what’s on the cover and what’s inside (Discussion: Thirtheenth Child and Across the Great Barrier)

Well, that was easy. Since my Kindle2 went splat and I’ve replaced it with a Kindle 3, I have a beautiful K2 cover and nothing to do with it. I was going to ask for ideas here, but then I had the idea of posting it on my company’s virtual bulletin board. It was snapped up inside five minutes, so that was easy. (I was debating about whether to just frame the thing because it’s so beautiful, but we live in rented space and can’t put too much on the walls.) I think I will be buying a new Oberon Designs cover for the new Kindle though – possibly the Tree of Life this time. So much for paring down possessions.

Onto the harder stuff.

Patricia Wrede’s Across the Great Barrier has just come out, which has me thinking about its predecessor, Thirteenth Child. That’s the book that has a world with extremely dangerous magical megafauna on the North American continent, as a result of which there was never an ancient migration across the Bering land bridge, and thus there are no Native American societies. As you might remember, there was an internet fuss at the time accusing the book of being racist, for completely erasing a whole group of people. My take is that it depends on what kind of racism you’re looking at. I am morally certain that Wrede had no racist intent; it’s a perfectly reasonable alternate-world assumption to make and a book set only in the American West has no responsibility to look at what happened to the people who didn’t make it there.

However, I do think Wrede goofed in her worldbuilding, and I do think it’s because of underestimating the importance and influence of Native American tribes on the world. So yeah, the book makes some assumptions that are racist due to being steeped in a society that consistnetly undervalues this one of its components. Wrede’s American West is recognizable despite its differences, and I don’t really think that could have happened; for one thing, after the Pilgrims and other early settlements died from starvation, I think the whole settling of the continent would have progressed far more slowly. No potatoes, no ears of corn, no help in adapting to local conditions. Fewer women for early male-heavy pioneering groups to marry. No help for that world’s early European explorers. No fabled cities of gold, to draw settlement and exploitation. It’s clearly possible to settle the continent without any of those, as Native Americans did, but it would probably be slowed by centuries, not years. Further, I don’t think the West would have had its characteristic feel without some of the bigger groups from Europe – and without the potato to contribute first to a massive population growth and then to famine, there wouldn’t have been the huge Irish migrations.

Those are only two things that come to mind; I’m certain there are others. It’s not the kind of thing that has me saying “Wrede is evil! xxxxracismxxx!”; it’s more the kind of thing I think about Mark Twain. Like Twain, Wrede is a member of a society and of course she’s been shaped by it as we all are. In this case, the built-in assumptions or privilege-goggles have damaged her world-building and hurt some would-be readers. Because of the internet fuss, I held off on buying Thirteenth Child for a while, until I decided that was stupid; I don’t want to be an unthinking part of internet dogpiles, and I do want to make my own decisions. Thirteenth Child was a good story and I enjoyed it, but I think that the lack of impact from the absence of Native Americans is a flaw in both the moral sense and the writing sense. No matter what else happens in Across the Great Barrier I’m sure I’ll like its plot and characters too; the question is in the setting. I don’t feel in the least guilty about buying and reading this sequel either (as I would, if I bought the book of someone who I thought was deliberately espousing evil ideas) but I will be watching and hoping for Wrede to fail better this time.

I’ve got more to say about the impact of internet discussion on my own opinions for good and ill (more for good, but not entirely so) but I think that needs to be its own entry.

ETA: After responding to LA’s comment, I realized I should also note that Wrede’s got lots of wonderful books out. I’m especially partial to her Regency fantasy (the Kate and Cecy books beginning with Sorcery and Cecelia and the two Mairelon the Magician books), and there’s also the Enchanted Forest books, which deal with what happens when Princess Cimorene finds out that dragons are much more sensible than courtiers. So this is a position where I’d found a blind spot in an author whose books I already have a relationship with, and who I already know has a lot of good things to say. In that sense, I do have a stake in how the next book turns out, and that is very much coloring my response.