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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Okay, here is where I am going to be very rude. When your blurb goes "A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin", that is a very damn high bar and you better be worth it or else.

Since I have no idea who this writer is, I had to look her up and oh my here we go:

She is best known for The Innsmouth Legacy series, which has Winter Tide as its first novel. In The Verge, Andrew Liptak discusses Winter Tide, writing "Along with a previous novelette called The Litany of Earth, it subverts Lovecraft's notorious racism by making his monsters - which were often thinly veiled stand-ins for people of color - sympathetic protagonists."

...In 2017, Emrys spoke with NPR, stating "In Winter Tide, I wanted to talk about how we rebuild community after genocide, and how rebuilt community is always changed from what we had before. And I wanted to talk about all those readers over the years who didn't question the Deep One concentration camps."

(Here's where I am rude). Having seen the author photo, well yeah I guess if you look like your name could be Marsh and you come from Innsmouth because you got The Look, then you will be inclined to be sympathetic to the fish-monsters wanting to take over the land. I guess she missed the parts about human sacrifice and forced interbreeding when shaking her head over Lovecraft's racist treatment of the gentle, indigenous, underwater monsters. Looking up the story The Shadow over Innsmouth we don't know that there are concentration camps, this is just something bruited in the newspapers:

Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges, were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and is even now only beginning to shew signs of a sluggishly revived existence.

The people arrested in Innsmouth weren't human, not fully, and the worst of them are the fish-monsters. So wherever the government locked them away, "concentration camp" is not the correct term (and given that this story was written in 1931, it would be Boer War type concentration camps not Nazi ones that Lovecraft was referencing - not great, but not the worst excesses). So saying "oh Lovecraft had his fish-people locked up in concentration camps" is the wrong reading here.

Now, I have read some "sympathetic to the monsters" new Lovecraftian fiction, I don't know if it was by this woman but I don't recognise her name so I don't think so, and it wasn't bad. But it's not Lovecraft, because his world-building is not about "cuddly native species who have as much right to live in harmony with nature as we do, or maybe even more because we're the bad guys", it's about "the universe is a cold, materialist place that does not give a damn about all your high-mindedness, and there are entities out there who are as gods to us, as far above us as we are above an ant, and they care as little. There's nothing supernatural or divine or demonic, this is all science, but we are bugs to be squished and there is no possibility of all joining hands around the campfire and living in peace".

From another review, which thinks that a novella that contradicts everything Lovecraft wrote in his universe is something for Lovecraft fans:

The conceit of the story is that Ruthanna believes the United States’ motivation for destroying Innsmouth was a mixture of racism as well as hatred for the non-Christian religious practices of the townsfolk.

But of course those were the motivations, not the human sacrifice and murder and forced interbreeding 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 Them pesky Methodees got all riled up about heresy or sumpin':

One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd—all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvellous transformations leading to bodily immortality—of a sort—on this earth. The youth’s own pastor—Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham—had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.

The Baptists and Congregationalists are doing fine, however:

I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly.

Or maybe it was the Freemasons, annoyed that they had been displaced?

It was called, she said, “The Esoteric Order of Dagon”, and was undoubtedly a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a century before, at a time when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren. Its persistence among a simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence on the town, replacing Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in the old Masonic Hall on New Church Green.

her wife and their infant daughter, a they/them, and a transman (who have a they/them toddler of their own whose gender is pointedly never specified

Oh Amadan, have you never heard of a theyby? Get with the times, grampa! Gaybies are soooo last season, theybies are the new must-have accessory to signal how with-it and super-allyship and woke you are! Why, even in my own country, some idiot fucking politician did an entire newspaper interview about their theyby. Public reaction (well, okay, reaction on a subreddit) was along the lines that this guy was a fucking idiot, so it's not just me 😁

My view on this entire matter is that if you want to write a novel about a lesbian starship engineer, knock yourself out. I'll even shrug if you want to fill out the entire bingo card of trans, multi-racial, differently abled, poly, neo-pronouns and all the rest of it. The only thing I ask is that you write the story about the starship engineer in space, not the LESBIAN in LESBIAN SPACE and did I mention in the last three paragraphs that xie is LESBIAN? Samuel Delany can manage to do that and be kinky and queer, but these modern chumps aren't half the writers he is.

The Bitter Review I Would Not Post on Amazon

You should post it, and I say that not just because I'm an inveterate contrarian. I leave reviews if something is good or bad, and I think leaving reviews correcting the bad stuff is just as important. If you leave a review saying that you're the type of person who is on the liberal side, likes first contact stories that are not about fighting off the aliens, and read this because you saw it recommended that may be enough to get it not dismissed as "conservative religious bigot transphobe". Criticism from within the tent will always be more impactful than from outsiders.

I guess she missed the parts about human sacrifice and forced interbreeding when shaking her head over Lovecraft's racist treatment of the gentle, indigenous, underwater monsters.

Pretty sure she didn't. I think she's making a very intentional comparison to antisemitic blood libel.

Except that in Innsmouth people really do go missing and end up dead (or worse) if they poke around in the affairs of the inhabitants, or are suspected of doing the same. It's not a blood libel if you really are murdering people, and I think if she is referring to that, then she's dumb.

Unless she completely changes the narrative, her version of "we just lived peacefully frolicking with our Deep One cousins in the waves until the wicked fascist US government destroyed our town and dragged us off to lock us up in concentration camps" is totally false.

It's not blood libel if you believe Jeffrey Epstein killed himself either.

The USS Liberty was a misunderstanding and Building 7 just collapsed... Because!

I've never tried reading any "sympathetic to the monsters" Lovecraft-inspired fiction, but I would argue that Lovecraft himself was good at writing them in a way that was both alien/horrifying and understandable/sympathetic (in the cases where it served the purpose of the story), despite him writing horror in which it was almost never a primary emphasis. So if someone came away from Lovecraft wanting to write a sympathetic treatment without appreciating how Lovecraft himself did it, I strongly suspect they would be worse at it than he was. Most likely by revising Lovecraft antagonists until they are less alien or threatening than even cultures/political-factions/eras other than the author's own, let alone other species. Meanwhile, based on that description for The Litany of Earth, it sounds like the author gave the alien culture of "the 1920s U.S. government" less understandable and sympathetic motives than Lovecraft gave to most of his actual aliens.

Most obviously the protagonist of At the Mountains of Madness comes to appreciate the alien culture and history of the Elder Things through the art and other remnants they left behind and is outright sympathetic to them (which serves the narrative purpose of contrasting with the greater horror), but this applies to antagonists as well. The Great Race of Yith are scholars seeking after science/knowledge and their own survival, the Mi-go are also scientifically inclined and have the more mundane goal of mining resources, and ghouls mostly just want to eat/survive and sometimes serve the role of allies or neutral figures. The reader (and sometimes the characters) can appreciate the wonders and achievements of their civilizations even if they don't share the morality of the early 20th-century United States. (Something much more difficult for SJW writers and readers who tend to have a totalizing view of SJW dictates and taboos, creating a necessity to insert them into fiction where they don't fit.) When beings have goals that aren't understandable, like the godlike beings tend to, he conveys the sense that they have their own reasons for acting as they do, even if they are not reasons that humans understand or appreciate.

The Deep Ones from The Shadow Over Innsmouth are some of his less sympathetic antagonists, in that activities like human sacrifice in service to alien gods seem irrational, but of course human sacrifice is a thing that even humans did, groups like the Aztecs are historical realities, so it is hardly cheating to impute it to a group of non-humans as well. Nor are such activities their only defining feature, just what brings them into conflict with humans. Instead attributing the conflict to "the United States’ motivation for destroying Innsmouth was a mixture of racism as well as hatred for the non-Christian religious practices of the townsfolk" is just flipping it around and having the U.S. government kill people in the name of religion instead, except that the 1920s U.S. government actually existed and not as the author depicts it. Naturally "The Innsmouth people are depicted as victims and the story ignores the Marsh family’s reign of terror over regular humans.", you can't give the "racists" understandable reasons for their actions, so conflicts must be cleanly divided between evil perpetrators and innocent victims. Meanwhile Lovecraft gave "monsters" glorious civilizations that the reader can appreciate even if the incidental consequences for humans produce horror. He was an enthusiast of science who often made his antagonists scientists, which makes sense with the instrumental utility it has for even deeply alien beings. (Compare to the above review for a book where 'non-binary gender identity", a highly specific and recent cultural concept, is immediately adopted by aliens once it is explained to them.) He was an atheist and intellectual who repeatedly wrote stories where the local superstitious traditions contain a kernel of truth that only intellectuals are arrogant enough to disregard (but without depicting science and modernity as having nothing to contribute). The roles of inhuman beings in his stories are shaped by the narrative requirements of primarily writing horror stories, but he could and did write them with complexity and compelling world-building anyway, and that was part of why his stories became so popular and influential to begin with.

I've never tried reading any "sympathetic to the monsters" Lovecraft-inspired fiction, but I would argue that Lovecraft himself was good at writing them in a way that was both alien/horrifying and understandable/sympathetic (in the cases where it served the purpose of the story), despite him writing horror in which it was almost never a primary emphasis.

I haven't read much Lovecraft-inspired fiction, and it's been a while since I've read Lovecraft himself, but I'd highly recommend the PS4 game Bloodborne for a great "sympathetic to the monsters" Lovecraft-inspired fiction. If you don't like games or don't have access to a PS4/PS5. I thought it did a great job of doing exactly what you're describing Lovecraft himself as doing, presenting these elder gods as both alien/horrifying and understandable/sympathetic. And it doesn't go for the obvious "humans are the real monsters" approach, presenting most human characters as parts horrifying and sympathetic, and the whole story just feels very tragic on all fronts for all characters, including the elder gods. This being a Fromsoft game, the story is cryptic and difficult to make out from a single playthrough, though there is no shortage of YouTube videos that dissect it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fromsoft is a Japanese company with Japanese writers and developers, and their style of writing and game design tends not to be heavily influenced by Western/American norms, despite most of their famous games, including Bloodborne (set in heavily fictionalized Victorian London), being set in Western settings with Western characters.

For any recent literary work, encountering "subverts" in a friendly review for me would be a huge red flag. That usually means a derivative work concentrated on pushing a point while using somebody's else creation as a prop. Very few people can do anything decent with this as a toolkit. Even less among those capable of it would want to - if you are that powerful, you do your own thing, not mock somebody else's. If you are a Creator, you make elves. If you are not, you make orcs out of somebody else's elves.

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