She's a wish fulfilment character

[purplecat]

Author Scott Lynch responds to a critic of the character Zamira Drakasha, a black woman pirate in his fantasy book Red Seas Under Red Skies, the second novel of the Gentleman Bastard series.

I'm always little uncomfortable with responses to critiques of women in fantasy which run

critique: Female warriors/whatever in a pseudo-medieval setting are unrealistic
response: So the dragons are fine, but you are worried about the female warrior?

Because even though at one level it makes sense, at another the existence of dragons in fantasy clearly requires a different kind of suspension of disbelief to the existence of emancipated women. It's a really complicated discussion which impinges on an equally complicated discussion about when one is, and isn't able to suspend disbelief which doesn't just apply to gender roles but also to abuses of science and (on one notable occasion) the precise presentation of the minarets in Jerusalem.

So it's really feel refreshing to see a response to this kind of critique which isn't "hey! look! dragons!" but is instead yes of course she's fantasy wish fulfilment. AND WHY NOT?.

I've only read the first of the Gentleman Bastards series which I thought was a truly excellent novel. I haven't read the rest because I heard somewhere that they dropped in quality and I didn't really want to spoil how much I had enjoyed the first. But the above response makes me think I should re-evaluate that decision.

Comments

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

Refer the complainer to Hurley's "We have always fought"?

(This won a Hugo for Best Related Work, which I think was a stupid thing on behalf of those who nominated/voted for it - not because it's not a good book - I haven't read it, but it's had good reviews in the academic press. The trouble is that no matter how good the book, it shouldn't have won a Hugo because it's not related to SF or fandom, which is the point of that category. It won because Hurley is a well-known fan writer - she also won the best fan writer Hugo lasst year with which I have no problem, as by all accounts she is an excellent online fan writer.)

[purplecat]

I've read Hurley's piece (which, to be honest, I thought went on a bit) at least I think I've read it. I read an essay in A Dribble of Ink so maybe it was an excerpt of the book you are referring to.

Certainly given the essay appeared in an online SF&F fanzine and was specifically about the representation of female warriors in fiction (which applies far more strongly to SF&F writing than to other forms of fictions) and how that diverged from reality, it doesn't seem like an unreasonable Hugo nomination for fan writing. Obviously if it was excerpted from a longer work then it was possibly tailored specifically to the fan audience in the excerpt.

As I said, I found it a bit long-winded. But then I find that with a lot of fan writing and Humanities writing in general. I like things to get to the point quickly and not beat about the bush too much with examples.

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

What you've read sounds like either a fannish piece she wrote drawing on the same sources, an early fannish element, or the fannish bit from a work of feminist scholarship. The work that won the Hugo was a full book. As I said, I've not read it, but the reviews and description of it were of it as a feminist work of history, with perhaps some pop culture analysis at the end.
There's good and bad writing in the humanities, as you know my work travels pretty much across the spectrum these days, but yes, there's a lot of waffly stuff in the humanities and the social sciences, which would be better written at about half or even one third the length, and with a focus on getting the point accross rather than drowning the reader in words.
Science isn't immune, though. One of my cohort at StA CS was a fan of Victorian literature and her heavily mathematical PhD thesis included lines like "And so it is that we have seen..." instead of "Thus,..."

[purplecat]

OK, I've got interested in the history of "We have always fought" now. My starting point was the assumption it was a Masters' thesis printed via a small press and then excerpted in Dribble of Ink, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Though the essay definitely strongly implies (at least to me) that there was a Masters' thesis somewhere.

Anyway the essay is easy to find. Wikipedia seems to think it is the Dribble of Ink essay that won the Hugo and, given context, I'd say that was fair enough (at least eligibility wise).

It looks like there was a subsequent collection of essays (on "Craft, Fiction and Fandom") published (probably self-published as far as I can tell) under the same heading and including the Hugo winning essay plus others - in fact it describes the original essay as "the first blog post to be nominated for the Hugo", though I'm not sure about that, wasn't "I didn't dream of Dragons" nominated for a Hugo and that was a blog post or do I misremember? I'm guessing this is the book you have come across. I've no idea what the other essays in the book are about though, given the tagline, they still seem relevant to the Hugo. The above page says that the book was put together as part of publicising the Hugo nominated essay, but that would imply its not the book that was nominated but the essay.

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. Clearly I should stop complaining and check out exactly what was nominated and won the Hugo.