(Post * Post) Colonialities
Posted on | March 15, 2010 | No Comments
I will never trust a Boingboing! book recommendation again.
The incessant recommendations for Doctorow’s work are understandable and three books later, I learned to just say no to the self-hyping and avoid the heaps of propaganda layered with shallow plot and even shallower characters. I was intrigued by how they hyped Sterling, again, understandable since he is “Chairman Bruce” and all, but they just kept at it even when most everyone concluded how Caryatids was, frankly, shyte. Having encountered several of Sterling’s post-Schismatrix works, I knew enough already to avoid that book, but like a moth to the flame I just keep getting suckered back in by the shiny boing-beads.
At this point I was seriously wary of their recommendations, so I started cross-referencing them with other sources and, about a year ago, gave Ian McDonald a chance. They kept talking about River of Gods and Brasyl so much that I picked up the former and, to be honest, I was hooked. It was an awesome experience, though the ending did descend a bit into tropeland, but still, near-future India and the juxtaposition of that ancient place and modern technologies seemed like a beautiful execution of the gibsonian quip on how “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed”. Then I tried the “sort-of-prequel/sequel” Cyberabad Days but somehow it just would not hold my attention. No biggie, Brasyl was waiting, and I dipped straight into it, only to be hit by such empty rubbish descending into “news-of-the-week” deus-ex resolution space that I was, frankly, revolted, and a bit of that revulsion even managed to retroactively taint River of Gods.
We are dealing with a book on Brazil, which is sort of a red flag right off the bat, as if the author decided to make the rounds of third-world overpopulated countries and dig into the local stereotypes for fun and profit. I fully expect him to do either Mexico City or Hong Kong next, followed by Johannesburg (although he might opt for a different city in Africa, due to the unexpected success of District 9). To boot, he then throws in subplots unfolding in favelas and on beaches, involving football goalies and a young lass effectively utilizing capoeira in self-defense… the shriek of “steeeereeeeeeotypeeeeee” was already deafening, even without the other subplot involving a 19th century missionary priest in the jungle and a godawful play on the simulation argument that was already done (and as far as I’m concerned, overdone) by Robert Charles Wilson several years ago…
His insisting how capoeira was such an effective means of fighting simply kept poking me in the eye throughout, wrecking my suspension of disbelief and making it obvious that we are dealing with an armchair tourist writing about something he does not, in fact, know. I guess he was going for “flashy” instead of effective, since he could have went with a different stereotype there, sticking with a very Brazilian and very effective martial art – Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, but I guess sweaty dudes humping on the floor makes for crappier mental images than a lithe pixie doing spinning hand-stands with flashing knives in hand.
So McDonald ended up tainted by a miasma of armchairism, and from now on will warrant a far more careful approach to his works, even though his style did have me hooked (yes, I love unnecessary flourishes and wordplay). I sat down by the keyboard, opened up the admin panel for Screaming Planet and typed the title to this post, then the phone rang, or someone asked me something, or some urgent work needed to be done and that was that, until I fell prey to the hype once more and picked up Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigialupi. Biopunk! Dystopia! Book of the year! They dang well got me, particularly with that nifty cover with the elephant (megodont… whatever) and zeppelins and whatnot.
A hundred pages in and I was not hooked at all. Quite the opposite, the book was boring me to death, and not because of a lack of action (although, in fact, nothing really happens in the first hundred pages or so, bar a brief industrial accident), but the sheer pretentiousness of it in slogging through a poorly constructed world reeking of inconsistencies and stereotypes was seriously breaking some deals. The shifty great white hunter liberating a Japanese hypergeisha from slavery to a local crime lord, battling a Thai muay-thai fighter and struggling with an (also) shifty yet wizened old Chinese man who thinks of all foreigners as “foreign devils”… it just goes on.
The true problem is that books like these are being touted as the pinnacle of the genre, “literary” books ripe for the mainstream. Awards (or at least nominations) are being tossed at them in troves for seemingly being worldly and dealing with “other perspectives”, yet these books are nothing more than poorly thought-out travelogues of white people working with second or third hand information on cultures they never actually experienced (or at best, experienced as tourists). Despite most people teaching humanistics in academia these days being pretentious tossers, these writers, and those heaping accolades at them should sit down for a good helping of Colonialism 101, in order to avoid embarrassing outbursts such as the recently controversial column by Norman Spinrad in Asimov’s, claiming that on the one hand, authors writing of alien cultures as outsiders is colonial, yet writers assuming that they can write from perspectives inside other cultures is not. This may be so with cultures that are made-up and therefore we can have no ways of verifying whether they are doing a good job, but with cultures that are real, when one detects cracks in the veneer regarding aspects one is intimately familiar with (such as the aforementioned case of capoeira), this brings the credibility of the entire book and the author in serious question.
As the good old saying goes, “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
Tags: bacigialupi > boingboing > brasyl > collonialism > credibility > doctorow > mcdonald > river of gods > Science Fiction > sf > stereotypes > sterling > windup girl
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