At present there is a brouhaha about K Tempest Bradford. Who is a particular special snowflake, suggesting we only read trans fiction, or female fiction, or whatever. As if I care. You see, at present I’m re reading stuff: the first Honor Harrington on the nice Kobo, because Dave Weber is sort of nice, and since the Amazonz iz evil I’m reading the Domination. Which is interesting, because S.M. Stirling set out to write the most horrible society he could, and populated it with attractive bisexual bad guys, half of which are female.
Then he makes you like them. He can write. The mother in the quote I have screenshot pandered an enslaved nun to a guest in the previous chapter.
And the reason I re read him to to remind myself that those who we dislike, whom we consider evil (and the world S.M. Stirling made is a dystopia: evil it is) still have a dignity and nobility: still fall in love, still raise families, still care for their tribe and worship their God. They may be in error, their system may be evil, but they are not without virtue. And you take virtue and wisdom from wherever you can get it.
But this does not suffice for the special snowflakes. Bradford is aiming to not read me or mine: because I am male, happy to be so, straight, and about as white as she is, when she does not photoshop her photos. As a commentator pointed out — she is the original special snowflake.
And she is being called out on this.
The mainstream market wants to enjoy itself. It doesn’t like to be yelled at. It gets annoyed when you call it racist. Since most books don’t even have back cover photos anymore, the mainstream market probably doesn’t know what color the author is. The mainstream market has zero clue what culture the author grew up in, and if that information is available at all, the mainstream market probably doesn’t give a shit.
The mainstream market buys books based on the following criteria:
This cover looks cool. I will pick it up/click on it.
The back cover blurb/description interests me.
It has good reviews/word of mouth.
I will purchase it with my money.
If I liked it, I may purchase other books from this author.
Govinnage is a writer of color herself,
Writer of Color is a stupid term. I hate the term People of Color. It is just Colored People backwards.
yet she still learned a few things from the experience, including “just how white [her] reading world was.” Even when you’re coming from the viewpoint of a marginalized identity, the privileged view is everywhere and pervasive. It’s easy to buy into it without really knowing that you are.
Privilege huh? From what I’ve heard about Tempest, she grew up in a rich family. Luckily one of my readers copy and pasted some stuff from her bio into the comments. She attended NYU—which I believe is the most expensive undergraduate program in America—to study opera. She then dropped out to attend the “Gallatin School for Individualized Study” where “There we had no “majors”, only “concentrations”. My concentrations were in performance, writing, the history of mythology, interstitial art (though we didn’t call it that, then), and the collective unconscious”
But wait, there’s more about what it means to live such a life of marginalized hardship: “After leaving college and realizing that the life of a corporate drone is horrendous, I decided to throw it all away so I could attend Clarion West in 2003. I left my job, left New York, and left any notion that I’d be leading a normal life in the dust. After Clarion West I wandered around the country for a few years visiting friends, writing, and discovering that all one needs to survive in life is confidence, charm, and many well-off friends. In 2006 I returned to New York City and took up freelancing to support myself.”
I know when I think of marginalized lives, I think of mooching off your rich friends while playing tourist.
I only say that because I grew up with all that fancy Portuguese Dairy Farmer Privilege, where I got to have an alcoholic mother and a functionally illiterate father (who is way darker skinned than Tempest), where I got to spend my formative years knee deep in cow shit at 3:00 AM, so that I could later work my way through Utah State (only after getting a scholarship for my freshmen year because I knew a whole lot about cows), to then spend my adult life working corporate drone jobs of increasing difficulty and skill requirements, all while writing on the side while I supported my family, until I could make it as a professional author.
Lecture us more about privilege, Tempest. It’s fascinating.While I busted my butt to earn a hard science degree at an extremely competitive Virginia university (and getting near perfect marks, I might add), Bradford studied basically whatever she damn well pleased like your typical privileged dilettante, bouncing from – get this – “performance” to writing to the history of mythology to “interstitial art” to the collective unconscious. Right around the time my rheumatoid arthritis was ramping up in severity and I was taking a series of crappy part time jobs toearn my keep, Bradford was flitting about the country living parasitically off her affluent friends. Honestly, when I read her proud admission that she got by on “confidence and charm,” I immediately think “sociopath” — but I’m not a professional therapist, so I don’t really have the credentials to draw any firm conclusions.
At any rate, the miseducated Bradford has put out a clarion call for science fiction and fantasy fans to toss out books written by white, straight, cis male authors and stick to books written by gays, womyn, and “writers of color.” My first response, of course, was to say a bad word — but then I realized it would actually be fun to play by this creature’s rules. After all, as I demonstrated above, I know plenty of authors who would qualify for the challenge — but would also make Bradford’s empty little head explode in a fireball of rage. Pull up a chair and pass the marshmallows.
Tempest misses the point. It is not about being a snowflake. It is about plot. It is about catharsis.
And yes, I watch that show. Yes, I read fiction. Widely: more widely than my theology (and I read Catholic theologians more than the modern evanjellyfish because the old guys knew what they were talking about and the current “fashionable” writers are a pale shadow of what went before. And the fate of the SJW, these snowflakes, was neatly described by one of the most unfashionable antipodean poets, hated for committing two crimes: being popular and appearing on television.
Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler’s War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee’s Promenades and Pierrots–
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
“My boobs will give everyone hours of fun”
