| May 9th, 2009 |
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(Oh, by the way: Am semi-offline for the weekend.)
In order to avoid getting stuck in Someone Is Wrong On The Internet without having to leave these things unaddressed, which tends to make me feel annoyed and stressed all by itself, I'm going to return to ranting in my own space. Possibly, eventually, on my Very Serious Blog as well, but my Very Serious Blog isn't ready to get off the ground yet, not even close.
So, first up: one of the attempted derail sectors of Dear God Not Again: RaceFail '09 Version 2.0, Fail Harder, which ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) naraht is links-collecting at this point, and which is derived from Patricia Wrede, who I've never heard of, writing a book called The Thirteenth Child which takes, as its premise, a magic-enabled world in which the Americas were uninhabited until the white people got there; the book is reviewed at tor.com, and Lois McMaster Bujold makes an ass of herself in the comments, which is sad, because I had heard of her and had vague intentions to read her books at some point, and now I think she's a jerk and don't want to.
(Apparently my internet habits have changed in the last few months - I didn't hear about RaceFail for months, this has only been a few days, it seems.)
Anyway, in this similar but not directly related discussion on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif) james_nicoll's LJ, someone suggests the validity (as parallel) of writing (even if German) an alt-history world in which Europe contains no Jews, or possibly the whole world contains no Jews. gohover says: If you're interested In Jewish history, that could be interesting. Either there are Jews elsewhere in the author's world, in which case the author could show the differences Europe made on Jewish culture (and vice versa), or there are no Jews anywhere, in which case you can still show the differences Jews have made in the world. There are lots of non-creepy ways the subject could be handled. And I say oh hell no.
Because that's just too glib. In exactly the same way, to me, that the dismissals of the implications of writing the native populations of the Americas are too glib. If you're going to do that - either one - you can't keep things familiar. You can't do that and just have the Glorious Dramatic European History or the Great American Adventure without the dark, nasty, guilty bits. Because that's not how history works.
America without the native population does not up being America as you see it now. Especially if this is also America without slavery - that does not happen. These are not just unfortunate byproducts of history - they are integral, causative factors of the shape of history as it turned out, of the shape of America. It is intrinsic.
Taking out the Jews is even worse, if that's possible, because if you lose the Jews, you lose all of the Abrahamic religions - they came out of Judaism. If your world does not contain the Jews, your world does not contain Christianity or Islam either, and your world is totally fucking unrecognisable from the world that we live in. The land masses are the same, and maybe east Asia and parts of India aren't that different. Maybe... except you can't know, because you can't know for sure how the world would have been different had Christianity never hit the Roman Empire, had the old faiths persisted.
I'm not saying it's impossible to write speculative fantasy on these premises - what I'm saying is that you can't do it as background. If you write a people out of existence as background, rather than as the setup for an exploration of how the world is different without their influence, then you're almost guaranteed to be doing it for reasons that are entirely offensive.
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