One of the things I love about living in Kamloops is the Music in the Park event. It runs for two months and is free concerts every night at one of the major parks in town. Every year since we moved here we’ve spent at least one night a week there (unless we are smoked out by wildfires). They always have some great local and regional bands including some fantastic cover bands. We enjoy the music, but the best part of it is getting to lay on a blanket in the dusk reading.
Yep, I go to concerts to read.
What it means is that during the summer I end up reading a lot more books because I have a two hour chunk a few times a week set aside just to read instead of only having the last 45 minutes before I go to bed. This means that I go from taking a few months to get through a book to completing them in a week or so.
Some books I read this summer that I’d recommend:
The Interdependency trilogy by John Scalzi
Interstellar politics with a lot of assassinations, machinations, and a threat only a physicist can save the empire from.
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
If you like the tone of the Gormenghast series but with a bit more hope and a bit more happening, this one’s for you.
Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
Not every fantasy novel needs to be epic, sometimes they can just be about building and saving a coffee shop.
Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao
Bringing together some of the tropiest tropes in YA dystopia but subverting them in new and innovative ways, add in some strong Chinese inspiration, giant mechs, and social commentary.
The Sibyl’s War trilogy by Timothy Zahn
I haven’t read the third book yet, but I love the idea of a book where the main character doesn’t know and can’t know everything. It leads to some very human interactions in a fast paced sci-fi.
I read a few other ones this summer, but those eight were the best.
Jay Dragon had a great twitter post the other day:
is there a term for when the particular conditions of a fantasy/fictional setting set up a particular philosophy? like how jack saint describes Sky High or how warhammer 40k's setting self-justifies the imperium
is there a term for when the particular conditions of a fantasy/fictional setting set up a particular philosophy? like how jack saint describes Sky High or how warhammer 40k’s setting self-justifies the imperium
It’s something that happens all the time in fiction, and always has. In a later tweet Jay mentioned Star Wars as a fictional universe where they avoid it.
The use of the Jedi/Sith as the counter argument works so well. Because although the Original Trilogy sets it up as the now lost Jedi were right about everything. But the prequels and Clone Wars, as well as sequels to a lesser extent (they aren’t great at philosophy), point out that both Jedi and Sith are wrong but in different ways and to different extents.
That’s important because in real life in the same way that you can’t say “this is the exact truth empirically determined and universally accepted”, you also can’t say “both sides are right in/from their perspectives” because if one person brings a salad to an all-meat BBQ night and another person brings a bag of shit they are both wrong, but in different ways.
We can debate the nature of or existance of a deity or reason to the universe because we don’t know and can’t know. Though some say that reality is knowable, no one says that reality is already fully known. That brings us to fictional worlds.
What do we call worlds where the reality is one-to-one with the dominant character worldview? I have a few ideas but it depends on what is happening.
Reality doesn’t really align with the world-view, but the narrator thinks it does
That makes this an unreliable narrator, if the author intends it, then that’s fine, if the author doesn’t intend it, well too bad, they wrote an unreliable narrator without meaning to.
Knowledge of the true worldview was broadly and explicitly explained by a deity
Perhaps we call this deus ex philosphia? If this has happened then what do the people who weren’t let in on the knowledge think?
Reality is fully knowable and has become fully known via advanced science
Ok, so it’s science fiction, but I guess that means that we have a fully verified ontological positivism on our hands. Which is too bad because if all of the questions have been answered then there’s no more science left in the science fiction.
If the author is doing this without understanding that they are doing it then we have a different issue
I’ve seen this called implied ideal, but really it’s just that the author has way too many unexamined biases and hasn’t realized that they are doing number 5.
Finally what probably covers the majority of fiction that does this historically is that the author is aware of what they are doing and they’re doing it to explicitly imagine what would happen within that worldview if it were true
That makes this a thought experiment, which honestly is probably what we should call all of the versions, but only truly works if it is intentional.
I think I’ll leave it at that, because Thought Experiment probably covers most of the intentional uses and implied ideal covers those who are just writing their biases without realizing it. Where this gets complicated is who the narrator in the fiction is. If they are an omniscient or semi-omniscient narrator then if it is well written it should be thought experiment, if poorly written it will probably be implied ideal.
As I was writing this I realized I wanted to do two things. I wanted to give a review and I also wanted to reflect on how I experienced the book. So it’s two posts in one now. Feel free to just read one or the other.
Full disclosure, Harrison is a friend I’ve known since university.
The Review
This book will unsettle you. It is meant to. It is meant to show you truths many people would prefer not to see. This book made me cry. Crying in grief, in compassion, in horror, and in thankfulness for promised hope.
Though the focus of the book is on Harrison’s experience which may be new to many readers (growing up in a fundamentalist group considered extreme by the other Christians in the “bible belt”), the underlying concept (especially explored as Harrison moved out of the bubble his family created) is that their performance of whiteness was just one way that Blackness is attacked.
In Harrison’s narrative he points out that whiteness and white supremacy are intertwined. When white becomes default all else gets swept away in the move to embrace the similarities, but only the similarities to whiteness. It’s a perspective that harms everyone because it hides that the differences matter, and ignoring that makes it very easy to privilege what we are used to and shun/hate/fear what we are not used to.
This book is about the attempt of whiteness to use Blackness, to exert control over Blackness, and ultimately to erase and destroy Blackness. I wanted to start writing that sentence by saying “well meaning whiteness” but it doesn’t matter that those involved thought their intent was good, because the intent was only good for whiteness. Erasing and destroying are what white supremacy does, but worse, it makes us think that there can be a good way to do it. That the harms and lives destroyed in service to whiteness can be minimized because really the people doing it are good but misguided people.
This book doesn’t let you walk away with that thought. It might make you walk away though. It is hard for those of us who grew up with whiteness being a default to face the truth. Like Harrison’s classmate late in the book you might walk away instead of facing truth.
So it’s a book about attempted destruction, and about survival. About asking the questions were afraid to ask because it means moving away from the uniformity of using whiteness as a default.
And it’s especially a book that brings us to the hard question James Baldwin wants us to ask ourselves. “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
If you’re ready to ask yourself hard questions, read this book.
The Reflection
For me reading Invisible Boy was an especially emotional read because I exist just off screen. Imagine reading a book where you exist in the world, in the city, at the camp, in the stores, at the university, but not in the book. Its unsettling, but comforting. Things you remember exist there but seen from a different perspective.
I attended the churches his church saw as old and not charismatic enough (we didn’t do dancing). I attended the school his school said had too many Sikhs. I shopped at the same Christian book store, steered away from the products his parents embraced (what I didn’t realize then but do now is that my parents saw the Pat Robertson’s and the Charismatic Pentecostal and Evangelical celebrities as misguided, grifters, or heretics).
I went to the same camp the same year, but I seem to recall reading a book through the entire cougar ordeal. Things that were impactful for him have since been wiped away by other memories I have of there. We met again at the secular University as he was wrestling with his identity and relationship with his adoptive family. I was part of the clubs and classes and theatre with him.
I’m not in the book, but everything is so familiar that I am one of the extras who you only see the back of the head of in a crowd. When I knew him is almost a footnote in the book. A deep breath before his eyes were truly opened.
And that makes everything hit harder. Because the people I thought were weird were in fact abusive. The places I shopped or visited used him and his existence to market themselves to me. Places I felt welcome in were actively hostile to him.
Having read back through this I’m thankful for not being part of the story of my friend’s trauma. But I also know that not throwing stones doesn’t mean I wasn’t holding the coats. And this probably won’t be how others read the book (hence why it’s in a reflection), because that particular shining of the light isn’t hitting something they’re familiar with. But that was a big one for me, seeing how many places, people, and experiences from my childhood don’t move people toward being “larger, freer, and more loving”.
In my classes I try to explain to second year comput-ing students that their technical skills are only one part of what they need to succeed. Many jobs are like that, requiring both discipline or field specific skills and trans-ferable or soft skills. In The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching (2019) David Gooblar explains that for postsecondary profes-sors teaching is not a soft skill, it is a second discipline we should be engaging in the same way we engage with our primary discipline.
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is not a new discipline. However, it is often neglected in grad-uate studies, relegated to the individual’s professional development rather than being a core part of the curric-ulum. The Missing Course (2019) is Gooblar’s attempt to provide a concise and practical overview of teaching and learning with the objective of helping college and university instructors improve their classroom teaching. It is a valuable book for everyone who teaches or plans to teach in postsecondary from full professors to new graduate students.
Everyone likes different books. I tend to like books that speak to being human. I think that’s why I read so much fantasy literature. To blatantly steal a concept, they use the impossible to examine the probable. When you strip away the requirement to make the setting accurate you allow yourself the ability to more easily examine Truth.
A brilliant novel. The perfect way to wrap up the trilogy (yes, I know it continues, but it was originally the end of the trilogy). Scalzi has the perfect combination of military sci-fi mixed with bits of humor, political maneuvering, and all set against a backdrop of inter-species relations that impacts the story without ever coming across as being one-dimensional.
I haven’t enjoyed a sci-fi book this much since the Enders Game/Shadow series’ and before that Starship Troopers. Though Scalzi isn’t Heinlein he’s not that far behind and definitely gives Card a run for his money.
I read a lot. I know this because I keep track of it. The first year I kept track was from summer 2007 to summer 2008. I was taking the bus to UBC every day and had a lot of time to read. I read 54 books that year. Yes, I averaged over one a week. In 2011 I started tracking again, this time starting January 1st. I read 41 books in 2011. So far in 2012 I’ve read 23 books. We’re in week 26, so I’m doing pretty good. I try to read at least 30 books a year.
Because I read so much I read a lot of bad books. I read a lot of good books to, but I read a lot of crap. Sturgeon said that “ninety percent of everything is crap”, and it’s true to a certain extent. For example I no longer read books published only in e-book format, when three for three were terrible I gave up. The lesson I took from this is that there’s a purpose to gatekeepers.
Why is any of this important? Because I’m noticing a problem with peoples definitions of “bad”. Too often I read a review of a book that talks about how derivative it is of previous books. I’ve even made the same argument. But there’s a difference between derivative and bad. A derivative book is one that pulls a lot of concepts from previous works. Because over 75% of my reading tends to be Fantasy I feel that I can accurately say that nearly all Fantasy novels have some derivative elements to them.
For example:
Tall elegant elf like creatures: Tolkien
God stand-in to guide the plot: Lewis
Super intelligent horse: Lackey
Long drawn out quest: Tolkien, and too many to count
Mass group of intertwining characters: Jordan (or GRRM)
But here’s the issue. These writers were derivative as well. Do you like George R. R. Martin? Well I’m afraid that it comes down to a mixture of War of the Roses with a pretty standard fantasy setting, and some Mervyn Peake. Try watching a Shakespeare history play, basically the same thing.
Robert Jordan? Re-read Eye of the World. There is so little original in it that it’s almost laughable.
Mercedes Lackey? cookie cutter fantasy with magical horses added in.
C.S. Lewis and Tolkien must be original! Nope. Lewis owes everything to George MacDonald, which he gladly admitted, and Tolkien has tied together Norse and Germanic fairy tales with Anglo-Saxon romances.
Ahh… but does taking things from further back in history make one less derivative? No. It just means that you have a broader education. If I lift part of my song from Bach instead of the Beatles am I any less derivative?
This doesn’t mean any of those authors aren’t good. I read and re-read all of their books (well except for GRMM, but I’ve never been a War of the Roses fan anyway). What it means is that being derivative doesn’t matter. Fantasy literature comes out of the Romances (traditional meaning, not modern one) of the Germans and Anglo-Saxons. It comes out of the fairy tales and legends of the past. And it comes out of a desire to reconnect with the Quest.
When we criticize Fantasy novels as being derivative we need to ask ourselves “Why does it matter?” Because everything is derivative. Instead we need to look at the story by itself. That’s what’s important. How well does the author immerse you in their story? How well constructed is it? Not where s/he got this idea from or that idea from. That should be a last refuge for when the story fails. If the story doesn’t work then you can sit and pick it apart as being derivative. But not before.
Look at stories as they are. Read them for them. You can recognize where some elements came from, but remember everyone is derivative.
I was reading Lowering Higher Education by James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar recently and was intrigued by their chapter on Technologies. In it they discuss the concept of Digital Natives and whether or not they require a different style of teaching or have a different understanding of learning. Do Digital Natives require a more technologically oriented teaching method in order to be engaged? Côté and Allahar discuss the background of this idea and show how it is based in some misguided philosophy and assumptions, and then focus on results, showing that where universities have increased the amount of technology in their classes there is no proof of a corresponding increase in engagement.
That being said I wanted to discuss what it feels like being a Digital Native and going through, and working in the education system.
I actually dislike the term Digital Native, but as it is the one used in this discourse I’ll continue with it.
