The speed of my reading lately frustrates me. I need to read faster, so I can talk about some of the amazing-looking novels in my to-be-read pile, like Elizabeth Bear’s The Stone in the Skull, K. Arsenault Rivera’s The Tiger’s Daughter, Jodi Meadows’ Before She Ignites, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti: The Night Masquerade, and, oh, let’s call it several more. (“Several” is such a flexible word.) Because they all look good, and some of them—like R.E. Stearns’ Barbary Station, who doesn’t love pirates and mad AIs?—look like me-catnip.
There are so many books in the world, and so little time.
Let me segue from this eternal truth (the eternal cry of the voracious reader) to a related matter, one that has returned to my mind more and more often this year. That’s the issue of scarcity: the scarcity of certain kinds of stories, certain kinds of protagonists, certain representations of ways of being. There are so many books in the world, and so little time—but when it comes to some kinds of stories, there are still so few that reading three in row without actively looking for them is a visceral shock.
Bear with me: I’m reaching towards things that I find hard to put into words.
I’m a queer woman (bisexual, and to a degree genderqueer, if precision matters). Much of my reading experience, particularly with new-to-me authors, and even more so with male authors, involves bracing for things that are tiresome, wearying, and/or hurtful. Whether it’s active misogyny, background sexist assumptions, gratuitous sexual assault of women (which may or may not be used to motivate the character arc or development of male protagonists), Smurfettes, women without communities that include other women, transphobia, Buried Gays, or just the general sense that the world the author’s created has no room for people like me in it, there’s frequently a level of alienation that I need to overcome in order to be able to enjoy a new book—or film, or television show, or videogame, etc.—and constantly being braced for that alienation is exhausting.
And that’s even before we get to books that are outright badly done, alienating in ways that aren’t aimed at me (but fuck racism), or just aren’t to my tastes (a lot of comedy, most horror, certain themes that need to be really well done to work for me).
But I’m so used to experiencing this alienation, or to expecting it, that it’s a wrenching shock when I find books that just… welcome me in. That don’t place any barriers in my way. I don’t notice the amount of effort overcoming this alienation requires until I don’t have to make that effort—like not really knowing how much pain you were in until it stops.
Recently I read five books in a row where the books were, in more ways than not, books for me. Now, one novel on its own isn’t a rarity. Two happens… not as much, but still quite a lot. But a run of three or more, unless I specifically sought them out and/or reread? Friends, that’s damn near unprecedented. (And at least one of them—Max Gladstone’s Ruin of Angels—had a pair of queer romance arcs whose culmination, in both cases, damn near made me cry ugly tears of relief and gratitude.)
This led me to wonder out loud: is this feeling of utter acceptance, of being a normal and unremarkable part of the landscape, of being self-evidently interesting and complex and worthy of multiple different protagonist-type roles, and also not dead, invisible, brutalised, or in doomed love—is this what (straight, white) guys just… expect to find when they come to fictional narratives? Is this one of the ways their experience of the world differs from mine?
If so, wow. I cannot articulate the difference it was, to read five books in a row where most of the protagonists were women, most of them were queer, and most of them had relationships that did not end in doom and grief.
It’s been making me think afresh about the problem of scarcity, and how books and other fictionalised narratives with non-straight non-white non-guy protagonists carry so great a weight of hopes—because there have been so few of them, comparatively, that it’s not like you can just shrug and find another with a protagonist that reflects these aspects of your identity if you don’t like it. (And if it’s badly—insultingly—done, then it’s like being slapped with a rotten fish.) It’s also making me think about the cues that indicate to me that a work of fiction has good odds of being an inclusive narrative, along more than one axis: the cues that signal this work of fiction has a good chance of being welcoming to me.
Spoiler: those cues rarely turn up on cover copy, and only sometimes in cover art. Press releases are a little better, but most of the time, it’s hard to tell unless you have word of mouth, really.
So I’m left thinking about the ways that weight of alienation has shaped, and is shaping, my engagement with narrative, and my critical engagement, in ways that I can’t see. It’s only its occasional and utterly shocking absence that has let me come to realise it’s even there. What does it mean?
I don’t know, but I’m still thinking.
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, where she’s been known to talk about even more books thanks to her Patreon supporters. Or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
> oh, let’s call it several more. (“Several” is such a flexible word.)
Hee hee. Bon mot, oh queer woman….
I do like your style.
—
“She could and had faced an armed laser in the hands of a mad mutant
mercenary with less fear than she faced such unswerving emotion…”
— JD Robb, Immortal in Death, 1996
The culminations of those two romance arcs in Ruin of Angels were just so lovely.
In particular these lines:
I do not understand you. But neither do I understand fire, or starlight, or storms, and I love them.
Rise of Angels had an impressive amount of potential, but it failed to live up to the high standard Max Gladstone set in his previous writing. Looking back, I can see several areas where Gladstone fell short of his own standards.
1) Villains. In all of Gladstone’s other Craft books, there was a meaningful connection between the protagonist and the antagonist, and I didn’t realize how important that relationship was until it wasn’t there. The villains of Rise of Angels simply don’t have the same connections, and the author doesn’t spend enough time showing us why these people matter to each other. There’s something particularly satisfying about a conflict between enemies who know each other.
2) Too many protagonists. Three Parts Dead has Tara Abernathy and Abelard as the main characters. With fewer viewpoints, we get a more detailed look at each person, and a chance to explore their character arc in greater depth. Gladstone can work with a substantial number of viewpoint characters, but he needs to focus on one or two of them, rather than creating a larger team whose members just don’t have enough time to be fully developed. It’s better to have interesting minor characters around a small protagonist group than a bigger group of half-built protagonists.
3) An overly convenient ending. It isn’t the first time Gladstone has made this mistake, and plenty of writers do the same thing. To increase dramatic tension, they stack the odds heavily against the heroes, forcing them to resolve several crises at the same time. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough foreshadowing for how each crisis can be resolved, so some of the solutions Gladstone writes come out of nowhere and feel entirely unearned. (Especially the one with Maestre Gerhardt) It’s an unfortunate step back from Four Roads Cross, which generally did a better job of both setting up and resolving the climax of the story.
I suspect you may enjoy Molly Brooks’ Power Ballad, about a woman costumed adventurer who does what she does because it’s fun, where the main barriers to the romance between her and her Personal Assistant are an awareness boss/employee relationships are inherently problematic and (more importantly) that Olympic-grade inarticulateness on matters of mutual attraction.
Liz,
What were the other four books that you had read?
Not be the devil’s advocate, but bottom line is there has to be a big enough market for any kind of book.
I feel for you, Liz. I am an asexual autistic black woman and I have had such a hard time finding ace or autistic characters who aren’t white. The best example I have found for a autistic character of color is the YA novel On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis, which is great because the author is autistic and totally avoids all those problems that neurotypical often fall into without realizing it. If only more adult fantasy authors would do the same, though I heard Sherwood Smith was good with the ace protagonist of Banner of the Damned, so I have that checked our from the library.
It makes me want to go back to that middle grade project I had with a black autistic girl protagonist. I know it would have been so important to me at that age.
Fun fact: A lot of the better books I have read this year have been diverse, including The Ruin of Angels, The House of Binding Thorns, and On a Red Station, Drifting.
This is so much a crux of the problem. It’s nearly impossible for me to find books that are “for me” based on the formal marketing information. And even word of mouth can fail regularly, both in action (recommending books that don’t work for me) and in inaction (failing to bring books or aspects of books to my attention that do work for me). It makes me understand that certain strain of indie book promotion that frontloads all the identities and intersectionalities of the characters, although I tend to wince at the way that approach sometimes treats plot and setting as incidental. And word of mouth is so fragile a thread to hang a book’s success on.
Re: comment #7 — Why would there be an assumption that books with great female and queer characters wouldn’t have a broad enough market to be viable? After all, female and queer readers have long demonstrated that it’s perfectly possible to read (and enjoy) books outside your own identities.
Reviews, reviews, reviews! If there isn’t a site which caters to reviews of books like this, there needs to be. Find like others and create the site or get someone to write a review column on this kind of book at this site or others.
Plus, try reading beyond the major publishers. There are lots of other voices out there in small press and self publishing. Many of them are really excellent writers.
And there’s the age old solution that has started many a writer’s career, write the books you’d like to read.
Number 7 assumes facts not in evidence; that is, assuming “straight” or “white” or “non-brown” people will not read books with non-straight, brown/varying shades of color protagonists is an assumption without merit. All kinds of people read the straight white male-centered books. We’re pointing out the lack of other protagonists because we are the market for those books, and “we” includes non-brown folks, non-LGBTQIA folks, binary and non-binary folks. Here, being a Devil’s Advocate is only arguing for the status quo.
> had a pair of queer romance arcs whose culmination, in both cases, damn near made me cry ugly tears of relief and gratitude
I probably scared my housemates when I punched the air and yelled “Yeeee HA! Now *that*’s how you paladin!” at one of the key moments in one of those romance arcs. Gal may have replaced Elayne Kevarian as my “favorite Craft sequence character.”
(I obviously don’t agree with the poster above who thought Gladstone was off his game in this book. I think he was just playing a slightly different game than in past books. This one’s a love story — Kai’s love for her sister, the two very different romances, and the love of a people for their city and their past.)
I’ve noticed the exact opposite. Currently, due to a lack of time, I mostly read SciFi/Fantasy anthologies. In many of the ones produced in the last 5 years fully half or more of the stories that make sexuality a point will involve non-hetero relationships. Speaking as a straight man this doesn’t seem to affect the quality of the story. If the story is good it doesn’t matter who boinks with who.
“Liz, What were the other four books that you had read?”
Wanted to ask the same thing.
Sometimes it’s a relief to be a reader who doesn’t have specific types of character identities that I’m looking for. Many of my favorite reads have been about people who had little or nothing in common with me, experiencing worlds that are very different from ours. It’s even better when authors can imagine worlds and situations that aren’t directly linked to my political leanings.
“Max Gladstone’s Ruin of Angels—had a pair of queer romance arcs whose culmination, in both cases, damn near made me cry ugly tears of relief and gratitude.”
Well! That sounds like a book I want to read. *adds to list*
alclay @3: Oh yeah. Wow. Really took my breath away.
JamesDavisNicoll @5: So noted, with interest!
hihosilver @6: As a bullet-point list:
– J.Y. Yang’s two marvelous novellas,
– Tim Pratt’s THE WRONG STARS (Angry Robot, November), which is brilliantly fun space opera that reminds me of KILLJOYS but with more Weird Alien Cool Shit,
– Adam Roberts’ THE REAL-TOWN MURDERS (Gollancz, out now), which is a near-future locked-room murder mystery/political thriller
– Max Gladstone’s already-mentioned RUIN OF ANGELS.
…and then I broke the streak with Richard Baker’s VALIANT DUST, but went straight back to it with Ann Leckie’s PROVENANCE.
elhersomo @7: So what are you advocating, exactly? That straight white guys are too fragile to enjoy reading about people who aren’t pretty much nearly exactly like them? That they can’t empathise with people who aren’t exactly like them? (Though, you know, if they haven’t learned/don’t learn to empathise and identify with people who are different, that would explain a great deal about Some People.)
MsAngel @8: It’s tough. And I’m still relatively lucky, in terms of visibility and acceptability.
Heather Rose Jones @9: Yep. Yep. Yep.
MByerly @10: I believe you are preaching to the choir in my case, although “write the books you want to read” is easier said than done. Many people do not want to write, or do not have the ability to make the time commitment to write novels. One should not *have* to write books oneself in order to be satisfied.
neivet @11: word.
lumineaux @12: YES.
Sunspear @14: See above, my reply to #6. :D
Power Ballad deserves more attention than it has thus far got. If only there was some reviewer at a major site who could showcase it….
As an aging hetero male, I was always annoyed by the western male heroes who are better than everyone else, with female characters who are pure decoration. Fortunately, “Sleeps with Monsters” does all the work for me. Liz has provided me with such a wealth of wonderful authors that my only problem now is my ever-growing TBR list.
Thank you.
Favourite hero this year? Aphra Marsh from “Winter Tide”.
Hey,
Any tips for good children’s books that integrate a broader array of protagonists of different genders, orientations, etc? It’s getting easier to expose my sons to children from other backgrounds and cultures, but not much on the orientation and gender identity spectrum beyond the “So-and-so has two Daddies” track. At this point neither of my kiddos has shown a clear orientation in any direction, but I want them to be able to understand and think about things early rather than late.
Thanks!
I guess I should be a little clearer about what I was saying in that last comment. There is a lot of SFF out there that is horrible for anyone even slightly aware of the existence of “others” in our society.
People like Liz who wade through the dross to find the gems for the rest of us are worth their weight in gold ( or $3 a month, whichever you can afford).
My challenge is as an author as much as reader. I love diverse and interesting characters and relationships. I bring them into my YA contemporary fiction more than my other work, though I’m beginning to add some in. The challenge is in this age of ‘cultural appropriation’ having a main character who is not cis, white male opens me to accusations that I’m appropriating voice. I plan to continue to write more such characters anyway, but accessing a community to beta read and tell me when I’m on the money and when I’m off track is difficult. Suggestions would be helpful. I have a few books I’d like to get out into the world, but not until I’ve heard from people who will know whether I’m doing them justice.
@22 There are a lot of good resources out there: http://readdiversebooks.com/white-authors-fill-your-stories-with-people-of-color-but-dont-make-them-your-protagonists/
https://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2016/06/20/how-to-write-protagonists-of-colour-when-youre-white/
https://www.buzzfeed.com/danieljoseolder/fundamentals-of-writing-the-other?utm_term=.dskLgz0l0#.krnelzO1O
https://www.wattpad.com/165644622-writing-poc-101-introduction
See, this is exactly why I keep saying diversity in entertainment is a positive thing. Insert favorite applause.gif here.
I, too, want to know what the other 4 books were!!! Are they the ones mentioned in your first paragraph, because all of those are on my TBR list, too.
While all of us yearn for books with characters like us and I am pleased to see more diversity in new fiction, a really good writer should develop characters that can appeal to readers who aren’t all alike. I’m an older woman minus hormones, so romance of any kind can be appealing while graphic sex of any kind is boring. The heroines and heroes who appeal to me are those whose struggles are universal–loyalty, friendship, love, honesty, compassion, and sacrifice come to mind because folks of all orientations, genders, and ethnicities deal with these issues. I can identify with a black homosexual man who wants to do his best for his partner as much as I can with a white grandmother looking out for her co-workers. I remember being a child and a teen, so young protagonists still spark my interest, even though I am more interested in mature characters than in my past.
I also have the opposite side of this reaction sometimes, where I read/watch so many things in a row that I don’t get into that I start questioning whether I can tell if I like things, and whether I have lost the capacity to enjoy a genre. And then another one “for me” comes along and it like, oh yeah, that’s what being into a story is feels like.
If only it were easier to tell which books would be “for me” before spending a while reading them.
@20: I don’t know how old your kids are, but for middle-grade and YA, Rick Riordan! His fantasy is fun and wonderful and quite diverse. He just won a Stonewall award for a genderfluid teen character in his Magnus Chase series.
I think part of the reason for this is many of the designations and view points are considered new. Or new enough anyways that they haven’t penetrated the publishing world. There might be a strong online presence of each of these different perspectives, but to the broader public they are still a pretty new and unique thing. The sheer variety of new ways of identifying are still growing (And I think will continue to do so until they eventually plateau and then fall and coalesce into a few broader categories. I think the only reason they are exploding out now is until very recently the cap on what people can be (officially anyways) has been tightly fixed for a long time and now that it’s loosening the build up of pressure is squirting out in a multitude of directions and making a mess of terms and categories.) and I think the world of fiction is still playing catch up.
That includes the authors. How many queer woman ( who are bisexual, and to a degree genderqueer assuming precision matters) are there? And how many of those want to be authors, and how many want to be but haven’t made the leap because they don’t think they can, cause they don’t think they’ll ever get published/read anyways? And then how many authors are there who sympathize, and want to make characters like that, but don’t because they either don’t want to offend or think the same. I have no idea but somewhere in the answering of those questions plus time is a solution to this issue regarding representative characters.
@7 Elhersomo
Wasn’t completely wrong. There doesn’t just have to be an audience, there has to be a largely visible audience for more than a few of these books to be published. The reason so many books with similar protags have been successful for years is because they were( and largely still are) a “safe” bet. This wasn’t because the audience was exclusively white and male (Though I think it’s still safe to say a majority of the fantasy/scifi audience identifies that way) but because the other people in the crowd were(and in many ways and for many reasons still are) invisible and took whatever they could get despite not finding the character relatable to their lives, so they still sold well. Now that all of these different people are becoming more visible and acceptance of (and desire for) more difference is becoming (somewhat) more widespread I think we’re going to start seeing many more protagonists that are different from the classic mold. But it is still going to be slow unless the few of those books coming out are successful. Because ultimately what drives new things in the book world (Like many others) is sales. Also it takes time to write a good novel, so maybe they’re still being written.
So I guess the answer I see is if people like Liz Bourke keep putting themselves out there and enough people keep buying the books of authors who write diverse and representative characters we should see more of them. In other words I think it’s going to be an interesting next twenty years of fantasy. ( As a short aside to a lengthy post I really thought it was neat how in Alex Marshall’s the Crimson Empire series he just threw around different pronouns and gender identities and the only way you’d know anything was different than how you might of expected it is if you were paying close attention. The best thing though was how it was just very matter of fact in the setting. Also I’ve now been writing this long enough that I’ve lost all confidence in what I’ve written so I hope this all makes sense.)
People keep making that assumption without looking for any proof that it is true. Actual studies show that girls read more than boys (although those studies aren’t about a specific genre). It is strange that publishers ignore these numbers and still assume that the standard reader is male. If earning as much money as possible is really the main motivation it would make more sense to publish only books aimed at women because they are a larger audience than reading men.
Lumineaux @12:
I, too, thought that “Ruin of Angels” didn’t quite reach the height of the best “Craft Sequence” installements, which, to me were the first and the third ones in the order of publication – “Three-Fourths Dead” and “Full-Fathom Five”.Or even it’s immediate predecessor “Four Roads Cross”.
The big part of it’s flaws, IMHO, was due to majority of the story being literally “an idiot plot”. Also, Agdiel Lex didn’t feel as fresh and imaginative as the other Craft Sequence settings, since it was fairly reminiscent of Miéville’s “The City and the City”. And the general direction of his plots has become kind of obvious by this point.
But inclusion of romance front and center also made the story too predictable.
I am generally pretty fed up with how female protagonists in fantasy and SF tend to be saddled with romance as an essential part of their narratives. And how that romance is usually rigidly restricted by the tropes of the romance genre – i.e. :
it has to be Tru Wuv with guaranteed HEA somewhere along the line, there are fake-outs with ultimately unsuitable other candidates,
the right man has to amply prove his awesomeness, which has to equal or exceed that of the protagonist herself, so she wouldn’t be “settling” – that leads to him hogging her and other, more interesting characters’ limelight,
the leading couple has to routinely stop at wholly inappropriate times to argue about who betrayed whom and agonize over whether they can trust each other or otherwise ruminate over their relationship, and the main plot has to per-force allow them to do so without dying horribly, as they should have, etc.
All of this often irritatingly eclipses and disrupts the much more interesting adventure/mystery/horror plot, which is allegedly the main plot of the story. And also very often leads to marginalization/exclusion of other female characters because any hint of competition with the heroine can’t be countenanced, and the character spots are needed to flesh out the romantic fake-outs anyway.
This is very unlike male protagonists, where romance may be absent completely, or play a wholly subordinate role, or end in a plethora of different ways. And where the love interest never eclipses the hero in his own alleged area of competence or general importance and presence.
Which is why, while I crave more female protagonists, the back-cover summaries running along the lines of “woman has to work with man on stuff” make me wary and reluctant to pick up a book. And why the Craft Sequence has been very refreshing to me in this regard so far.
Now, returning to The Ruin of Angels, Gladstone dodges a lot of the above tropes by having lesbian romances in it. But not all of them. YMMV.
Birgit @29:
But that’s it – girls and women are taken for granted, because they read more and more broadly and have been (by necessity) socialized to empathize and identify with people different from them, but boys and men have to be specially catered to in order to attract them at all. Or, at least, that’s the pernicious narrative of publishing and many other forms of entertainment industry :(.
@20/Sarah – What age is your son, and what reading level? What are his favorite books?
I know I may be missing the point, but, what were the five books please?
:)
I <3 discussions like this for helping me find new stuff, I’ve added “Power Ballad” to my webcomics list.
I’d also suggest “Spinnerette,” http://www.spinnyverse.com/comic/02-09-2010
Cool webcomic with primarily female leads, several of them WoC, it has a lot of fun with genre conventions and comic book/sci fi in-jokes, and a really nicely developing romance between two queer women.
I feel obliged to mention AN ACCIDENT OF STARS and A TYRANNY OF QUEENS by Foz Meadows, which has strongly women-centered societies which are still messed over for Various Reasons, and villains who have actual reasons to do what they do. The story arc feels more or less finished in just the two books, but seriously, she could keep on writing those universes for a long, long time before I got tired of them.
You should try The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and the sequel A Closed and Common Orbit – brilliant series, and gave me the exact same feeling you were describing. So good.