Reading Science Fiction and Fantasy

 

I've been reading a lot. Possibly too much, but that's a post for another time. I have thoughts about science fiction and fantasy stereotypes and tropes. This post was prompted by a friend sharing an essay on similar topics, linked to here.

I discovered science fiction in eighth grade, starting in my school library with Robert Heinlein. He had a book, Podcayne of Mars,  which features a 15 (earth) year old girl. She had agency and wit, and it started me on the genre. Reading the wikipedia summary today, maybe she had a little less autonomy than I remember. I continued with SF throughout my high school years. I don't much remember any authors besides Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, though frankly Asimov wrote enough to keep any single mortal busy anyway!

I started in fantasy at about the same time, though I don't remember much except for Tolkein, and The Last Unicorn, considered one of the best all-time fantasy novels. One of the synonyms for "fantasy" novels has been "sword and sorcery". More on the sorcery aspect below.

When I was a freshman in college, I took a class in science fiction and fantasy literature. The required reading expanded my horizons significantly. That's when I read, for example, Dune. And a great deal of Kurt Vonnegut. I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect everything on the reading list would have been written by a man. Even "James Tiptree, Jr" was not publishing novels back then, and it wasn't until much later it was known she was a woman.

I remember having an argument in that class about women's roles in this literature. My point was that if you were inventing a world, there was absolutely no reason to perpetuate the sexist roles that exist in this one. Evil sexist people and societies might exist, but clearly their sexism was only an aspect of their evilness. Not everyone agreed with me - this was 1973, after all. 

It was only later that I found Vonda McIntyre, Mercedes Lackey, and Ursula LeGuin, as the first women of sci fi and fantasy. By imagining worlds free of our constraints, they expanded my own imagination into what would be possible in our world. Dreamsnake by McIntyre blew my mind. Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey captivated me and, as it the first of a considerable series, the author held my attention for quite a while. (According to Wikipedia she has published over 140 books! No wonder I haven’t read them all.) I sought out only books written by women for a while. Now, there are also works by men like John Scalzi. He has written some books where the main character, the narrator, is actually ungendered. Through the whole book, you don't know. I was chagrined to only realize this having read a whole novel like this. Throughout the book, my notion was the narrator was a man (after all, it was written by a man). But I read a blog post about it, and realized that it was never made explicit throughout the book.

I am sad to say that my awareness of racism in speculative fiction took much longer to awaken. There was no overt racism in any of the books I liked, but also there tended to not be any characters of color. That gradually changed, and frankly Star Trek was a leader in this area. But gradually, I have grown uncomfortable with the concept of whole races of non-human beings who are just plain evil, serving in some ways as a proxy for racism. Creatures like Orcs in the Lord of the Rings, non-human characters one can kill with a clear conscience. 

I've also grown impatient with the tropes of the semi-human magical race, and of the "chosen one" who alone can save the world (or the universe), due to some inherent quality born into him (it's almost always a boy). There is sometimes a theme of people with special abilities being persecuted and exploited, when they are clearly actually superior to ordinary humans. Huh. 

I remember reading an alternate-history book that took place with a Roman Empire that lasted through the 18th/19th century. There were excellent characters struggling with colonialism and identity, and a fun political setup. But then our main hero had to go off on a quest in the desert to find her magical heritage. The book was so interesting without that unnecessary bit, and I found it obscured the more interesting themes. Who even needs sorcery?

Lately I've been indulging myself in a series of (YA) fantasy novels, the Ranger's Apprentice series by John Flanagan. One of the appealing things about this book is the (almost complete) absence of magic. There is an evil race of beings that appear in the first couple of books, but in the many books that follow, they aren't there. I think Flanagan may have realized how they didn't help his stories forward. There are definitely people who are very, very, even unnaturally, talented in certain areas, but they tend to also utilize hard work to make the most of their talents. It makes it a much more comfortable world to indulge my imagination in. I could picture myself there happily. And I think that is often the point of fantasy novels.