I promised myself I wouldn't rant, but then...

I promised myself I'd cut back on my outrage at humanity. After all, it's so easy to get outraged these days. In fact, everyone's doing it. Outrage seems to be the de facto normal state for people in today's world.

So I promised myself I'd let all that go. Simply focus on my fiction writing. Finish running this year's Million Writers Award.

But then I read Norman Spinrad's latest On Books column "Third World Worlds" in the April/May 2010 Asimov's. So many statements in this review made me want to throw the magazine across the room that, in the end, for my own sanity I had to rant.

For example, Spinrad says, "With the exception of the Japanese, I at least, am at a loss to point to any science fiction that I know of that has evolved independently in non-European languages or cultures disconnected there from."

Right off my head I can name a few: Juntree Siriboonrod, the "father of Thai science fiction." Or how about Rimi B. Chatterjee of India, or perhaps more well known in SF circles in the United States, Vandana Singh. Or, good grief, what about science fiction in China, where the most widely read SF magazine on the planet--Science Fiction World--is published.

Perhaps Spinrad would discount all this by saying these SF authors, and the cultures which produced them, didn't evolve independently. But in today's world, what culture is truly independent of each other?

Still, I might have avoided this rant if that was the only statement I screamed at. But there was more. For you see, Spinrad refers to Mike Resnick as follows:

So, for now at least, and in the apparent absence of a significant body of science fiction written by born and bred Africans, this Caucasian American is probably the closest thing there is or has been to an African science fiction writer, with the exception of Octavia Butler. Who did write the same sort of thing, and did it well, and was Black to boot, but I use that politically incorrect word rather than “African American” because aside from her genetic heritage she was no more African than Mike Resnick.

Now I like Mike Resnick as a person and love his writings (especially Santiago, one of my favorite SF novels). Resnick isn't responsible for what Spinrad wrote, and would probably laugh at that comment. But seriously. Is Spinrad saying Resnick is the closest there's ever been to an African SF writer. Excepting Octavia Butler, who Spinrad then dismisses as not "African" enough? But Resnick is?

Must. Control. My. Need. To. Scream. And. Rant!

Err, what about writers like Nnedi Okorafor? Doesn't she count? In fact, by a funny coincidence Okorafor recently wrote a fascinating essay titled "Is Africa Ready for Science Fiction?" where she gives some examples of African SF. All of this information could have been found with a simple Google search.

To Spinrad's credit, he admits he is ignorant of much of the world's literature, being limited to what is translated into English. And he is also specifically talking about science fiction, not the larger speculative fiction traditions which include fantasy and magic realism. But come on! The SF community had been talking about world science fiction for the last year, especially in light of Lavie Tidhar's excellent anthology The Apex Book of World SF (which, again, focuses on more than only science fiction) and Tidhar's related blog.

I don't have the patience tonight to dissect all that is wrong with Spinrad's column. Because I swear if I don't get off the computer right now it will be weeks before I can stop ranting.

Comments

[Bryan Thao Worra]

At first, with the April publication date, I'd hoped it was some sick April Fool's joke, but it seems written so earnestly, so absolutely staggering in its ignorance. Unbelievable!

[SMD]

Confusion is setting in for me. So Resnick is more African than Octavia Butler, despite the fact that Resnick is both white and not originally born in any African country? I even looked it up hoping that maybe Resnick had been raised in South Africa or something, but he's a native of Chicago as far as the Internet is concerned. Technically speaking, my grandmother is more African than either of them. She's actually from Africa (South Africa). But we're talking in a nationalistic sense, not in a racial sense. If you get right down to it, the word "African" in racial terms is actually meaningless; genetics shows us that being of a certain skin color doesn't always indicate that you are any more directly descended from the ancient people of Africa than the rest of us (that's not a joke; studies have shown that people who are white turn out to actually descended directly from places not traditionally populated by whites, and people who are black occasionally show to be descendants from people in locations where blacks are not typically present...they did a fascinating NPR thing on it five or six months back and it's kind of shocking).

On the other side of things, I think there's a flaw in both of your arguments. First, every nation you've thus far mentioned has had direct contact with the West. Thailand, while never officially colonized, did have problems with Europe. China and India too. None of those countries developed their science fiction independently from European or Western influence.

But, he's got it wrong too, because Japan also did not develop independent of the West by any stretch of the imagination. While Japan is certainly unique, to say that science fiction there has somehow grown more independently of the West than any other non-European country is absurd at best, at least in terms of modern science fiction (if you go back far enough there are science fictional elements in early Eastern texts, much as there are in early Western texts).

So, all around a silly argument.

[Milton Davis]

Although this is sad, you're not really surprised by this, are you? I give him a feather for knowing who Octavia Butler is. Focus that rant energy on doing your work. That's what I do.

[88800888]

I don't even have the energy to address how ignorant and arrogant this foolishness is, but thanks for reminding me why I don't send my subscription dollars to the zine. I could read this kind of bs for free in the bathroom stall...

[gordsellar]

I'm puzzled. (And couldn't renew my subscription while abroad -- that was planned for this afternoon, but a student dropped by and three hours later here I am! -- so I haven't read the article, but...) I'll leave Spinrad alone, because I haven't read it (among other reasons...)

But as for what you recount of his argument, if we're separating science-fiction from other genres of the fantastical, then, well, it's not surprising to see it emerge at first in the West -- that's where we had the first huge industrial revolution, where science and technology started impacting on society in general (ie. the world as most of the society lived in it) in massive ways, and experiencing it not as what was imposed upon it by an outsider, but rather as a process of what the society was doing to itself. (An important point, I think, which may touch on why SF seems not as common in post-colonial societies.)

Doubtless many literatures outside of the West did have things we could point at as SFnal, or proto-SFnal, but one wonders why it would be insulting to claim modern (technocratic, gadgety, supposedly scientific discourse-focused) SF basically developed in the West and spread out from there.

We don't think it's an insult to India when it's said that jazz was created in America, by African-Americans; after all, we're not saying improvisation was invented there, and nobody's barred Indians from playing jazz. It's also not shocking or insulting to argue that nobody else developed Westerns independently of the American form... but that didn't take away from my shock and interest when I learned that there apparently was a whole genre in Korea, similar to spaghetti Westerns, but set in Manchuria, often during the colonial era. I mean, dude! (Haven't tracked any of those down, but there was a festival running a bunch from the 70s, to my utter amazement, when a recent film in the genre was released.)

Anyway, the point is, "independently" seems, as you note, a nonsensical division since, well, who cares about independent development. For that matter, American SF didn't develop "independently" of earlier British and French SF, and.. so what?

As for the apparent lack of SF in other parts of the world, it's a patchwork question. In some places, it's more a case of the stuff just not being translated much into English, and thus unavailable to US. There's apparently a vibrant body of SF in India going quite far back that's mostly available only in various Indian languages, much of it not translated into English. (Satyajit Ray, though, is an earlier-but-probably-familiar example, since we know him also as a film director... though Jagadananda Roy was doing Bangla SF back in the 19th century!)

But in other places (like where I live) SF is only beginning slowly -- and still marginally -- to bloom in vernacular form, despite years of foreign translations pouring in). I certainly wouldn't want to enter any discussion of whether Octavia Butler or Nnedi Okorafor (or any other African-American author) is "African enough" but I think a more interesting question is whether, how, and why (or why not) a society embraces SF. Having people of African ancestry or even people having grown up in Africa and gone abroad join the Westerner's ongoing party (by writing and publish SF) is different that having a vibrant party in Africa, and the latter question is more interesting to me. (I don't know anything about SF in Africa, but from what by Nnedi Okorafor writes, it's still not really caught on much there... a situation familiar to me in other places I've looked for SF. Searching the racks of every bookstore I saw in Indonesia, it seemed Fantasy was the default spec-fic genre, and SF, when it was available at all, was marginal. I found precisely one Indonesian SF movie available despite much searching as well.)

As suggested by a few of the people cited in Nnedi Okorafor's post, it seems every society into which SF makes inroads, internalizes it only by remixing it in such a way as to make it resonate with the local culture's concerns. This, ironically, can be a part of what makes it hard to share a locally0-successful SF text with the wider world.

(For example, Korean SF is preoccupied with educational issues, to a degree that seems weird to a Western, in a way that reflects the society's overwhelming and, to westerners, baffling preoccupation with education; it also seems, from what some Koreans describe and what little I've been able to read, to be less focused on problem-solving as an active, agency-driven process. Which also makes it hard to translate in a form that would make the text satisfying for most Western SF readers... we see deus ex machina where a Korean reader might see a happy ending that came the only way realistically imaginable.)

Which reminds me, I got a recent magazine that claimed to have run a special on "African SF"... been too busy to give it a look, but I've been hoping to do so. One more thing to do... ah, pesky day job...

Oh, and Japanese proto-SF -- there's a good piece on that in that critical text, Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams. It seems Japan did have a kind of mechanization-of-the-body/horror thing going on in texts prior to what is considered modern SF, and though I can't find any of that stuff in translation, it looked interesting. Oh, to live long enough to see creditable machine translation... hahaha, don't bet on it.

Got the Tidhar anthology on order, finally. Can't wait to get it! :)

[SMD]

"Anyway, the point is, "independently" seems, as you note, a nonsensical division since, well, who cares about independent development. For that matter, American SF didn't develop "independently" of earlier British and French SF, and.. so what?"

You have be very careful when making a statement like this. A lot of the countries we're talking about here didn't have a choice in how they wanted to go about developing either their literature or nations. Some of them were colonized, often brutally, by the British Empire, France, the United States (we called it Imperialism, but it's basically the same thing), Portugal, and others. So, some people care very much.

[Jeff VanderMeer]

Yes, the comment is stupid and ignorant. Rather than righteous indignation, though, perhaps you might've had patience and engaged with the rest of it, or even contacted Spinrad first and seen what he had to say, started a dialogue and seen where it took you. I guess what I'm saying is I totally understand why, for example, Nnedi would shake with rage, but you're farther removed from the center of that comment. My feeling is that Spinrad might well be horrified by what he'd written--sometimes people just don't realize what they've done--and you might well have found a cool way to facilitate communication and understanding. (Some would say, why bother...well, I don't agree.) This isn't a criticism, just that as you admit at the beginning of this post, there's been way too much righteous indignation lately and not enough clinical dissection, or nuance.

I say this in part because there's that bit of the article, but there's also more to it. He talks about colonialism. He talks about the insertion of the white guy into a non-white culture/setting, and understands that that's often a recipe for terrible cliches. An interesting quote near the end, where Spinrad also talks about how understanding other cultures is a way of deepening your self and your writing:

"Which is that despite the twenty-first century global show biz sphere, despite the global Internet infosphere, despite the seeming universality of Anglo-American popular music, despite the supposed globalization of so-called high culture, major “non-western” civilizations like those of India, Brazil, Japan, West Africa, and so forth have developed, continue to develop, and will probably always continue to evolve their own popular cultures.

And these popular cultures—the music people are currently listening to, the TV shows they are watching, what they wear, their junk foods, their street-level life, their criminal gangs, their sports, their waves of transient fads, cults, urban legends, their media spheres—are what really create the consciousnesses of their inhabitants in the permanently and rapidly mutating twenty-first century and for any foreseeable non-devolutionary future.

And therefore, if you are not taking these true full-spectrum presents into account, when you try to extrapolate their future evolutions, you can’t quite get it. This is what is missing from Paul McAuley’s Greater Brazil, and to make it more glaringly obvious, consider the great reams of science fiction of the 1950s, 1960s into the 1970s, and much of the same sort of thing still written today by American science fiction writers extrapolating American-based futures."

This isn't a defense of the comment re African SF and Butler and Resnick, which is bizarre, or of Spinrad--it's simply to say the guy did try, and there are things in the article that are interesting and useful.

All of the commenters make good points, btw. There is nuance to this issue. There are many countries that don't have strong traditions of SF. There are countries where the *book editors* of SF/Fantasy lines say that they don't think the work in their countries, translated or not, is all that great. "World SF" as a term tends to hide this fact. It's one reason I don't like the term.

And myself, I'm very uncomfortable saying "Africa" or "Latin America". I'd much prefer we talk about specific countries and specific writers in those countries, as each country has its own traditions and its own strengths in terms of literature. Mexican and Argentinean writers, for example, or Brazilian and Chilean.

Why do we insist on using general terms like "Africa" or "Latin America"? Because most of us still have no fucking clue what writer is from Kenya as opposed to South Africa, for example. We need to start differentiating by country and be specific. And understand that it makes a difference.

But perhaps even more importantly, this points out to me the limits and the pitfalls of being just one thing. I read a lot of stuff in translation and I don't particularly fucking care if it has SF or F in it. I just want something interesting across all kinds of modes of writing. If readers want to be truly multi-cultural, then don't just read SF and F, or you're going to miss out on whole traditions of fiction.

This also relates to marketing, because I swear to god a lot of SF/F readers will not consider something SF/F unless it's from an SF/F imprint. So...Dalkey Archive Press releases one of the best fantasies of last year, from Czech writer Michal Ajvaz...and no one for the most part gives a shit. If it'd come out from Tor, hey, that's fantasy. This attitude by readers and reviewers within genre frankly pisses me off and it's part of the reason "World SF" looks rarer than it is.

So, sometimes I kind of throw up my hands and think, "What is this damn fixation on identifying whether something has a fantasy element or SF element so we can call it something we're comfortable with?" And, in fact, I've decided that if I get to the end of 2010 and I can actually write another year's best article from a place of knowledge...I will have had a bad year because it will have meant I've missed out on all the other stuff out there.

World SF? World fucking literature, period.

Now you've got me doing a rant.

Cheers,

JeffV

[Nick Mamatas]

I had some comments:
http://www.haikasoru.com/science-fiction/world-sf-worth-reading-before-developing-an-opinion/

[Jeff VanderMeer]

Yeah--I liked that a lot, Nick. Specifics! Lots of specifics there. And interesting analysis of the latter parts of Brasyl.

[Jason Sanford]

I like how everyone is being calmer, and more analytical, than I was. Good deal. I especially like Nick's linked analysis, and agree with Jeff that the issue here is being aware of "world literature," instead of trying to peg certain authors and writers into certain categories.

When I wrote this I was very much in the emotional moment of reacting to the essay. I look forward to hearing what others say in the days to come.

[gordsellar]

Very good points, I also liked Nick's linked article, and Jeff, thanks for mentioning the parts nobody else has. I don't know when I'll get to see the article, but it's a relief that it's not all as nutty as the bits being quoted.

I wanted to reply to SD:

"You have be very careful when making a statement like this. A lot of the countries we're talking about here didn't have a choice in how they wanted to go about developing either their literature or nations."

Right, that is true. But... so do you! For example:

"Some of them were colonized, often brutally, by the British Empire, France, the United States (we called it Imperialism, but it's basically the same thing), Portugal, and others. So, some people care very much."

Of course. But...

I wanted to write about the Korean and Japanese situations, but it's very touchy and I don't want to lose my job over a little internet debate. (And yes, I could, even citing well-respected texts on the subject, lose my job. People have done in the past on much less touchy subjects.) So I'll just note that in some colonial societies, writers or culture producers' experience seems to suggest either a sense of continuity of oppression -- domestic tyranny replaced by foreign tyranny -- or even a period of sudden freedom as the new colonizers change the restrictions, while alleviating the former domestic regime's restrictions. Likewise, a domestic tyranny isn't necessarily a place where a community of writers necessarily experiences any "freedom of choice" in the development of a national literature.

(There's a reason that in anxious Japanese proto-SF developed in a society the metaphors of the mechanization of the body were often connected to a kind of early bio-horror mystique... or so I recall from an essay I read a few years ago. Mass industrialization is so often traumatic whether it's imposed on a society from without or from within.)

The fact is that postcolonial nationalist historiography is very often historically revisionist (erasing anything that doesn't look like monolithic resistance and outcry) makes it much more difficult to see what the real responses to colonial occupation were at the time -- that is, to see the range of literary responses. It's important to really look carefully at that shorthand notion of "freedom" or "choice" in national development, while bearing in mind that, yes, colonial oppression is an awful and oppressive force in the development of many national literatures... one among many such awful and oppressive forces, though maybe the most horrifying to us in the modern world.

(To give a more recent example of one of those other awful forces, when I arrived in Korea in 2002, younger authors were being berated in the press by their elders for writing about "contemporary life" and other "unimportant things." Writing about anything other than the great national traumas of modern Korean history -- especially the Korean war, the partitioning of Korea, and the "necessity" of reunification, though sadly not the Kwangju Massacre -- seemed for older authors to be something of a sacred duty. Younger authors wanted to write murder mysteries set in Seoul, stories of life as a Korean expatriate in Paris or Mexico, love stories and whatever else modern urban authors write. This was seen as "irresponsible." That this kind of debate was seen as anything but ridiculous after the turn of the century speaks volumes about the kinds of social (and political) pressures that can act upon a literary culture even decades after the end of foreign rule... even if, yes, the experience of foreign rule unarguably shapes the nationalist discourse and the literature of the country.)

I think my real point is that "literary unfreedom" (and other material conditions of life) are far more often imposed upon one by one's own fellow countrymen and countrywomen, than by foreign invaders, but because of nationalist historiography we often conveniently agree to forget that. It's not an apologetics of colonialism to note that "freedom" is a really slippery, problematic notion, often used at odds with what we can reconstruct of actual historical experience.

[gordsellar]

Oh, for those who want to see and judge for themselves, the text is online:

http://www.asimovs.com/issue_1004-05/onbooks.shtml

[SMD]

Gordsellar: I won't argue about Korea or Japan, because I don't know enough about those societies to be able to talk with any authority. However, to your point that nationalist or local-nationalist cultural oppression (centralized rather than foreign) is a bigger factor: for many of the nations we're talking about (specifically African nations), local nationalist oppression is intrinsically linked to the colonizer. Even if the literary heritage is oppressed by people native to the land, the practice is one developed either in response to colonialism, in league with neocolonialism, or simply the direct extension of foreign colonialist/imperialist financial/militaristic/political pressure/control/etc. Whether the freedom existed prior to colonialism or not is somewhat irrelevant when any potential for the development of that literary freedom is removed by the cultural destruction that colonialism brings with it. I think Frantz Fanon was being nice to the national bourgeoisie when he wrote The Wretched of the Earth.

[gordsellar]

SMD:

Ha, ironically, I actually see Wretched of the Earth as very much applicable to the situation in Korea... as I've written a bunch of times. (When I've occasionally recommended it to students and friends, and they've actually check it out, they've returned wide-eyed and full of comments.)

Also, as an aside, I really, REALLY don't claim expertise of Japan. I bet tons of readers could say much more. My understanding has really only developed from scant readings, plus constant confrontation with a fairly wrong-headed view of the "freedom" Japanese civilians enjoyed under Hirohito.

So...

I don't know that we can so brashly toss aside the problems facing literary development prior to colonialism as "irrelevant" and then blame colonialism alone for the destruction for the potential of same. It's especially mistaken, I believe, to claim that:

Even if the literary heritage is oppressed by people native to the land, the practice is one developed either in response to colonialism, in league with neocolonialism, or simply the direct extension of foreign colonialist/imperialist financial/militaristic/political pressure/control/etc.

It doesn't make sense to say (I'll simplify it) repression results from colonialism when I was noting that repression often precedes colonialism, and in some ways forms a continuity with it. Fanon astutely noted that postcolonial oppression had a continuity with colonial oppression, but in many places, colonial repression also often had a continuity with pre-colonial oppression. The same elites (or, in disruption, others eager to attain the status of the old, destroyed elite) lived better off, cooperated with the colonizers, and were eager to be co-opted into the system. To claim it doesn't matter seems like a logical error of some sort.

Again, this is not to engage in an apologetics of colonialism -- I suspect we're on the same page about the ethics of colonization -- but it's important to recognize that even when it is dominant, cultural destruction isn't the only kind of cultural activity that occurs in colonial societies. It is one kind of activity, and a horrible and reprehensible one, and sometimes it is even dominant, but it is not the only one... in part because both colonizing and colonized peoples are not monolithic, and also because, especially on the part of the colonized, resistance, creative appropriation, and more are not only often possible but often felt downright necessary.

(And that's not even to get into how sometimes claims of "destruction" are vastly exaggerated: plenty of evidence to the contrary has not unraveled the belief that the Japanese regime actively, straightforwardly, and in a systematic way, sought to wipe out both the Korean language and identity.)

The colonized resist, defy, and subvert in interesting ways. Members of the colonial regime are, also, often less monolithic than they are remembered. The colonized also take the colonizers' art forms and turn them inside out, preserve their own art forms, sometimes in encoded form, and so on.
After all, colonial experiences are not purely colonizer-centered, even when the agency of the colonized is heavily, and horrifyingly, constrained, at times.

This is all patently clear when we Westerners look at a case of historical, non-Western colonization at some remove of time. (I'm assuming you are a Westerner, but if I'm wrong I apologize and hope my point remains clear.) We marvel at the beautiful and unique dance and musical forms of Java and Bali (for example), but fail to see the procession of different powers that dominated and imposed different aesthetics and expectations on the performing artists there. Undoubtedly cultural destruction occurred in the process of these regimes (Indicized and Islamicized) refashioning the dominant culture, but at some remove we can also see destruction was far from the only process at work. Cultural fusion, remixing, and more exist in a mixture of creation and destruction all muddled together.

(Though, yes, especially, from the little I know about colonial histories in various African nations, rather barbarically, disastrously constrained. Like, much different and arguably much more extreme than in Korea or other societies which come to my mind because of familiarity.)

Again, and I really want to stress this, I do not mean at all to defend colonialism. It would be downright ugly, stupid, ignorant, wicked, and heartless to claim that Nigeria should be glad of its colonial history because without it Nigeria (and the world) would have no Chinua Achebe. But I think it's also wrong to totalize the destruction, because that also erases the creativity and importance of Achebe's (and many others') creativity in the face of constraint and both colonial and postcolonial regimes.

These parts of history are profoundly complex, painful, horrifying, and, of resulting necessity, deeply unsettling. The unsettling nature of them seems to make us seek out simple, straightforward ways of enunciating what happened, I think, and leads us to simplifications which, in fact, may well partake of the colonialist discourse which we are trying to rebuke, and erase the agency of the colonized -- including, most tragically, the creativity with which they have always responded to their situation.

[StarShipSofa]

People might like to hear this interview I did with Norman Spinrad. It was recorded in 2008 at a French SF Convention and has never been played before - it seems a good time to put it out now. He covers many topics. http://bit.ly/bEywMC

[Jeff VanderMeer]

Jason--I think your post was necessary and was in part responsible for many interesting posts across the blogosphere. jv

[TK Turner]

Interesting. Thank you for the rant, Jason. Got me thinking! And all of the comments here have been interesting as well.

[Jason Sanford]

Everyone: It's all cool. I've enjoyed reading all the discussions that have come about as a results of this. In fact, here's a great summary of all the different responses, in case anyone is interested: http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/third-world-worlds-link-compilation/

[NelC]

As an aside form the main subject, Gordsellar, I'd be interested in any English-language sources you have about Japanese lack of cultural genocide in Korea. I've only heard about it from a couple of Korean friends, friends of friends, and once, an old man in a museum in Seoul, who were firmly of the opinion that it was indeed as bad as that.

[SMD]

Gordseller: I have a response coming to you eventually, but I need to re-read everything you've written a few times and get it clear in my head before I start spouting nonsense or repeating myself. You're making me think, which is something I'm not used to when the closest thing to a debate or intellectual discussion I've head on a website is talking with Creationists or Anti-Global-Warming people on YouTube.

So, fear not, I'll be responding, I just want to carefully put together my thoughts and make sure I address everything properly.