There’s a lot of wisdom in the old saws that readers should not meet the writers of their favourite books nor writers respond to criticism, as has been proven once again by what started as an enthusiastic review on the Tor website when Jo Walton shared why she like Patricia Wrede’s Thirteenth Child. The trouble is, Thirteenth Child, as Jo puts it takes place in “an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America (“Columbia”) was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical.”
Which may very well be an interesting setup for a story, but quite understandably rubbed quite a few people the wrong way as a story that has magicked away the native inhabitants of America to make way for the happy guilt free adventures of white folk. Patricia Wrede may have used this idea in all innocence, but as a writer in a country that has been founded on the murder of its original inhabitants and which has a long tradition of ignoring and silencing the voices of the survivors, of denying there was a history before the Pilgrim Fathers, that’s not enough. In the end the Thirteenth Child still fits neatly in this tradition of denial and for many people, including myself, this is enough to dismiss it without reading.
As you might expect, once the first few people expressed their discomfort with the premise of this novel, you got the usual debate between them and those who saw little if any problem with it. For many people a story’s just a story and any attempts to “politicise” it is scary or wrong. In short, we got Racefail II: the Quickening. All of which wouldn’t be so bad but then Lois Bujold showed up and well, made a fool of herself…
First she told people to just read the book, then she accused people of wanting “a sermon” as well as having made up their mind. Her next post was the worst though, patting herself on the back for doing something to improve the world while saying her critics just talked. Things went worse from there…
I’m sure Lois Bujold only jumped in to defend a friend from being, as she saw it, unfairly slandered, but unfortunately the way she went about it only confirmed the worst suspicions of people already suspicious of white sf/fantasy writers due to the huge clusterfuck that was Racefail 2009. The discussion about Thirteenth Child isn’t really about the book or its writer, but about a pattern in fantasy and science fiction that excludes people of colour, whether unconsciously or otherwise. To deny or belittle this as Bujold did doesn’t help. So yeah, she didn’t do herself or Wrede much good jumping in and I like her slightly less for it.
Perhaps the most unhelpful suggestion in this discussion was the idea that people need to “read the book” before they can criticise it. I’ll end this post with Bruce Baugh explaining why:
But that makes me quite an outlier in the hardcore of fandom. Boasts about the size of unread-book stacks remain ubiquitous, the subject of amused consideration. And yet people who take a self-deprecating pride in all the books they’re not reading keep insisting that others who decline to read this book here are clearly being cowards and wimps or the slaves of political correctness, because otherwise of course they’d be reading this one and never mind their own tastes and judgments.
I am not impressed. At least not favorably.
The fact is that we do all make our selections, and so nearly as I know nobody actually reads purely and only the works they believe are most meritorious by some general standard. We skip classics for the current fad; we read for comfort, and cheap thrills, and prurient curiosity, and lots of other reasons. And you know, this is all quite okay, because as a species we can’t run in top mental gear all the time. People who are stuck unable to take mental vacations succumb to a variety of physical and psychological impairments, and doing things that make rest (mental as well as physical) impossible is torture.