I mostly read (hard) sci-fi written by straight white dudes, so the tweet on the screenshot made me feel a bit defensive. In the replies and qrts people are patting themselves on the back for reading marginalized fantasy writers exclusively and this "consumption as activism" seems rad-libby to me, but maybe I'm wrong.
Just want to recommend Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin if you're looking for good stories not written by white dudes. I'm reading Parable of the Sower right now off and on and it's sometimes honestly fucking eerie how accurately Butler is describing our reality, like sometimes word-for-word.
I read the first few pages of one of N.K. Jemisin's books and thought it looked good but she's a fuckin' Warren lib.
Most of the "classic" books were written by white dudes throughout history because nobody else ever even had a chance to write. That being said, Sappho is a truly great poet and people should check out books like Romance of the Three Kingdoms (wikipedia has a free version with lots of pictures and Chinese), the Shahnameh, The Arabian Nights (super racist and sexist in its own way and its best translator (Burton) was a weird imperialist), and Aimé Césaire's A Tempest. Pushkin and Dumas are technically not white dudes. I've been getting into this Korean novel called From Wonso Pond, the author was supposedly a communist feminist and it's great.
Earthsea is supposedly good for fantasy but I haven't read it. Honestly am not aware of any fantasy novels not written by and for white dudes.
I am technically a white dude SF writer. Publishers these days seem interested in two kinds of fiction writers: debut writers who are not white dudes (and who seem to vanish after they publish their first novels), and then white dudes who write, like, spy fiction that basically pays the bills. Almost every literary agent is a liberal white woman. A handful are liberal white dudes. After querying hundreds of them I finally managed to get an agent. He happens to be a white dude, and he said he could only take me if I published a novel together with my spouse, who is not white. My spouse and I agreed to go for it: I would write a book, she would read and edit it and approve it, and then both our names would appear on the book, with hers first. (She is not a writer.) There was just one problem: no publishers were interested. We pumped out two books that way before we gave up. I have some SF novels out under my own name on amazon now. They're military SF, which is a super reactionary genre (reviewers complain about taking the lord's name in vain, I'm serious), so I had to be very sneaky about packing the books with communism. I'm working on a communist fantasy series now.
Butler yes, LeGuin no. And I say that as someone who counts Ursula LeGuin as my favorite writer. I don't think someone who reads mainly "hard" sci-fi would enjoy LeGuin, personally. Her writing can be pretty abstract, which I love, but might seem annoying to a hard sci-fi person. But definitely the Xenogenesis trilogy from Butler. Really good stuff.
i think the point of the whole exercise is to expand one's reading horizons. LeGuin might not fill her writing to the brim with mind-bending imaginary future tech (the only real exception i can think of is the ansible which ironically was used by name by Orson Scott Card), but her social science and anthropology are much harder than the majority of the SF canon.
Thoughts on Kate Wilhelm? I was a big reader of hers back in the day but don’t know if she would appeal to the hard sci-fi audience either.
I've never read anything of hers. Someone gave me a collection of her SF short stories called The Mile Long Spaceship around the same time I started reading Marxist theory, lol. My mom loves Wilhelm's mystery stuff, though, and I trust her taste in literature since my mom was the one who put me on to Vonnegut.
Bleak news as somebody writing with the intent of publishing.
This is just my take. It might be because I have zero talent lol
i think the broken earth series by jemison is must read for anyone into speculative fiction. it's fantastic. if youre a big le guin fan it'd hard not to read it as directly in dialogue with a lot of her work too, and if anything it feels like itd be slightly more in line with my politics & the politics of this site than big ursula, as much as i love her.
there's a lot of stuff about characters walking away from conflict and trying to establish their own societies (like in a lot of uklg) but it's pretty much always presented as a dead end and ends in a failure. it's very angry and very focused on a confrontation with power, where le guins politics rarely allowed for that. there's a very direct parallel to the ones who walk away from omelas too, and the upshot is that walking away is completely inadequate.
it's great, honest
been reading her latest novel this week (sort of gaimany scifi/fantasy set in modern day new york) and I've been pretty disappointed overall and especially with the political stuff, i didn't know anything about her personally but the lib tendencies are pretty obvious in a real world setting. bit of a shame. theres definitely a heart in the right place tho imo
Oh I tried to find parable of the sower on lib gen some time ago but didn't find it. The dispossessed is on my reading list
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Have you read NK's "The ones who stay and fight"? I think she might be more left inclined than the average warren lib.
Less compelling once I realized that "fight" in the author's mind meant "vote for big structural bailey"
She actually answered me once when I attacked Warren on twitter. I'll look into this. Like I said, I think she's a good writer, just maybe not the best person.
Goddamn though, Twitter is absolute brain poison. One of the things I always think about with Jemisin is how she got caught up in the "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" scandal. Write up about that here, if you're not familiar, though content warning for transphobia and suicidal thoughts. And, whatever, it was just one moment of thoughtlessness from Jemisin, what happened to Fall wasn't her fault, and she had a pretty minor role in the whole thing anyway. She took a lot of shit for it all. But it's just such a clear example of how fucked the performative outrage machine that is twitter really is. Here you've got an author, a noted progressive, has positive trans rep. in her novels, and she still stumbles ass-backward into this kind of fuck up because she had to go and have a hot take about some story she hadn't even read. Twitter, it's bad.
Ah, fuck that then. I wish the dumb libs could actually understand the difference between attacks from the left and attacks from the right.
Aside from Earthsea which I remember loving when I was young, The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke are both great fantasy novels. Both are set on near modern earth which isn't everyone's fantasy cup of tea of course.
EDIT: Oh also Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is also really good. I also like The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, which is about a man who lives the same life over again every time he dies, and who comes into a very complicated conflict with one of his reincarnating peers.
:yes-hahaha-yes-l: definitely my favorite dusty poetry
Marie of France is a good medieval author to add to the list.
Diana Wynne Jones is a good fantasy writer. I like Trudi Canavan as well. Lots of good female fantasy writers out there.
That said, I also feel like this line of discourse (the tweet) is a classic example of "idpol without material analysis". It's just virtue signaling, and it doesn't help anyone. I don't think most people know or care about the author, and when they do, it's usually only after they've read the book and realized it's really good or really bad.