by an estimated 1 million microbes. They coat the surfaces and crowd the innards of our robotic landers and rovers, which international policy requires to be cleaned, but not fully sterilized. The bugs are dormant, but viable. If Mars warmed up and water began to flow again, these microorganisms would revive and reproduce. And it is within our power to make that happen.

The concept of terraforming—making a barren world suitable for widespread life—is well developed in science fiction. The term was first used in a science-fiction story published in 1942. It implies the creation of a copy of Earth, which need not be the goal, but the word caught on. (It is definitely more euphonious than the suggested alternatives of “ecopoiesis” or “planetary ecosynthesis.”) In the ’90s the award-winning science-fiction trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars centered on the science and ethics of terraforming. But terraforming is no longer just science fiction.

(2) DIFFERENT CURRENCIES. Sarah A. Hoyt raises compelling points in “Some Hard Thinking About Our Business”. Why doesn’t everybody go indie? And how much money is it costing them to go with traditional publishers?

So I am continuously puzzled watching indie authors who are doing better by an order of magnitude than any traditional writer I know succumbing to the lure of a traditional contract.  I’m not disapproving, mind you — who the hell am I to be disapproving of other people’s business decisions? If I had my time again, I doubt I’d have made most of the ones I made.  I’d still want to write for Baen, but that’s about it — I’m just jaw-dropped shocked.  Because they’ll be giving up 90% of their income or so.  But perhaps they want the respectability.  And perhaps they think it will give them further reach.

Is the reach thing true?  For now.  For a time. More on this later.

Is the respectability that important?  Sure, if you want to have some sort of job as a “real writer” such places are starting to choose indies, but not really.  Some conferences too (though we’re not absolutely sure, in this new era how much attendance of conventions contribute to sales, with the remarkable exception of hard copy books [more on that later.]) expect you to flash your “real writer” credentials in the form of  contract.  I even understand it from the social point of view, where when you’re at a party and people ask what you do, the question after you answer “writer” is “so have anything published?” (Or maybe that’s just to me, because of the accent.)  Mind you, you can answer “Sure” and  list your books and not say “indie” but I also know that when I say “Sure, x books with Berkley, x with Bantam and x with Baen” people’s attitude changes completely.  And I can see that when people suspect you’re indie they say “So you published yourself” and dismiss it.  I know that’s a stupid reason to give up 90% of your income, but humans are social animals and I can see “not being embarrassed at parties” making a difference.  I can even see the velveteen writer thing, wanting to be a “real” writer in your own eyes, the way you envisioned it.

(3) LONG RELIEF. At MLB blog Cut4, “Superfan Sean Doolittle reviews ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”‘. Doolittle is a pitcher for the Oakland A’s.

Big Star Wars fan Sean Doolittle was kind enough to take some time away from his rigorous offseason sock-throwing regimen to write a film review of Rogue One … yes, really! Enjoy it all below, and don’t worry — there are no major spoilers, as Sean knows what he’s doing. 

What really separates this movie from any other episode in the Star Wars franchise, though, is how dark and harsh it is. Rogue One is as much a war drama, with real, raw emotion, as it is a sci-fi adventure movie. This movie drops you into the middle of a brutal galactic civil war, one that’s taken everything from these characters and turned them into soldiers willing to fight for the Rebellion.

(4) NOT THE REASONS FOR THE SEASON. I thought Tor.com had a great discussion-generating post idea in “The Non-Holiday Movies We Always End Up Watching Over the Holidays” but they had more misses than hits as far as my tastes are concerned. (Anyone else watched Rocky II this month? I did.)

And it’s a discussion you can have on more than one level. I decided to watch Tracy and Hepburn in Desk Set the other night I’d long since forgotten that most of the climactic events happen at the office Christmas party. So can I count it as “non-holiday” or not?

(5) GHIBLI AND GRAVY. The YouTube video “Studio Ghibli in Real Life” is a charming YouTube video in which Studio Ghibli characters are placed into real-life Japanese settings.

(6) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • December 21, 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at the Carthay Circle Theater in Hollywood, California. It was the first animated feature-length film with sound and color.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRL

  • Born December 21, 1937 – Jane Fonda

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born December 21, 1957 — Tsutomu Kitagawa, a Japanese actor and stuntman best known for playing Godzilla in the Millennium (or Shinsei) series. He also played the costumed actor for the Blue (and occasionally, Black) Ranger in many of Toei Company’s Super Sentai Series in the 1980s, better known in the US as Power Rangers.

(9) BRAIN CANDY. John Scalzi did not write an incisive political commentary today.

Me: I want to write a long piece on politics today!

Brain: Sorry, man. Not up for it. Too much thinking involved.

Me: But I have important things to say!

Brain: You should have thought about it before you decided to fuel me exclusively on Christmas cookies for three days straight….

(10) HINES BENEFIT AUCTION #22. The twenty-second of Jim C. Hines’ 24 Transgender Michigan Fundraiser auctions is for a set of autographed books from Pamela Dean.

Today’s auction is for a set of books from Pamela Dean, including signed hardcover first editions of THE DUBIOUS HILLS and JUNIPER, GENTIAN, AND ROSEMARY, along with a signed mass-market paperback set of the reissue of the SECRET COUNTRY trilogy. That’s a total of five autographed books for you to enjoy!

About THE DUBIOUS HILLS: Centuries after a group of warring wizards eliminate war from the Dubious Hills, the Hills are a place where knowledge and ability are parcelled out in strange ways. Only the group known as the Akoumi understand death, only the Gnosi know how to teach, and only the Physici can know pain. Dean weaves a strange and compelling examination of knowledge, responsiblity and death.

About JUNIPER, GENTIAN, AND ROSEMARY: Three sisters live comfortably with their parents: Juniper, 16, who likes cooking and computer chats; Gentian, 13, who likes plays and astronomy; Rosemary, 11, who likes Girl Scouts. Enter Dominic, handsome as the night, quoting poetry, telling riddles, and asking help for a complex and fascinating science project. Gentian isn’t interested at first–she has her own life. But gradually her life, and her time, belong more and more to Dominic and his project, and her father begins to fear that the lad may be more than a charmer…

About THE SECRET COUNTRY: Each vacation for the past nine years, cousins Patrick, Ruth, Ellen, Ted, and Laura have played a game they call the “Secret”—and invented, scripted world full of witches, unicorns, a magic ring, court intrigue, and the Dragon King. In the Secret, they can imagine anything into reality, and shape destiny. Then the unbelievable happens: by trick or by chance, they actually find themselves in the Secret Country, their made-up identities now real. The five have arrived at the start of their games, with the Country on the edge of war. What was once exciting and wonderful now looms threateningly before them, and no one is sure how to stop it… or if they will ever get back home.

(11) THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MENTIONING RACE. Foz Meadows engages a recent controversy involving YA commentators — “YA, Race & Assimilation: A Response”.

Which is why, returning to the matter of QOP and Whitney Atkinson, pro-diversity advocates are so often forced to contend with people who think that “separating races” and like identifiers – talking specifically about white people or disabled people or queer people, instead of just people – is equivalent to racism and bigotry. Whether they recognise it or not, they’re coming from a perspective that values diverse perspectives for what they bring to the melting pot – for how they help improve the dominant culture via successful assimilation – but not in their own right, as distinct and special and non-homogenised. In that context, race isn’t something you talk about unless you’re being racist: it’s rude to point out people’s differences, because those differences shouldn’t matter to their personhood. The problem with this perspective is that it doesn’t allow for the celebration of difference: instead, it codes “difference” as inequality, because deep down, the logic of cultural assimilation is predicated on the idea of Western cultural superiority. A failure or refusal to assimilate is therefore tantamount to a declaration of inequality: I’m not the same as you is understood as I don’t want to be as good as you, and if someone doesn’t want to be the best they can be (this logic does) then either they’re stupid, or they don’t deserve the offer of equality they’ve been so generously extended in the first place.

Talking about race isn’t the same as racism. Asking for more diversity in YA and SFF isn’t the same as saying personhood matters less than the jargon of identity, but is rather an acknowledgement of the fact that, for many people, personhood is materially informed by their experience of identity, both in terms of self-perception and in how they’re treated by others at the individual, familial and collective levels. And thanks to various studies into the social impact of colour-blindness as an ideology, we already know that claiming not to see doesn’t undo the problem of racism; it just means adherents fail to understand what racism actually is and what it looks like, even – or perhaps especially – when they’re the ones perpetuating it.

(12) APOLLO 11 ON YOUTUBE. Ars Technica helps relive history – “Heinlein and Clarke discuss the Moon landings as they happen”.

Thanks to documentaries and YouTube, the younger set can experience some of the flavor of the late 1960s today, as well as what the Moon landing meant at the time to America and the world. The zeitgeist of hope and possibility might perhaps best be captured in a CBS News discussion on July 20, 1969—Apollo 11 landing day. Hosted by the inimitable Walter Cronkite, the great newsman interviewed science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein about the implications of NASA’s achievement. The program featured a discussion just after the landing, with a second segment following the first moonwalk by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

“Time just stopped for me, I think it stopped for everybody,” a 51-year-old Clarke said, describing how it felt to watch the lunar module touch down. “My heart stopped. My breathing stopped.”

(13) CURSUS HONORUM. James Langdell raises a good question:

How do you become a Ghost Of Christmas Past? Do you work your way up after starting out as Ghost Of National Pickle Day Past?

(14) THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS LAUGHS. Curator John King Tarpinian delved into the archives for these Stan Freberg Christmas parodies —

  • Green Christmas

  • Christmas Dragnet (1953) / Yulenet (1954)

  • The Night Before Christmas (1955)

[Thanks to Rich Lynch, Mark-kitteh, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

109 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 12/21/16 Ancillary of Green Gables

  1. There was an episode of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries which involved the killing of people off with a Twelve Days of Christmas theme. Probably closer to And Then There Were None than Se7en.

    Wish I could remember who had the commercial with the writer being a success when they decide to self-publish. I had thought it might be Microsoft, but nothing turns up when I do cursory search.

  2. I was wondering how one becomes Grand Moff. Are there Assistant Under Moffs? Associate Moffs? Temp Moffs? Moff Interns?

    Apparently a Moff is an Imperial sector Governor who may also hold a senior military position. A (or The? How many GMs are there?) Grand Moff is presumably the boss of them…

    (I may have just been reading IMDB trivia…)

  3. @JKT:

    I don’t have enough Prima in my collection. My core “Cool Yule” playlist kicks off with Armstrong’s “Christmas Night in Harlem,” rolls into Kay Starr’s “(Everybody’s Waitin’ For) The Man With the Bag,” and goes from there. Prima’s “What Will Santa Claus Say? (When He Finds Everybody Swingin’)” comes in at #5, and of course there’s some Duke Ellington in the mix.

    @microtherion: (becoming Grand Moff)

    That’s easy. You donate a thousand credits to the Committee to Re-Elect Emperor Palpatine (CREEP).

  4. @microtherion: (13) this week I was wondering how one becomes Grand Moff. Are there Assistant Under Moffs? Associate Moffs? Temp Moffs? Moff Interns?

    There is only one Grand Moff, but the GM has a host of underlings who are empowered to issue orders on the GM’s behalf. These are known as As-a-Moffs.

  5. 11) That’s one of the best explanations of why “I don’t see race” is problematic that I’ve ever seen. Personally, I strive for IDIC; I won’t say I always succeed, but that’s my ideal.

    @ Peer: What you’re missing is the concept of the “default setting”. Absent a specific description of a character, many readers will assign a generic image — and that image is overwhelmingly likely to be white if race/ethnicity is unspecified, and male if gender is not clearly specified. (Martha Wells had an interesting comment in an essay about being told by multiple people that her first Raksura book was “hard to follow” even though it’s an entirely linear, single-POV storyline; apparently the source of the problem was that all her characters have gender-neutral names.) If you don’t have the default setting in your head, that’s great — but a LOT of people do, so not having diverse character descriptions results in the effective whitewashing of the story.

    @ Eli: While I’m thinking about the Raksura books… Wells makes it clear that the groundling forms (human shape) of most of her Raksuran characters are various shades of brown. The groundling forms of Fell rulers and progenitors mostly have milk-white skin (although they are not albinos), which is one of the things about them that Raksura find jolting.

    @ Darren: There were occasions in TOS when people hurled racial epithets at Spock. It was usually made clear that those people were not the norm. But even McCoy occasionally said things like “Why, you pointy-eared…” when he and Spock were having one of their legendary arguments.

    @ Steve D.: It should also be noted that the reason Weir didn’t get the Best Novel Hugo is that the original indie version of The Martian didn’t get a lot of buzz in the year it came out. It took off like hotcakes the following year with the house-published version, but was ruled ineligible because of the previous indie edition.

    @ Darren: I’m happy for you that you have the ability to completely ignore issues of race or ethnicity in story characters. But it would be really nice for those who don’t have that option if you could refrain from referring to description diversity as “identity politics”. It comes across as kinda rude, y’know?

    BTW, when I’m talking to people online, I find that being aware of their backgrounds tends to promote better understanding. It’s not just about the ideas; people’s real-life experience counts too, and you can’t evaluate that without knowing who they are.

    @ HRJ: Yeah, I just don’t get the “all or nothing” approach some people on both sides of the trad/indie divide have. Am I the only person who finds it blindingly obvious that some people will do better with one approach and some with the other? (Clearly not, since you made exactly the same point. 🙂 )

  6. @Steve Davidson

    Both Hoyt and Meadows are addressing issues of identity.
    Perhaps my impression of Hoyt’s piece is colored by her puppy affiliations, but I read it to contain “complaints” that indie authors “get no respect” – or, rather, ought to be as entitled to fame, fortune and recognition at conventions as trad authors.
    When I can visit Amazon and find the names under “also recommended” (incidentally leading authors in their categories) are actually authors I’ve heard of, we’ll be getting close to what Hoyt is looking for. (For the past several months I’ve seen names associated with “Best selling SF author on Amazon” that always prompt a “who the heck is that?”.)
    I think Andy Weir is a perfect example of the fact that some indie authors have already achieved parity with traditionally published authors. Whether that continues will be based on the strength of his next book. If it achieves even “decent” review levels, he’ll remain among the pantheon of well-recognized SF authors. If not, it will be his first book that we recognize, but not the author.
    Significantly, Weir achieved that status AFTER taking his indie book traditional. Why? Probably because some smart PR type person recognized that the whole Mars thing was about to explode and made the right connections.
    The other problem with indie genre publishing is – most of the authors involved DO NOT seek out the traditional field/do not come from the traditional field and so each has their clade of readers, separate and non-communicative with others – the very people who A: might know someone in the field B. are likely to be able to say “oh, if you liked X, you will certainly like Y”.

    I didn’t necessarily read Sarah Hoyt’s article as an “Indie authors don’t get no respect” lament, but rather as a fairly typical “Indie publishing rules and trad publishing is doomed” post. That sort of post used to be dime a dozen on indie publishing blogs a couple of years ago.

    You make a good point that there is often very little overlap between indie authors and their readers and the regular genre community/fandom. Hence, you get Amazon subgenre bestseller lists that look like Baen’s slush pile and top-ranking author lists at Amazon dominated by authors who clearly have a lot of fans but are often completely unknown in larger genre fandom.

    On the other hand, you have indie writers who have very little knowledge about the genre they write in beyond having read a couple of books on the Amazon bestseller list for the relevant genre/subgenre, usually books by indie writers as well, and then emulating those.

    And while it’s true that some indie authors make a whole lot of money, most make comparatively little. Plus, as Steve points out, most of the big indie successes in SFF seem to have gone hybrid or crossed over to traditional publishing altogether, e.g. Andy Weir, Amanda Hocking, Becky Chambers, Michael J. Sullivan, Jay Allan. Hugh Howey is still mainly indie, though he has a publishing deal for print books and foreign editions. Ditto for Annie Bellet, who also has a print deal as far as I know. A.G. Riddle is still indie, though I’ve seen physical paperback copies of his books in bookstores. Amanda M. Lee is 100% indie as well.

    Also, as Heather Rose Jones said, there is no one size fits all solution to publishing.

  7. Darren, if race were really that irrelevant to you, you’d by default expect, or at least understand why people who are more visual readers than you are would expect, skin color to be mentioned simply as a detail of physical description.

    And yes, thoroughly fed up with the aggressive use of “political all correctness” and “identity politics” to try to bludgeon into silence any discussion of race, gender, and ethnicity by those for whom these are still real issues. Which is to say not just much of the population, but a large and growing percentage of people who are sick of being told, whether implicitly or explicitly, to shut up.

  8. @Rev. Bob: “editorial” direction that’s really Marketing saying “we don’t think this aspect will sell”. Do you believe all, or even most, editors defer to Marketing? Do you have evidence? I can certainly see many editors, with or without Marketing prompting, saying “This isn’t our type of book” — but the bits I’ve heard suggest that manuscript alterations at Marketing’s direction are uncommon. And I’ve mentioned here at least one indie work that would have been better for basic editorial intelligence.

  9. I have to say, I think this may be my favorite-ist title of all–I just love it so much!

  10. A few examples of how the ‘default’ reading of a character as white despite explicit authorial cues otherwise shows how both unconscious/aversive and Jim Crow racisms are often deployed, AKA “what happens when white people get all upset because their idea of whiteness as a norm and the universal is challenged even ever so slightly.”

    Damien Scott. “The 25 Most Racist Tweets About ‘The Hunger Games.'” CompPlex: Pop Culture.
    Link

    More specifically, guys and girls alike were seemingly offended that the character of Rue, a girl described in the novel as “a twelve-year-old girl from District 11. She has dark brown skin and eyes,” was played by Amandia Stenberg, a talented young black actress. No one seemed to care much that Lenny Kravitz was also in the movie.

    Bim Adewunmi. “Why Wasn’t The Hunger Games Cast as I imagined in My Racist Reading?!”The Guardian (Race Issues). 28 March 2012.
    Link

    “Why does rue have to be black, not gonna lie kind ruined the movie”

    “I was pumped about the Hunger Games. Until I learned a black girl was playing Rue”

    “Totally not expecting Thresh to be some big black guy”

    “Why did the producer make all the good characters black”

    “…I don’t think he will be able to re-enact Cinna’s calm temper and quiet personality… ”

    “Omg thought he was white crying omg wtf this movie will suck”

    Many of us will have seen the racist tweets of The Hunger Games fandom over the last few days. At the risk of sounding like the veteran with the thousand-yard stare, I wasn’t surprised. Some of the comments above were posted last November, after the character posters were revealed. At the time, I tweeted about the obvious and not-so-obvious racism on display – in these people’s minds all fictional characters, but especially those set in “non-modern” scenarios, are white. The expectation even extends into genres outside of sci-fi and cult series, and anything that threatens this notion is labelled as “PC gone mad”.

    Anna Holmes. “White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in Hunger Games.” The New Yorker (Page Turner). 30 March 2012. Link

    Adam says that the pivotal moment in the evolution of Hunger Games Tweets came on or around March 23rd, after he posted a tweet by someone named Alana Paul, a petite brunette who went by the handle @sw4q. Alana’s tweet was not the most offensive or nakedly racist of the bunch (that award could go to Cliff Kigar, who dropped the N-bomb, or to @GagasAlexander, who complained of “some ugly little girl with nappy…hair.”) but perhaps the most telling. “Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you picture,” she wrote. She cc’ed a friend on the tweet, @EganMcCoy.

    And need we revisit the whitewashing of LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy (and all the other whitewashing done by Hollywood)? Plus all the similar issues around gender and sexual orientation and class that I’m just too tired and too pissed off to want to bother seeking out the numerous examples.

    Talking about “identity politics” as if the minimal social progress made in the US in the last century isn’t about to be undercut if not dismantled by a political party dominated by white people is especially enraging. Off to block.

  11. I’m trying to envision how many kinds of conversation one misses out on if one has no idea about the age gender, cultural background etc of the person one is talking to. I can imagine basic “how was your day?” talk (though be careful of too many references to workplaces, weather or transportation, all cultural touchstones), book and movie reactions (though many in depth reviews and thoughts would lose potency) and maybe some restaurant/cooking discussions, as long as it was a kind of cuisine both people are either equally familiar with or equally unfamiliar with; though even that is knowing something. The same for music, and again even finding the safe common ground would involve learning something of the other person. Strict science fact, maybe, but remove all speculation based on lived experience.

    In short, it sounds like pure small talk, of the worst kind.

    I’d rather know I was talking to a middle-aged white male SF big-name-fan with multiple Hugo nominations and awards, a fantasy writer with an obsession with heirloom gardening and some awesome podcasts to her credit, a young Jewish woman who is coping with having been hit by a truck, a gay man who runs a site reviewing SFF… every time these things and other touchstones of background and life experience have become relevant to their perspective the conversation is richer.

    Heck, imagine discussing barbeque without reference to where each proponent lives…

  12. Lenora Rose: every time these things and other touchstones of background and life experience have become relevant to their perspective the conversation is richer.

    Exactly. When I started reading and commenting on File770 lo, these many 20 months ago, you were all just random commenters. Now I know many, many details about the lives of many of you — and it enriches the reading of your comments to know that background and have that insight.

    In other words, you’ve become fully-fleshed-out people to me, rather than just random characters spouting dialogue on the page I’m reading. When I read your words, I have the background of things you may not specifically say in this comment, but which I know from something you said last month or last year, and which more fully informs the context of this particular comment for me.

    And this is why I say that the little background details that authors slip in about appearance or heritage make a work of fiction go from grayscale to Technicolor for me: these details make characters distinct from the other characters in the story, and they take on life, and become more of a real person to me.

  13. @PJ Evans — thank you, I am glad to know this lack of visual imagination isn’t related to glasses.

    @microtherion & all others who “moff commented” – I had to read your comments to my roommate.

  14. My mind has been blown by the whole “not everyone can imagine things visually (or audibly)” stuff! And I write this as someone who feels like he doesn’t have a good visual imagination – but wow, I’m a virtuoso, I guess, by comparison. (Somehow this just feels surreal, not good.)

    I felt it was funny that I looooove and mostly read SFF, despite not having a great visual imagination for SFFal things. I can imagine my house, the beach, etc. just fine! I can imagine hearing songs almost too well…these days, even while trying to get to sleep! But imagining something utterly SFFal purely based on description is tougher for me – but, apparently, not as tough as for some. (So I love book covers – yay, it helps me picture things in the book! LOL.)

    Anyway, wow. Just wow. BTW thanks, @Darren Garrison (IIRC) for linking to that Facebook post – fascinating!

  15. @Chip Hitchcock: “Do you believe all, or even most, editors defer to Marketing? Do you have evidence?”

    Yes, I believe the firsthand accounts of authors who say that they were told to change their characters’ races or genders – especially to change a same-sex relationship into a heterosexual one – to make their books “more viable” are rooted in marketing. Parsing whether the decisions were rooted in editorial bias or came from the Marketing department rather misses the point.

    @World Weary:

    We’re notorious for straying moff-topic around here.

  16. @Rev Bob:

    @microtherion: (becoming Grand Moff)

    That’s easy. You donate a thousand credits to the Committee to Re-Elect Emperor Palpatine (CREEP).

    Ah, good to know. I already donated because Palpatine was so convincing when he said “I’m not a Sith”, and I’m impressed with his foreign policy—only Palpatine could go to Endor, after all.

  17. @Chip Hitchcock:

    I can certainly see many editors, with or without Marketing prompting, saying “This isn’t our type of book”

    I don’t remember whether File770 already had a discussion on the infamous “Moby-Dick” rejection letter that asked:

    First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale?

    http://www.azula.com/moby-dick-rejection-letter/

  18. Thanks for the comments, everyone!
    The “default setting problem” I understand, I just dont know how to solve it cleanly. The reason is simply, that I think that in a society with non-human races (Vulcans, Elves,Orcs, Defels) would be essentially colourblind. Its therefore difficult to include racial describition, without being heavyhanded about it (“Oh, that the secon ltd, who, on old Earth, would be considered black to the doctor, of asian descent. Whatever “asian” means). This is amplified imho, because if you highlight one character as “black” and not the others, its as if you have a “token” black charackter. So you have to include even more racial descriptions. And I personally like it, when stories are written as if the author (and the reader) where part of the universe vs. a story where soemone tells a story to someone (i.e. the reader) that is from a different universe entirely.

    But then again, I can wholehearty feel with JJs (IIRC) argument, that it feels more personally if a characters background is especially stated to share with your own. So thats something I want to keep in mind, if I start writing again…

    For what its worth: I do imagine characters, often vaguely, but often not necessary fitting with the describtions in the books. My mental imagine is more formed by the name and the actions of a character than by the describtions (If that makes sense). I know at least once I complained about an blonde actress cast for a character I envisioned being brunette, only to be told, that it said in the book that she is a blonde…

  19. @ Kendall: When I read, I “hear” the words in my head as a sort of background narration. My brain privileges this over the sound of someone actually speaking to me, so when I’m buried in a book it’s hard to get my attention. I also “hear” melodies when I’m reading lyrics, which means that if I know the original tune of a song that someone has posted filk lyrics for, it’ll generally come right up, cf. that “Gods Talk” filk a couple of Scrolls back.

    I have a good friend who doesn’t have this ability at all, and who dislikes most poetry because he can’t “hear” the metric pattern in his head. It was disconcerting when the topic first came up in a conversation; I’d never before met anyone who didn’t do that at least to some extent.

  20. ’m trying to envision how many kinds of conversation one misses out on if one has no idea about the age gender, cultural background etc of the person one is talking to.

    Strict science fact, maybe, but remove all speculation based on lived experience.

    You just nailed my primary interest. I’m much more interested in “strict science fact” (including the “soft” sciences) than I am in “lived experiences.” I prefer looking up, not down (metaphorically, not literally–geology is perfectly fine for me.)

  21. @Peer–

    The “default setting problem” I understand, I just dont know how to solve it cleanly. The reason is simply, that I think that in a society with non-human races (Vulcans, Elves,Orcs, Defels) would be essentially colourblind. Its therefore difficult to include racial describition, without being heavyhanded about it (“Oh, that the secon ltd, who, on old Earth, would be considered black to the doctor, of asian descent. Whatever “asian” means). This is amplified imho, because if you highlight one character as “black” and not the others, its as if you have a “token” black charackter. So you have to include even more racial descriptions.

    I don’t think that’s quite right.

    If the current “racial” and “ethnic” categories, which I think everyone here agrees are socially determined, become irrelevant, then skin color becomes just an item of physical description, like hair or eye color. It also seems probable that with time nearly everyone would be what we’d now call “mixed race,” making the mixes of specific characteristics perhaps more varied than we expect to see now.

    @Darren–

    You just nailed my primary interest. I’m much more interested in “strict science fact” (including the “soft” sciences) than I am in “lived experiences.” I prefer looking up, not down (metaphorically, not literally–geology is perfectly fine for me.)

    Okay, maybe I’m confused, or maybe just not awake. If I read this as written, it would seem to indicate a lack of interest in fiction. But that’s obviously not correct, or you wouldn’t be here participating in this discussion. So I’m missing something.

    For me, experiencing different viewpoints and ideas, some insight into other people’s “lived experience,” is part of the point of fiction.

  22. Darren, I think it depends what you are talking about. With Science Im with you, but when its about culture -of which literature is a part – different backgrounds would give different insides. Same with politics.

    “Shes blinding me with Pixels!”

  23. @Techgirl1972

    Fortunately I don’t have the face recognition problem. In fact I’m more often the one saying, “sure I know that actor from somewhere” and reaching for IMDB. So I do know what people or things look like at some level, I just can’t conjure more than fleeting picture. I suspect my horrible memory for names is connected though. I don’t remember much if anything about dreams either, though I do go into a lucid state when half awake.

    As an introvert and while mostly high functioning still definitely a bit less than neurotypical with a side order of working in an information security role I’m not naturally given to information leakage online. Which is why I didn’t link to the Facebook article, I’m not on it. I’m not big on social media at all this is one of the only forums I regularly post on.

  24. “Well, ‘ow d’you become Moff?”
    “The Sith of the Swamp, his face clad in shimmering black Bakelite, held aloft the Lightsaber Electrical, thus signifying by overwhelming Force that I was to be Moff. That is why I am your Moff!”
    “Listen, disfigured tantrum flingers, mopin’ about in marshy lowlands are no basis for a system of government! You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some plastic-faced git waved his flashlight at you!”
    “Shut up!”
    “If I was to go about claimin’ I was a Jedi just because some slimy strongman threw in his Banth-sticker wi’ me, they’d put me away!”
    “Vader! Will him to shut up!”
    “Ah, now we see the violence… urk.”

  25. Okay, maybe I’m confused, or maybe just not awake. If I read this as written, it would seem to indicate a lack of interest in fiction. But that’s obviously not correct, or you wouldn’t be here participating in this discussion. So I’m missing something.

    I said “primary interest”, not “only interest”, I do get caught up in social issues somewhat, but I’m more interested in how things work than I am in how things feel. For instance, I’m much more interested in learning what structural or chemical differences in the brain cause a person to be transgender than in what it is socially like to actually be transgender. For me, the important word in “science fiction” is “science”, not “fiction.”

  26. If the current “racial” and “ethnic” categories, which I think everyone here agrees are socially determined, become irrelevant, then skin color becomes just an item of physical description, like hair or eye color. It also seems probable that with time nearly everyone would be what we’d now call “mixed race,” making the mixes of specific characteristics perhaps more varied than we expect to see now.

    How about not giving any characteristics (if not needed for the story)? If I dont include hair- or eye colour, than its OK to ommit skin colour as well? It doesnt quite solve the default setting problem?

    (I hope my post doesnt come across snarky, it certainly isnt meant this way – Im honestly interested!)

  27. Peer Sylvester: How about not giving any characteristics (if not needed for the story)? If I dont include hair- or eye colour, than its OK to ommit skin colour as well? It doesnt quite solve the default setting problem?

    What constitutes “needed for the story”?

    In my opinion, various details about appearance, cultural heritage (whether Earth-based or alien), relationships — all of those things add depth and color and flavor to a story.

    If the writer omits them, the result is just a Blandy McBlandFace story. And if all the reader cares about is the plot, that may suffice.

    But for me, a truly great story combines strong plotting with strong characterization. If I only get one — or the other — the story feels insufficient, and I feel unsatisfied. It’s like having a choice between a meal that looks like several fabulous dishes which all taste like oatmeal, or a meal that tastes fabulous, but looks like various piles of brown mush.

  28. @Rev Bob: That’s not a constructive answer. I can’t recall such author comments offhand but I have no trouble believing that they exist and are frequently true; however, I asked whether this was a majority behavior. I can see somebody going indie because they had such interference; assuming such interference (as I read your original comment) seems self-defeating (unless, perhaps, you were thinking only of highly formulaic publishers). I haven’t read the books you’re speaking of, so I can’t guess whether your no-publisher-will-touch-these is implausible — but that goes back to my suggestion that publishers may be more likely to say “we can’t do this” than to niggle afterwards.

  29. I am enjoying the comments by people about how they “read” differently — I’ve learned a whole lot by asking my students to describe their reading processes and experiences all of which has led me to believe that we as a culture don’t really know how the hell this new (really quite recent in human development) technology and set of literacies works.

    I tend to be a very immersed reader–in the books that grab me, so immersed that people have had to walk up to me and poke me or say my name loudly to get my attention — and I am very visually oriented but NOT in terms of character description so much as in “seeing” and experiencing the world of the text. (This applies to fiction–immersive reading of a theory text is a very different experience/perception.) But I have had to learn ways of reading more analytically for writing and teaching.

  30. There is no way “out” of cultural associations (including stereotypes), in the sense of not being affected at all (as opposed to critical self-evaluation). And all it really takes is a name.

    (I think of these studies every time I see someone claim that they don’t “think” about gender or race when choosing books to read, just go with the best/most interesting, etc. etc.)

    The claims by the people in the dominant group to have the ability to be objective, focusing only on merit and the “facts” seem to be undercut by studies showing that an application that has a name that is read as a woman’s, or as an African-American’s is treated entirely differently than the same application with a name that is read as a man’s, or as a white person’s.

    And I have no doubt that every single one of the people rejecting those applications would say they “don’t see race” and/or don’t see “gender” (which means they don’t see racism or sexism as issues which is sort of the problem).

    And as someone with a name that can be read as either masculine or feminine (“Robin” being a nickname for Robert in Britain and Australia but being given to women in the US – although sometimes with change in spelling, “Robyn,” the “y” making it girlY), I can say there is no such thing as a gender neutral name. A name that is not clearly marked as masculine or feminine (and those gender markings are very culture specific) is read by most as the default male. The same thing goes for the use of initials as well–that’s the way “default” works.

    National Bureau of Economic Research: “Employers’ Replies to Racial Names” Nontechnical digest of a study by two NBER Research Fellows

    A job applicant with a name that sounds like it might belong to an African-American – say, Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones – can find it harder to get a job. Despite laws against discrimination, affirmative action, a degree of employer enlightenment, and the desire by some businesses to enhance profits by hiring those most qualified regardless of race, African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed and they earn nearly 25 percent less when they are employed.

    Now a “field experiment” by NBER Faculty Research Fellows Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan measures this discrimination in a novel way. In response to help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston newspapers, they sent resumes with either African-American- or white-sounding names and then measured the number of callbacks each resume received for interviews. Thus, they experimentally manipulated perception of race via the name on the resume. Half of the applicants were assigned African-American names that are “remarkably common” in the black population, the other half white sounding names, such as Emily Walsh or Greg Baker.

    To see how the credentials of job applicants affect discrimination, the authors varied the quality of the resumes they used in response to a given ad. Higher quality applicants were given a little more labor market experience on average and fewer holes in their employment history. They were also portrayed as more likely to have an email address, to have completed some certification degree, to possess foreign language skills, or to have been awarded some honors.

    In total, the authors responded to more than 1,300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support, clerical, and customer services job categories, sending out nearly 5,000 resumes. The ads covered a large spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mailroom to office and sales management positions.

    The results indicate large racial differences in callback rates to a phone line with a voice mailbox attached and a message recorded by someone of the appropriate race and gender. Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback. This would suggest either employer prejudice or employer perception that race signals lower productivity.

    Paper: “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jama? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan. NBER Working Paper No. 9873. Issues in July 2003. NBER Program(s): LS.

    Alexander W. Watts. “Why Does John get the STEM job rather than Jennifer?” Gender News. Stanford University. June 24, 2014.

    In their study, Moss-Racusin and her colleagues created a fictitious resume of an applicant for a lab manager position. Two versions of the resume were produced that varied in only one, very significant, detail: the name at the top. One applicant was named Jennifer and the other John. Moss-Racusin and her colleagues then asked STEM professors from across the country to assess the resume. Over one hundred biologists, chemists, and physicists at academic institutions agreed to do so. Each scientist was randomly assigned to review either Jennifer or John’s resume.

    The results were surprising—they show that the decision makers did not evaluate the resume purely on its merits. Despite having the exact same qualifications and experience as John, Jennifer was perceived as significantly less competent. As a result, Jenifer experienced a number of disadvantages that would have hindered her career advancement if she were a real applicant. Because they perceived the female candidate as less competent, the scientists in the study were less willing to mentor Jennifer or to hire her as a lab manager. They also recommended paying her a lower salary. Jennifer was offered, on average, $4,000 per year (13%) less than John.

    Despite the scientific valuation of objectivity, gender stereotypes tainted the judgments of the scientists, generating a bias that dampened the STEM career prospects of Jennifer. Even women scientists favored John. This finding supports the understanding among researchers that gender biases are not a result of in-group favoritism. Rather, gender bias is often an outcome of an implicit cognitive process in which pervasive gender stereotypes shape our judgments, regardless of our intentions. Moss-Racusin stressed that the participants in her study were likely unaware they were discriminating against Jennifer.

    Abstract: “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students.” Authors: Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, John F. Dovidio, Victoria L. Brescoll, Mark J. Graham, and Jo Handelsman.

  31. The claims by the people in the dominant group to have the ability to be objective, focusing only on merit and the “facts” seem to be undercut by studies

    Despite the scientific valuation of objectivity, gender stereotypes tainted the judgments of the scientists, generating a bias that dampened the STEM career prospects of Jennifer.

    I know you aren’t addressing me directly, but I do not make such a claim. In fact, my original quote was: “ideally, I would not know the age, sex, race, etc. of anyone I communicate with on-line so that the ideas themselves are all that matters.” In other words, I like not knowing any of those things so that unconscious biases do not come into play. I acknowledge that I have unconscious biases–therefore, I like when I can have a conversation with GlUxMT854726 (who’s avatar is a sliced turip) so that I can concentrate on the important issues of ideas without being distracted by the cultural baggage of race, gender, sex, age, etc.

    As for reading, I’m not trying to say that I don’t pay attention to race, I’m saying that I don’t pay attention to all physical attributes–height, weight, eye color, clothing style, etc, unless a plot element specifically makes me concentrate on it. It isn’t some cultural statement about “color-blindness”, it is a factual description of how I visualize things when I read. (Heck, I tend to barely form characterizations at all, to the point that I rarely even remember a character’s name after I’ve finished the book.)

  32. @ Peer: When you start talking about “only if needed for the story”, you’re getting onto ground that is very problematic indeed — because, whether you mean it like that or not, that particular argument is most commonly deployed by the same people who talk about representation in general as “political correctness gone mad”. The people who believe that unless there is some plot-related reason for a character to be female or non-white, the default should rule. The people who sneer at character diversity as “checking ticky-boxes”. This is a path I don’t think you want to follow.

    @ robinareid: Yes, exactly. This is what’s called “institutionalized racism/sexism”, and it’s nearly impossible to explain to people who think that those terms only refer to deliberate, conscious bias. And when steps are taken to combat it at the institutional level, those same people start whining about “reverse racism” and how white men are the REAL victims here.

  33. @Chip Hitchcock: “That’s not a constructive answer. I can’t recall such author comments offhand but I have no trouble believing that they exist and are frequently true; however, I asked whether this was a majority behavior.”

    Since I never made a claim as to whether such interference was or was not “a majority behavior,” I have no stake or interest in addressing that point. I’ve seen enough accounts to be convinced that the behavior is at least prevalent enough to be a realistic concern, and that’s all that’s required to answer the original “why would some authors choose to go indie?” question.

  34. As an author, I had to really wrestle with my issues around character visuals. In real life, I’m significantly face-blind (not absolutely, but enough so that it causes me noticeable social difficulties) and I’m sure the two are connected.**

    When I visualize a character in my default mode, I know the kinesthetics — how they move, where they are, how they gesture, facial expressions — but very little about their appearance otherwise. I know what they’re feeling, how they’re reacting, what they’re thinking. It’s as if I know them from the inside, but not the outside. The most useful piece of feedback I got when working on my first novel was, “I have no idea what any of these people look like!” And I realized that I had no idea either. I knew them like I knew my own hands, but I couldn’t see their faces. But at the same time, among the things I did know about my characters were age, gender, and ethnicity.

    So, for example, in Daughter of Mystery, I already knew that Dominique, the dressmaker, was a black woman of Caribbean origin, even though nothing about her ethnicity is directly retrievable from the text. (Though part of that was her relatively small presence on the page and the fact that my viewpoint characters both were distracted at the time, and wouldn’t have had any reason to take special note of her color.)

    For me, the only way to get an acceptable level of physical description into my books is to have a “reference picture” for every significant character and pull it up in front of me when writing description. And one of my bullet-point revision items is to find every available location for including physical description. Because when I think I’ve overdone it, my editor will still be grumbling about how disappointed she is that I’ve ignored her advice on that point.

    **It is also possible that there’s a connection to me rarely being attracted to a person based on physical appearance (though often based on physical activity) as opposed to being attracted to personality. But then, this aspect may also be tangled up with being on the asexual spectrum. Which makes me wonder idly whether there’s any correlation between face-blindness and asexuality.

  35. In the books of his I’ve read, John Scalzi tends to omit any character detail not directly involved in the plot (to the degree where, IIRC, in Lock-In, which I have not read, the protagonist’s gender is never referred.)

    Even knowing it’s a conscious choice, I find it one of his biggest weaknesses. I’d rather read a flawed work like Binti, where culture and colour and difference make a meh story richer, than a perfectly crafted plot where everyone sounds like a variation on the default.

  36. @Lenora Rose: I never really noticed a lack of character detail in Scalzi’s books, which may say something about my poor reading comprehension, hmm! 😉

    Tangent: He talks about the Lock In thing here; there’s a little more to it than you make it sound. It was a teensy bit gimmicky, but I found his explanation interesting and it didn’t distract me as a reader at all. (I kinda wish I hadn’t known ahead of time; I doubt I would’ve noticed, but I wonder.)

    BTW I recommend Lock In! It’s not my usual type of thing, but occasionally I like a near-future thriller-ish novel, and I enjoyed this one a lot.

    /ramble

  37. @Lee: I certainly dont think you should only include different ethnic backgrounds/minorities if its needed for the story! But I (as a reader) dont automaticly assume a “Default”-setting, if no description is given either, so I can see where you are coming from.
    I think my fallacy is that I personally prefer if the author gives as little information as possible/necessary for characteriation, while many readers prefer more informations. Of course, if I write I have a mental pictures of my characters, I “know” who is black, who is white, who could be gay…But I dont necessary need to enforce my interpretation to the reader. But the again, Im a “default” type of guy, 😉 , so its easy for me to say.

    Heathers Post seems to agree there as well and Im very happy that she shared her side as a published author 🙂

  38. Kendall: It’s actually near the peak of mount TBR. It’s merely suffering the fate of being IN Mount TBR.

    Finding the discussion of differing reading protocols interesting. I find proprioceptive description – what Heather Rose Jones is describing – to give a better and more lasting concept than many more direct physical descriptions — but we still need a few of those basic physical characteristics to hang it off of.

    And so often the biggest problem with describing features is that too many of the easiest descriptions are both hackneyed and very non-individual. And for me, from a writing standpoint, what is noticed needs to establish something about two characters — the one looking and the one looked upon.

  39. @ Peer

    Re: making character characteristics explicit

    I wasn’t trying to say that I don’t think it’s important to communicate non-default characteristics to the reader — far from it. I was more trying to talk about some of the difficulties I have in doing so due to a personal quirk.

    One big problem is that even if a reader doesn’t default to assuming all characters are straight white men unless specifically told otherwise, the reader will assign characteristics of gender, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, etc. based on their own unconscious assignment of those characteristics to specific groups. The unconscious association of particular demographics with specific characteristics is more commonly called stereotyping.

    I find myself doing this all the time, both in reading and online interactions, when I’m not given specific information to contract my unconscious biases. For example, I have regularly discovered, after the fact, that I’ve assigned a particular gender to a commenter avatar that doesn’t provide gender cues based on my own stereotypes about male and female behavior online. Those stereotypes may even be statistically significant, but that doesn’t mean they won’t result in wrong assumptions.

    And here’s why that’s a problem:
    1. When my unconscious stereotypical gender-assignment matches the person’s gender and that person’s gender is made explicit, my stereotypes are not challenged.
    2. When my unconscious stereotypical gender-assignement matches the person’s gender even though that person’s gender is never made explicit, my stereotypes are not challenged.
    3. When my unconscious stereotypical gender-assignment does NOT match the person’s gender, and that person’s gender is never made explicit, my stereotypes are not challenged even though they very much should be.
    4. It is only when my unconscious stereotypical gender-assignment does not match the person’s gender AND I am made aware of the person’s gender–whether that happens before I reflexively assign gender or whether it happens after I’ve already developed an (erroneous) picture in my mind–that my stereotypes are challenged and I am forced to confront them and expand my understanding of the range of gendered behavior.

    Repeat as necessary for other characteristics. Apologies for my oversimplified example operating in a binary gender system.

    In Daughter of Mystery, because I was not able to find an in-story way to indicate that Dominique was black, I failed to challenge readers’ assumptions about the racial makeup of my fictional world. The fact that I knew it is irrelevant except for my knowledge meaning that I hadn’t set anything up to contradict it, and that I made definite plans to continue her as a minor character and make the fact explicit. But I strongly doubt that any reader, reading the two paragraphs in DoM in which she appears, would have visualized her as black, unless it’s a reader who habitually visualizes a certain percentage of unspecified characters as black.

    That last bit isn’t meant to be a snark. I do this for sexuality. For my own amusement (and emotional well-being) I default to assuming that all female characters are lesbian until presented with in-story evidence that contradicts it.

    If a story under-specifies the demographics of a character, leaving the reader to fill in whatever features they consider necessary to visualize to enjoy the story, then the story will not expand the reader’s understanding of the ways people can be in the world beyond the unconscious stereotypes they already carry.

  40. For my own amusement (and emotional well-being) I default to assuming that all female characters are lesbian until presented with in-story evidence that contradicts it.

    Is doing this somehow “better” than assuming that all male characters are straight white men, unless they are otherwise described?

    (And if the answer is that it does not amuse you to do the latter, fair enough — you should get whatever you want out of reading a story: edification, amusement, moral improvement, kill time, etc.)

  41. For my own amusement (and emotional well-being) I default to assuming that all female characters are lesbian until presented with in-story evidence that contradicts it.

    Is doing this somehow “better” than assuming that all male characters are straight white men, unless they are otherwise described?

    One way it’s different is that it requires active choice and active thought. Straight, cis, white men get the luxury of being the assumed default. The further one is from that assumed norm, the more one has to actively work to see oneself in fiction, particularly in active characters with real agency.

    And not seeing that, ever, can be disturbing.

  42. The way you phrased it, it sounds like you make an active choice to imagine characters as lesbians — that it was not something you would do without having made a conscious decision in that direction.

    Which is different that what has been discussed here about straight white men. I don’t enter a book thinking to myself “Lead character will be, unless otherwise specified, SWM.” It just happens. (Even when it shouldn’t — my mental image of Juan Rico from Starship Troopers looks more like a western European than it does a SE Asian).

    And that’s interesting to me. My default is to imagine characters to be like myself — SWM. But if I’m reading you correctly (and apologies if I’m not), you have to actively work to imagine characters to be like yourself (specifically, lesbian). Is it that way for most readers who aren’t SWM? Do they typically imagine characters to be something other than their own selves? Does a typical black YA male see Rico to be black, to be Filipino, or to be a white guy?

  43. And that’s interesting to me. My default is to imagine characters to be like myself — SWM. But if I’m reading you correctly (and apologies if I’m not), you have to actively work to imagine characters to be like yourself (specifically, lesbian). Is it that way for most readers who aren’t SWM? Do they typically imagine characters to be something other than their own selves? Does a typical black YA male see Rico to be black, to be Filipino, or to be a white guy?

    The problem is that none of this is happening in a vacuum.

    We all get the social messaging that “the norm” is straight, cis, white male. All of us.

    And if you’re a straight, cis, white male, that works out fine for you. And you’re encouraged to see yourself as the default human being.

    Until fairly recently, you weren’t seeing characters outside that norm depicted as hero material, or usually as having agency at all. I spent a lot of my childhood and teenage years, identifying with straight, male characters because it’s no fun to read a book and identify with a character who is basically part of the furniture.

    And yes, sure, in any decade you care to choose, you can point to books that are exceptions to this, where the female characters had intelligence and agency without being villains. But they were exceptions. Even the explosion of feminist sf in the 1970s that so distresses the Puppies just made it less uncommon.

    So, yes, seeing characters with agency as being “like me” when it’s not specified is, I think, a very different experience from being a cis white male and assuming characters are white and male unless otherwise specified. If nothing else, there’s less work being done by the reader. You get taught, largely unconsciously, that you define the norm, and all over literature and the arts, that is reinforced–and when it isn’t, the work gets defined as “feminist,” i.e., something other than just a good story the writer wanted to tell. Including women, gays, non-whites, etc., gets defined as having an agenda, and we get the Puppies. 🙁

    Does any of this help?

  44. Re: character descriptions

    I may have a little different perspective on this from my experience editing J.B. Rogers’s erotica. One easy part is that those stories are written as contemporary fiction with (in the novel) limited magic, so the whole “what does the world look like” problem doesn’t exist. It’s the modern-day USA. A complicating factor, though, is that all of the storytelling is done through first-person narration – meaning that the viewpoint character’s priorities come into play.

    I had access to more than just the manuscript when editing; I had J.B.’s notes and outline, which gave me more detail on the physical appearances of key characters. I got reference photos as well, although those tended to be more like composites. Something we agreed on is that the level of description should feel more like a journal than a movie – and when writing that you went shopping with your best friend, do you describe that friend in detail? I don’t, except for a couple of striking features or if they’ve changed their appearance. Thus, the text focused on following the narrative gaze, which turned out to get really interesting when describing a costume party from three different viewpoints. (It’s unrealistic to expect all the characters to “notice” the same half-dozen people in a crowd, so a lot of work went into populating the party with a variety of options.)

    One of my tasks was to make sure a specific character detail was obscured over the first several chapters, but that the reader could go back when it was revealed and see that there had been clues all along. The “described by a friend” device helped a lot, and the “secret” surfaced about a third of the way through the book, when someone sees – and describes – that character for the first time. I can also say that one minor character’s race changed over the course of the first draft; he’d originally been envisioned as white, but his voice came out as black in a late chapter. Thus, I got the job of hunting down the bits of physical description and making sure that everything which needed changed got fixed. I think the change added some depth and resonance to those earlier scenes, due to the power dynamics involved.

    Ultimately, the goal was to describe the characters well enough to be memorable, but not so closely that a reader couldn’t find someone to identify with. Homing in on a few unusual aspects – the accent that comes out when a trans woman stops modifying her voice for a trip home, a black character’s smoky gray eyes, the difference between a clerk’s self-image and the way others see her – can suffice without overwhelming.

  45. @ Bill

    Is doing this somehow “better” than assuming that all male characters are straight white men, unless they are otherwise described?

    “Better” is a very interesting choice of word. Given that I explicitly introduced the statement saying that I did it for my own amusement and emotional well-being, one would presume that I view it as “better” for my subjective reading experience. But by comparing it to a default assumption of SWM, we’re now comparing my conscious default with other readers’ defaults (whether conscious or unconscious) and asking whether one is “better” than the other. That feels like it’s trying to drag the conversation into some sort of competitive space, rather than sharing our individual experiences of texts.

    The way you phrased it, it sounds like you make an active choice to imagine characters as lesbians — that it was not something you would do without having made a conscious decision in that direction. … And that’s interesting to me. My default is to imagine characters to be like myself — SWM. But if I’m reading you correctly (and apologies if I’m not), you have to actively work to imagine characters to be like yourself (specifically, lesbian). Is it that way for most readers who aren’t SWM?

    I thought I was clear about it being an active choice. Let’s compare two defaults: defaulting to lesbian versus defaulting to non-lesbian woman — in both cases, until and unless the text directly contradictions the reading. (I’m removing gender and race to make the comparison simpler to begin with.)

    Start off with gender. Given a character for whom gender hasn’t been specified, how often is later evidence going to identify that character as male versus female? That’s not the best example, because texts rarely conceal character gender for long. The most typical context will be a first person narration, especially if it takes a while for the character to interact with another person. But let’s assume that context. How often will a person assuming a female character get tripped up later versus someone assuming a male character?

    A better example. What percentage of significant random female characters in a story are going to finish up the story without having some clear evidence of sexual orientation presented? Now: of those where clear evidence is presented, how many will be indicated as lesbian versus indicated as having some level of attraction to men whether as straight or bi)? We’re excluding genres where orientation is not random (e.g., pretty much everything put out by my publisher).

    The biggest difference between a default to lesbian-until-contradicted versus non-lesbian-until-contradicted is that the former is far more likely to be contradicted. Unless an author specifically and deliberately intends to present evidence that a character is meant to be read as lesbian, the chances are that at some point that character will have thoughts, reactions, or experiences that contradict a possible reading as lesbian. Simply because the author is going to default to non-lesbian.

    Now let’s back out and look at the more complex question. A reader who visualizes every under-specified character as straight, white, and male (whether deliberately or unconsciously) will have a much lower contradiction rate than a reader who visualizes every under-specified character as lesbian (ethnicity unspecified). That contradiction rate affects one’s experience of the text. The contradiction rate is sort of the flip side of the identification rate (i.e., how often a reader encounters characters share similarities with the reader).

    As a reader, if I defaulted to seeing lesbians only when I’m given positive evidence for orientation, I would have a massively low identification rate (unless I confined my reading to lesbian publishers — and that experience is exactly why many lesbians do confine their reading to lesbian publishers). In contrast, if a straight man defaults to only reading a character as a straight man when given positive evidence, he’s going to have an extremely high identification rate. (Unless, say, he’s reading the output of a gay romance press.) If he opens it up to assuming that default unless contradicted, the stats won’t change all that much, whereas if I assume identification unless actively contradicted, I get a massive increase in identification potential. Still probably a minority, depending on genre. (Opportunities for contradictory evidence are going to be fairly common in your typical characterization.) The dynamics are not at all similar.

    Yes, I have to actively work to apply this as a default. I have to work against my knowledge of how likely it is that an author would intend a character to be lesbian without making it overt. I have to work against the statistical probability that my default will be clearly contradicted by the end of the story. But it’s one way I can claw out a small space where I feel like I’m included in the greater literary conversation — even when nobody actually intended to include me.

    That is an extremely different reading experience than a SWM has.

  46. Bill: My default is to imagine characters to be like myself — SWM. But if I’m reading you correctly (and apologies if I’m not), you have to actively work to imagine characters to be like yourself (specifically, lesbian). Is it that way for most readers who aren’t SWM? Do they typically imagine characters to be something other than their own selves?

    And that is one of the main points that I (and, I suspect, a great many other people) am trying to make when I say that putting diverse characters in fiction is important.

    I’ve got a degree in computer science and engineering. Growing up, I always loved, and was better than anyone else in my class, at science and mathematics as well as at reading and writing. I started reading adult novels, near as I remember, somewhere around the age of 7. I hated dolls and preferred things like building little dams and waterways, and floating little boats improvised out of plasting playing card clamshells around on, the huge puddle which formed at the bottom of our driveway after it rained. At the age of 10, I took apart my mom’s electric razor, which had stopped working, and figured out how to fix it.

    Somewhere in there, I discovered science fiction. And every adult science fiction novel in the library, every single goddamned one, featured a white male as the protagonist. The person who got to have adventures was a white man. The person who was smart and competent was a white man. The person who got to be a hero and save the world — or the universe — was a white man.

    In the meantime, who did these writers give me in their stories to see myself as? Idiots. Bimbos. Clueless, dumb women who were valued only for their appearance, their sexual function, and their homemaking abilities, whose main purpose was to serve as decorations and accessories and as the male character’s reward for his heroics.

    What the hell was I supposed to do with that? How the hell could I imagine myself as the “default” character, when he was so very clearly not me? When the characters who did resemble me physically bore no relation, in terms of personality or skills, to what I was actually like?

    Mind you, I love Heinlein despite his more problematic aspects; he and Star Trek were my gateway drug into SF. But I got so fucking tired of seeing women in SF fridged and used as manly emotional motivation and provided as rewards to the “real” characters. When I started reading the Darkover and PERN novels, my reaction was “OHMYGOD! These are smart women and they actually get to be the center of the story! They get to be the heroes!

    I can’t even imagine what it was like for POC and LGBTQIA people when they finally — finally — started to get to see themselves in stories. And even then it took a while before they could see themselves as someone other than a throwaway background character to be killed off, or the villain.

    The pleasure you got from always being able to see yourself in the hero’s role was something that women and minorities just never got to see themselves. They just had to try to live someone else’s adventures vicariously — and most of the time, trying to pretend that was pretty damned difficult, because the writers always made it quite clear that they were men, and usually that they were white, too.

    So when people like the Puppies complain about authors adding women, or POC, or LGBTQIA characters to stories “if it’s not necessary to the story”, it beggars belief.

    Of course it’s fucking necessary.

    They’ve always gotten to see themselves in stories. Now the rest of us get to see ourselves in them, too.

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