This question popped in my head while answering someone else’s question about Ray Bradbury and his shallow portrayal of women.
Basically, the question is this: if we judge other authors by their lack of inclusivity, how should we judge something like the *Broken Earth* trilogy which seems inclusive to everyone except cis/hetero/binary/white men? As in, the only such characters in that trilogy felt like negative caricatures, much in the same way that Bradbury’s women in most of his works feel like negative caricatures.
A few qualifiers:
* I haven’t read her other works. *How Long Until Black Future Month* is on my to-read shelf. So if this is something specific to this trilogy, let me know.
* It’s been two years since I read it. If I’ve forgotten a main character that indicates otherwise, also let me know.
* I say “white” because that was the impression I got from *Broken Earth*’s character/world descriptions. While that world doesn’t have the same races, she uses a lot of coding that suggests white/nonwhite and the institutional power in the hands of the “white” people in that world. For example, using “rogga” as a colloquial epithet for the magic users, in place of the n-word our society uses as an epithet for black people.
* I do think it’s entirely possible this was a deliberate choice by Jemisin. Which makes it a different category from Bradbury who came by his exclusion more naturally/by default. As in, maybe it’s arguable that Jemisin is being too heavy handed with excluding the demographic of society’s oppressors, but I don’t think (?) she *actually* feels this way about all straight white men. Whereas Bradbury likely wrote the way he did because thats how he viewed women.
Very curious to see how others feel about this. If you asked me a few years ago I’d say it was bad. Now, I have no idea. I enjoyed the trilogy a lot tbh so even if it’s “bad” it didn’t stop me from reading it haha.
by Julian_Caesar
14 Comments
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Bradbury: Simple sexism and misogyny
Jemisin: Healthy creative reaction to centuries of systemic oppression
These two aren’t remotely the same to me, man.
I’m 100% cool with Jemisin’s creative choices, because she did not make them in a neutral continuum, but as a reaction/response to the world we live in. The work addresses the painful truths of our shared history as well as the long history of protaganists in genre fiction overwhelmingly being straight white guys.
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I find the phrasing of your post title interesting.
“How do *we* feel,” instead of “how do *you* feel.”
It comes across like you need to be told how to feel by others, or that others feelings on the matter must match yours.
I could just be reading too much into it though.
The story was set with these interesting characters. I did not care that none were whatever category people are worried about. It is a great unusual story well told.
You can’t make this kind of post and not provide details as to why you think it – quotes, passages, examples, SOMETHING. I did not get this impression at all from this series.
It was bad, but you enjoyed it. And now you are conscern trolling it was anti white straight men?
As a straight white dude, get over yourself.
Honestly, it’s not something that crossed my mind while reading the book (I only ever read the first book in the trilogy as I disliked the writing style). I really don’t much about race (likely in part because I’ve never been discriminated against because of my race) and cannot visualize things as I read – so lengthy descriptions about what a character looks like that might help one reader go “okay, this is an old white man” and “this is a young black woman” generally leave me with “guy” and “girl”. So while I definitely got the “people in power are not good people” vibes, I didn’t associate it with race or anything of the sort.
As far as I can remember, the only male characters of any note are the arbitrarily bigoted and murderous husband/father, the bi/asexual tortured aesthete, the cold-blooded sociopath, and the pirate-king sex god in that cringey section of blatant author-insert erotica.
So she didn’t do all that well as far as male characters in general go.
I didn’t pay that close of attention to race and she was notably sparse in visual descriptions of characters, but the only ones I had visualized as at least whitish we’re tortured aesthete and cold-blooded sociopath – violent and murderous father was black in my recollection, and pirate-king sex god was roughly Polynesian (and might as well have been named Jason Momoa).
Broadly – yeah, there are some shortcomings in her characterizations of men, and I guess of whites (are there even any white female characters?). And while some of that can certainly be attributed to bias, I think a lot of it is just that she’s really only a mediocre writer, and characterization is one of her most notable weaknesses.
I mean – it’s not as if she did much better with the women. Granted that the female characters got the questionable honor of getting mostly neutral to positive shallow stereotypes – like mom the determinator, daughter with daddy issues, badass butch lesbian or absent-minded scientist – they’re not much more nuanced than the male ones.
So while the bias is sort of unfortunate, it doesn’t bother me much in and of itself. I see it as just a not-surprising aspect of her broader problems with characterization in general.
> Very curious to see how others feel about this.
Bewildered by your post more than anything.
I’d have serious doubts about someone who had that as a key takeaway from that amazing trilogy.
I haven’t read this particular book, so I can’t say whether I agree with your assessment of it or not. I’ve seen the kind of caricaturing you describe in other books, though, usually of the YA or “new adult” variety. I mostly read thrillers, and it’s frustrating in large part because it takes the unpredictability out of the story: you know that the black person isn’t going to be the bad guy, and that the white Republican is going to be completely incapable of doing anything good for anyone.
I remain hopeful, though, that this new trend is temporary. Similar to the way books like Gone Girl broke the mold of “feminist writing = women should be portrayed as saints”, I think we’re going to see less caricatured depictions of race/gender/orientation relations going forward in the next few years as people start to realize that “cishetwhitemales suck” has become its own cliche.
Well, for one I enjoyed the series very much, I appreciate Jemisin’s knack for creating very complex worlds, where the protagonists aren’t always right, and sometimes the bad guys have a very good point.
What I find interesting in your post is how much the non-“white guy” perspective bothers you. Maybe “bothers” isn’t quite the right word, more like “unsettles” or, at the very least, it stands out to you as unusual. Consider that if it’s that much of a departure from the norm, how does much of the common popular literature over the last several centuries read to non-“white guys”? The change in perspective to a place where straight white men aren’t the focus is a valuable thing. The suggestion that “there are other, perhaps better ways of making a society work than what we’ve been doing all along” is something worth examining, without needing to dilute it by giving a nod to anybody’s fragile feelings. If you (I mean general you, not necessarily personal) are unhappy with the portrayal, then recognize that you are not the intended audience – and that that’s OK. Although personally I think it’s good to read stuff that’s not about you.
It seems like what you’re saying is that you felt discomforted because, as a straight white cis man, you identified more with the stills who hold institutional power than with the orogenes who are systemically oppressed, abused, enslaved and murdered. In which case, I guess what I’d say is— maybe you should? Maybe that discomfort is a valuable takeaway for you as a reader.
Not everyone in the Stillness is outright violent to orogenes, but all of them benefit from the structural oppression and enslavement of orogenes. They’re part of the system, whether they even know it or not. They’re born into a society that’s built on the corpses of orogenes and that teaches its children that orogenes are monsters to justify this fact.
Are some stills nice people? Probably. But how do you make that distinction when your own parents sold you into slavery? When your little boy has been murdered by his own father? When you’ve seen an entire town, down to the gentlest person, descend as a mob on a suspected orogene? Broken Earth is primarily Essun’s story, and Essun *has not had* a whole lot of positive interactions with men in positions of privilege. Certainly none that could possibly balance out all the violence such men have committed against her.
Having societal privilege doesn’t make any individual a bad person, it’s not something any of us gets to choose. But for those of us who benefit from systems that oppress others, simply because of our gender or sexuality or race— that fact should be discomforting.
She changes the viewpoint default settings in her worlds to black, brown, and female. It really refreshing to see the world from a new viewpoint. I can see how it would be unsettling because the majority of sci-fi and fantasy written before the 1980s has the “standard” default settings of a viewpoint that is cis, white, and male.
Octavia Butler did the same.
I’m not black, brown, or female, yet I find myself identifying with the protagonists in all of her stories.