I started rereading The Long way to A Small Angry Planet this week so I thought I’d add another character design to my ongoing project; Captain Ashby Santoso.
I’ve been telling some people lately that I’m no longer into popular sci-fi author Becky Chambers’ writing because I’m put off by the racism. When I googled around for some critique about this, I found that there wasn’t much, so I wanted to take the time to explain in some detail why I feel this way.
The Wayfarers series has an overall problem of “post-racial” sci-fi in which humanity has supposedly intermixed so much that everyone is everything and race doesn’t exist anymore. I am completely in favor of science fiction that depicts a future without racism, but this is a very short-sighted way to do so. A future without racism isn’t a future where all of humanity is homogenized; it’s a future where all types of humans and all of our cultures are equal, all respected, all thriving. (For an example of science fiction without racism that doesn’t homogenize humanity and culture, see the Twilight Mirage season of the podcast Friends at the Table.) This vision of how to overcome racism reminds me of color-blind racism, in which people claim to not be racist because they don’t see race. By this same logic, if everyone is mixed, then we’re all the same race and there’s no racism.
More specifically in the Wayfarers series, I’m troubled by the tradition of the Exodus fleet shown in Record of a Spaceborn Few in which families get their surnames from the surname of the first family to live in the family quarters they do, regardless of their relationship to that family. This cultural practice means that any family living in the quarters first inhabited by, say, the Achebe family, would have the surname Achebe, even if they have no connection to Igbo culture. There is no examination in the book of what this might mean or how it might be troubling. This feels like another form of color-blind racism: we’re all the same, so any family can have any surname and it doesn’t matter.
There’s another form of crypto-racism in the Wayfarers series and A Psalm for the Wild-Built that is based on a deeply settler-colonial perspective and an ignorance of indigenous ways of life. In the Wayfarers series, Earth has been set aside as a nature reserve without humans so it can recover from pollution and climate change. In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, half of the terraformed moon where people live in the future is also set aside as a human-free nature reserve. The clear message here is that Chambers believes that humans and Terran ecosystems are better off if we interact with them as little as possible. This belief is false, and it is based on a settler-colonial understanding of ecology. Indigenous peoples have positive, healing relationships with their traditional lands, which are deeply beneficial both to the people and to the ecosystems they tend. And if you can’t take indigenous people’s word for that, there are Western scientific studies which have shown that indigenous harvest practices have a positive impact on the plants they harvest. Becky Chambers’ ecological “utopia” in which humans and Terran ecosystems do not interact with each other is in fact a dystopia.
Usual disclaimer that if you enjoy Becky Chambers’ novels, you can continue to enjoy them; I am not coming for your faves. I just think it’s important to point this out.
This vision of how to overcome racism reminds me of color-blind racism, in which people claim to not be racist because they don’t see race. By this same logic, if everyone is mixed, then we’re all the same race and there’s no racism.
This also feels like it misunderstands how race-and-racism works. Our descendants might look thoroughly, indistinguishably mixed to us, but that doesn’t mean that our descendants won’t notice (or even create) differences among themselves.
This is a really good addition! Racism is constructed based on cultural context and might happen very differently in one time and place from another. So a group that appears “racially homogeneous” to you or me may not actually be so in their own context.
I liked some things about Record of a Spaceborn Few, but writing an entire novel that was deeply concerned about the disappearance of “Earth” culture via assimilation, without a single vague acknowledgment at any point that every single individual Earth culture had disappeared, was not one of them. It honestly soured me on the book as a whole, which was my first Chambers novel because diaspora themes, and I have not read any more of her work. I’ve read and watched plenty of sci-fi that assumes some sort of monolithic Earth culture in the future (The 100 has this too with its Earth exiles in space, for instance) but never one that so blatantly undermines its entire main theme like that.
I’ve been telling some people lately that I’m no longer into popular sci-fi author Becky Chambers’ writing because I’m put off by the racism. When I googled around for some critique about this, I found that there wasn’t much, so I wanted to take the time to explain in some detail why I feel this way.
The Wayfarers series has an overall problem of “post-racial” sci-fi in which humanity has supposedly intermixed so much that everyone is everything and race doesn’t exist anymore. I am completely in favor of science fiction that depicts a future without racism, but this is a very short-sighted way to do so. A future without racism isn’t a future where all of humanity is homogenized; it’s a future where all types of humans and all of our cultures are equal, all respected, all thriving. (For an example of science fiction without racism that doesn’t homogenize humanity and culture, see the Twilight Mirage season of the podcast Friends at the Table.) This vision of how to overcome racism reminds me of color-blind racism, in which people claim to not be racist because they don’t see race. By this same logic, if everyone is mixed, then we’re all the same race and there’s no racism.
More specifically in the Wayfarers series, I’m troubled by the tradition of the Exodus fleet shown in Record of a Spaceborn Few in which families get their surnames from the surname of the first family to live in the family quarters they do, regardless of their relationship to that family. This cultural practice means that any family living in the quarters first inhabited by, say, the Achebe family, would have the surname Achebe, even if they have no connection to Igbo culture. There is no examination in the book of what this might mean or how it might be troubling. This feels like another form of color-blind racism: we’re all the same, so any family can have any surname and it doesn’t matter.
There’s another form of crypto-racism in the Wayfarers series and A Psalm for the Wild-Built that is based on a deeply settler-colonial perspective and an ignorance of indigenous ways of life. In the Wayfarers series, Earth has been set aside as a nature reserve without humans so it can recover from pollution and climate change. In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, half of the terraformed moon where people live in the future is also set aside as a human-free nature reserve. The clear message here is that Chambers believes that humans and Terran ecosystems are better off if we interact with them as little as possible. This belief is false, and it is based on a settler-colonial understanding of ecology. Indigenous peoples have positive, healing relationships with their traditional lands, which are deeply beneficial both to the people and to the ecosystems they tend. And if you can’t take indigenous people’s word for that, there are Western scientific studies which have shown that indigenous harvest practices have a positive impact on the plants they harvest. Becky Chambers’ ecological “utopia” in which humans and Terran ecosystems do not interact with each other is in fact a dystopia.
Usual disclaimer that if you enjoy Becky Chambers’ novels, you can continue to enjoy them; I am not coming for your faves. I just think it’s important to point this out.
male ai: arcs about the realization of their humanity and independence, what it means to be alive, always the god, sometimes the son
female ai: love arcs despite their naivety regardless of their knowledge oft being infinitesimal, likened to children despite their love arcs, always the daughter, sometimes the mother
This sent me down a warm spiral of thinking about Breq/One Esk Nineteen.
I think there’s probably plenty interesting to say about One Esq as both a caring parent figure and a helpless child figure to Lieutenant Awn, and the asexual expression of their role as both a pining lover and an object of affection.
One of the things I loved so much about this series was the way Leckie made more generalized care the locus of its ideas about personhood, and so decentralized romantic love as the ultimate expression of humanity (especially in relation to a feminine AI!).
“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.”
cr:the long way to a small angry planet by becky chambers
it’s been a while since i had the attention span to read :D
i think i may be a sci-fi girly :o i had this weird perception of the sci-f genre where i thought everything would be dense and boring, but in reality this shits fire. i want to learn about every nitty gritty detail there is to know about this book and world.
Happy New Year, everyone! Now that the holidays are over, it’s a great time for a fresh start. That means that this blog is getting a fresh start, too.
Over the past two months or so, I’ve barely posted at all. This wasn’t due to a lack of motivation, but rather because I suddenly got so busy that I didn’t even really have time to read, let alone to write about the books I was reading.…
Apologies if you like Becky Chambers, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I very much do not. And it has only taken about 50 pages of A Psalm for the Wild-Built, which has got to be the most boring, superficial scifi I’ve ever read.
