![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyThe miscmeasure of a man, and the rest of us, too: science, colonialism, genocide, and science fiction
A number of recent works have examined the relationships between science, colonialism, historiography, and science fiction, from Rosemary Kirstein's stealth SF Steerswoman series to Octavian Nothing to SF tv such as Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. How are SF and related genres envisioning and revising the ethical and social dimensions of science? What role does the idea of Science play in maintaining or subverting power inequities of empire, nation, race, and gender?
With Micole Iris Sudberg, K. Joyce Tsai, Rachel Virginia Swirsky, John H. Kim, Evelyn Browne
RVS: (Banter about moderation and throwing things.) Everyone here is on the anti-genocide side, I hope. I'll throw the floor open to questions.
A: In Stargate: Atlantis, there was this kerfuffle about the genocide of the Ray(?) -- there were these ethical science problems.
R: There was a Harry Potter online RPG... does anyone remember what happened?
A: Taking off of Kristallnacht.
MIS: They called it Kristallnacht and they were using the holocaust as a metaphor to discuss -- something? The treatment of muggles, or house elves?
A: Voldemort killed off the muggles.
MIS: They wrote the Jews out of the picture. Many of us found that problematic.
A: The relationship between colonialism and neo-colonialism that goes on today.
RVS: I'll recommend with all fervor Micole's blog -- can I do that? She's the go-to person for anything exploding on the internet, her and Liz Henry. (I am not linking myself, out of respect for privacy issues.)
MIS: I think I proposed this panel... I don't think I've read the entire book, Mismeasure of a Man. This is not a defining statement for the panel. My intent was, the ways in which scientific objectivity is distorted by politics and power relations. One question is, is anyone going to come out against the scientific method? Is this bad? I think that's an interesting connection underlying these issues that I wanted to talk about. But I'm not sure where that connection exactly exists. Science as it exists has been used to maintain and express power relationships. Even in stories that are deliberately invoking it, or that are unintentionally invoking it b/c of SF's history as colonialist narrative.
RVS: The modernist idea that science is good might be problematic.
A: The concept of the elitist intellectual heritage portrayed in SF, where you want the brainiest people to reproduce with each other. In The Marching Morons, he said the world was going to become full of dumb people b/c they reproduced more. The Mensa sperm bank. We seem to have that as a thing that goes on again and again. The idea of an elite intellectual culture that can be transmitted genetically.
A: The irony of this panel vs. the panel next door (The War on Science.) Having lived through the sixties... people insisting that it's oppressive and masculinist to insist that 2+2 must always equal four.
RVS: I think we're all coming to this panel with an interest in social justice. The veneer of science has always been used to promote racist and sexist ideas. Ursula K LeGuin admits that Left Hand of Darkness was messy and uncertain, an experiment, a repetition of it would cause different results. You don't always find this humility in SF. I remember reading Justine Larbalestier's Battle of the Sexes -- in magazines, promotional copy, they said, everything published in this magazine will come true! I'm going to throw things open to the panel. I don't like it when panels become just book recommendation sessions. If you could hold your recommendations till the end, please? Then people can write them down furiously. Let's introduce ourselves and start answering this question: a work of science fiction that either subverts or maintains power inequities.
KJT: I reread the Steerswoman series. It does a good job of subverting the notion of gender in science, but not necessarily with race and colonialism. I come from books like Octavian Nothing, Andrea Smith's Conquest, about big agriculture and the medical industry, what those do to the poor and women of color. Killing the Black Body, about reproductive justice.
MIS: I blog about feminism and race and science fiction. I wanted to bring together a bunch of assumptions about what science fiction is doing as a literature and a narrative. I see a lot of classics of science fiction that I love, as profoundly implicated in imperialism/colonialism. The Marching Morons and eugenics in science education, that's deeply racist and you can still see that expressed in policies towards family planning and different family institutions in the global South vs. the US, and the racist horror stories of brown people outbreeding white people. There's a political racial component to this. One book that's interesting here is CJ Cherryh's Cyteen, which is about the difficulty of parsing what is genetic, what is environmental. It's a fascinating examination of nature vs. nurture and the way the subjectivities of the observer/experimenter affect the experiment. It is disappointing and noninquisitive about the racial aspect of that. She writes about alienness but her humans are so white. We don't even see it.
JHK: I'm interested in the role of science, as a former physicist. I'm interested in the role of social components of how everything works within science, even a supposedly objective science like physics.
EB: I'm trained as a linguist, here as a reader. I was interested in the Steerswoman books, mainly. The idea of this elite culture of intellect -- that question gets at a lot of things about Steerswoman. If there were ever a series I didn't want to spoil, it's these, so I'm going to be elliptical. One of the driving antagonisms of this book is between science as an intellectual culture that's passed down as the practice of a people, and science as a practice and set of morally neutral techniques. The wizards who consider science to be the defining characteristic of her culture are on the side of the oppressors. The ones who consider science as a set of techniques are on the side of justice. Rowan does not think of herself as a scientist, but as a navigator, but she works out the idea of orbit as a way of dissociating herself from.. having just asked her buddies to torture someone for information.
KJT: The torture scene is awful. She looks at her knowledge of humanity to extract the max amount of pain. The steerswomen are posited against the women. They're invested in the scientific method but it's this open-source white-geek culture where things are positioned as open and accessible... but that's true only in a completely equal culture, which is not what we have. She tries to apply this to the Outskirters. How do you apply this to the idea that there are some things you shouldn't have access to, some things that aren't yours to take?
RVS: Let's get our definitions on the table. Tell me about your feelings about social justice and the scientific method.
EB: I'm in favor of the scientific method. It can be extracted from social power structures to the extent that anything can... which is not a very great extent.
RVS: Let me springboard off what I know is your answer...
JHK: Science can't be extricated from social structures. It's a social process. This is often misrepresented. There's often a few of individual scientists as being "just smart." Nobel Laureate sperm bank, for example. It's all written in retrospective: they discovered these things, that was their genius, this is what they got wrong. That misrepresents the scientific process as something which many people contribute to. I recommend Pythagoras's Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars. Margaret Wertheim.
MIS: My background in history of science is reading feminist critiques. Evelyn Fox Keller, the work on the social culture of high energy physics. The ways that particular theories are accepted or rejected based on social interactions. There's two different takes on science as social process: the one that sees it as innately self-correcting, and the one that says what you use to correct bad science is good science. There isn't really pure science that gets misrepresented. Eugenics is factually as well as ethically wrong, but you can't extract some concept of pure science from how people misrepresent it. Evelyn Fox Keller talks about how social practice of science, embody ideas about what's evidence, what's knowledge, what you look at, what you except. The "war of the left on science," as opposed to the war of the right, is science as this magic powder that makes everything better. Things are cooler and more exciting because you're in your space ship wearing your space pants.
KJT: Science is a western construct coming out of a very specific time period, woven in with colonialism, and imperialism. You can't separate the scientific method from those. You can't separate it from being human. We all bring our own baggage in.
RVS: You said that scientists need to argue with the social implications of science. Can you talk about that?
JHK: There is often this idea that scientists' job is to discover what the truth is, and someone else's job to disseminate that truth. They get frustrated when the authority of science is challenged. They should consider themselves to have a responsibility. They have to take part in science education. It can be controversial.
RVS: Hard science fiction uses jargon to give itself a sense of authority. Can you speak to that?
JHK: Recently, Blindsight. I was frustrated by the interweaving of a flawed philosophy of Searle's Chinese Room, neurological science and a lot of jargon about space travel and so on.
RVS: I think Robert J Sawyer is guilty of that, where you use a science argument to prop up your bad argument. You're throwing out a lot of terminology that a lot of readers won't get to lend it an aura of authenticity.
RVS: How much do readers by into that?
KJT: I do think that readers reject that. I'm questioning, is all knowledge really open, and what do you get to know? These books look at the practice of science maybe without questioning that some people may not have the right to know, especially in social science and the subject/object position. They may not push it as far as I want, even if they question it.
RVS: American SF has a tendency to place itself in a subject position.
KJT: What you're talking about with Cherryh and Cyteen, this question of studying the Other and going native to learn their ways. A strong anthropological tradition in Sf that doesn't necessarily question this.
RVS: Anthropology began as a colonialist endeavor. To find out how we can oppress colonized people better. Its origins are really problematic. Also, Earthy Woman vs. Male Scientist.
KJT: We draw blank spaces on the map when WE don't know what's there, but they're not blank. They're not there to be filled in. People DO live there already.
RVS: The recent kablooie --
KJT: It's positioning America as a blank space ready to be colonized.
MIS: Galiano has a story about this one Spanish conquistador who was said to be the first person to stand where he could see the Atlantic and Pacific at the same time, but no, there were surely native inhabitants there first.
MIS: Patricia Wrede's 13th Child -- you can't erase the American Indian civilizations from America and expect things to turn out the same way. I think readers DO buy into this. We recognize this 50s science fiction, in the future there will be magic food to make us smart, as silly -- but we have our own narratives. One of the things about Sarah Connor is how it challenges and reinforces science fiction as individual achievement. It's very explicitly talked about AI intelligence as a historical inevitability. It's being developed in multiple places and it's just a matter of when and how. You can stop one person from inventing AI, but other people are doing that work elsewhere. Same thing with the A-bomb, which is connected to colonialism and race. There was discussion of using it on Germany, but it wasn't used on a white nation, it was used on a nonwhite nation. Some of this is so obvious but nobody says it.
EB: I think that readers tend to buy into the colonialist viewpoint, subject position. It's an easy thing to fall into. To what extent does the shiny science further that? That's something that's easy to fall into, I think, even if you resist the shinyness of the science. There might be two paths there.Those cultural narratives go a lot better than Western modernist science is good. The science-is-good narrative spread as widely as it did because it buys into existing cultural narratives.
JHK: You can't conflate that with all of rationality. You don't have to reject the idea that there's an objective reality that we're studying. We don't have a good picture of what science would be like in another culture.
KJT: I think a lot of SF is written from a subject position, but there are ways to read around that. When they're talking about those objects that they're studying -- they're writing about me. I'm not going to put myself in the position of the white male explorer, I'm putting myself in the position of the Outsiders.
RVS: Is that easier for readers to do, than to create text that will be read that way? It's difficult to create fiction from an American perspective and flip the narrative, force them to identify with somebody else.
MIS: I want to problematize some of the things we've been saying on the panel. I don't have the expertise to address this, but I'm concerned by talking exclusively about the western tradition of science. That's an imperial narrative. It ignores the fact that different scientists in other parts of the world were way more advanced! Mathematical work done in India and Arab countries, astronomy in south America, medical knowledge of the Islamic world in the middle ages. Christian medicine sucked in the middle ages. Science from another perspective is not an alternate history -- it's OUR history. Just because we're not aware of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
KJT: I have a problem with the term, "the scientific revolution." As if it's the only one, the only one that counts. It's coupled with imperialism. If not for that, it wouldn't BE the scientific revolution.
MIS: There's a late development in the Steerswoman books. It's too spoilery to talk about. Cherryh's Atevi books were mind-splitting -- they crash-land into a sentient race on the verge of an industrial revolution. Very weird colonialist vibes, and then there's discussion where the Atevi are distressed by faster-than-light travel. It violates their religious principles. She's established that the Atevi have a finer sense of topology and mathematics than humans do. They're not superstitious, they have a gut understanding of the theory of relativity. They're RIGHT. They're ACCURATE. That turns around the entire assumption of who has a superior understanding of science -- technology equalling an understanding of science.
KJT: You can't compare the Christian right war on science to this. It depends on who's the colonizer, who's the colonized.
RVS: I edit a magazine, and we attempt to publish anti-racist works, and reading audience reactions, the people who react tend to be white male libertarians. They feel like they have permission to speak authoritatively. They keep saying, I don't get this, it's about nothing. Clearly it IS about something. When they hit a narrative that counters their narrative they just ignore it. I'm trying to figure out how you get people to look at things they don't want to look at. It should work to set them up with a narrative they're comfortable with and then subvert it, but then... they keep going, huh? Can you help me out, how can science fiction do better?
KJT: Read Octavian Nothing. In which the narrative flips, and you're like what, I don't get it! Rewriting these tropes from a different point of view. Having those stories out there.
JHK: You have to reduce the scope a lot. Rather than having jargon, educate. Be less far-reaching and just have a core point which you explain from a number of points of view. Simplify the science and the social aspects.
MIS: A lot of these texts are not hard science fiction, they're weird alternates or historical fiction. Steerswoman is one of the few that talks about the scientific method. Octavian Nothing, too.
EB: I read this book on your recommendation... I spent the first chapter trying to figure out if I was reading a science fiction book.
KJT: It's not science fiction. It's our history.
MIS: That reminds me very much of Cherryh's Cuckoo's Egg, which is about a child raised by aliens. This says a lot about science fiction.
A: You have to decide whether you're going to vitiate your fiction by putting in an explanation for the stupid. That makes the fiction less good than it could be. Some guys are just not going to get it.
RVS: But then they get really mad if you DO explain it.
JHK: I think a lot of good fiction uses science... not to explain it to the reader.
EB: A good science fiction story can use science without teaching it.
Timmi Duchamp: I'd like to talk about Vandana Singh. Long Distances is about a mathematician. Male reviewers don't like it, it doesn't fit their notion of a mathematician. She's developing mathematical models in a completely foreign culture. She has stories about Indian physicists. In one, he's very old and doesn't fit with the image that science fiction likes to give us. It's not read as hard SF but I think it is.
RVS: The way you write science fiction that disclaims the problematics of science is... it becomes something else?
KJT: (a writer I didn't catch) is very good at looking at gender ans sex, but... she doesn't note that she's doing this anthropological thing with the Japanese scientists. There's this racial issue that I'm not sure if she sees.
MIS: There's this Octavia Butler book where they can't put a black woman on the cover, so they made her green? SF readers can't identify with a black woman, but they can identify with a green woman?
KJT: SF is so metaphorized that... you have to bring it back out of metaphor. You can have green people, but no brown people.
MIS: It's hard to take the recognition of your subjectivity all the way down. It just keeps expanding, you have to look more deeply.
RVS: Octavia Butler uses the aliens to metaphorize the white people -- Amnesty, Blood Child.
Aud: How is the free market taking the same role, with What The Market Wants as a rationale?
RVS: Whether our current colonial adventures have put the more direct metaphors into fashion.
MIS: I forgot we hadn't address your comments. But Neo-Colonialism, not so Neo. It's not just history, but the present implication.
KJT: The free hand of economics will supposedly level the playing field -- it's the same myths as the myth of scientific objectivity. Giant multinational corporations use these organizations to change postcolonial countries.
JHK: Economics pretends to be a science, but economic understanding feeds back into how economics behaves. It's not a scientific process but we're treating it like it is. That causes massive problems.
(Panel is almost done, missing some bits because of severe ouchies.)
Deepa D. asks for books - fantasy rather than SF - that approach herbalism, shamanic medicine, etc. seriously? In a non-head-exploding way?
Amblingalongtheaqueduct.blogspot.com for book recommendations -- I am not writing this down but will link later.
A number of recent works have examined the relationships between science, colonialism, historiography, and science fiction, from Rosemary Kirstein's stealth SF Steerswoman series to Octavian Nothing to SF tv such as Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. How are SF and related genres envisioning and revising the ethical and social dimensions of science? What role does the idea of Science play in maintaining or subverting power inequities of empire, nation, race, and gender?
With Micole Iris Sudberg, K. Joyce Tsai, Rachel Virginia Swirsky, John H. Kim, Evelyn Browne
RVS: (Banter about moderation and throwing things.) Everyone here is on the anti-genocide side, I hope. I'll throw the floor open to questions.
A: In Stargate: Atlantis, there was this kerfuffle about the genocide of the Ray(?) -- there were these ethical science problems.
R: There was a Harry Potter online RPG... does anyone remember what happened?
A: Taking off of Kristallnacht.
MIS: They called it Kristallnacht and they were using the holocaust as a metaphor to discuss -- something? The treatment of muggles, or house elves?
A: Voldemort killed off the muggles.
MIS: They wrote the Jews out of the picture. Many of us found that problematic.
A: The relationship between colonialism and neo-colonialism that goes on today.
RVS: I'll recommend with all fervor Micole's blog -- can I do that? She's the go-to person for anything exploding on the internet, her and Liz Henry. (I am not linking myself, out of respect for privacy issues.)
MIS: I think I proposed this panel... I don't think I've read the entire book, Mismeasure of a Man. This is not a defining statement for the panel. My intent was, the ways in which scientific objectivity is distorted by politics and power relations. One question is, is anyone going to come out against the scientific method? Is this bad? I think that's an interesting connection underlying these issues that I wanted to talk about. But I'm not sure where that connection exactly exists. Science as it exists has been used to maintain and express power relationships. Even in stories that are deliberately invoking it, or that are unintentionally invoking it b/c of SF's history as colonialist narrative.
RVS: The modernist idea that science is good might be problematic.
A: The concept of the elitist intellectual heritage portrayed in SF, where you want the brainiest people to reproduce with each other. In The Marching Morons, he said the world was going to become full of dumb people b/c they reproduced more. The Mensa sperm bank. We seem to have that as a thing that goes on again and again. The idea of an elite intellectual culture that can be transmitted genetically.
A: The irony of this panel vs. the panel next door (The War on Science.) Having lived through the sixties... people insisting that it's oppressive and masculinist to insist that 2+2 must always equal four.
RVS: I think we're all coming to this panel with an interest in social justice. The veneer of science has always been used to promote racist and sexist ideas. Ursula K LeGuin admits that Left Hand of Darkness was messy and uncertain, an experiment, a repetition of it would cause different results. You don't always find this humility in SF. I remember reading Justine Larbalestier's Battle of the Sexes -- in magazines, promotional copy, they said, everything published in this magazine will come true! I'm going to throw things open to the panel. I don't like it when panels become just book recommendation sessions. If you could hold your recommendations till the end, please? Then people can write them down furiously. Let's introduce ourselves and start answering this question: a work of science fiction that either subverts or maintains power inequities.
KJT: I reread the Steerswoman series. It does a good job of subverting the notion of gender in science, but not necessarily with race and colonialism. I come from books like Octavian Nothing, Andrea Smith's Conquest, about big agriculture and the medical industry, what those do to the poor and women of color. Killing the Black Body, about reproductive justice.
MIS: I blog about feminism and race and science fiction. I wanted to bring together a bunch of assumptions about what science fiction is doing as a literature and a narrative. I see a lot of classics of science fiction that I love, as profoundly implicated in imperialism/colonialism. The Marching Morons and eugenics in science education, that's deeply racist and you can still see that expressed in policies towards family planning and different family institutions in the global South vs. the US, and the racist horror stories of brown people outbreeding white people. There's a political racial component to this. One book that's interesting here is CJ Cherryh's Cyteen, which is about the difficulty of parsing what is genetic, what is environmental. It's a fascinating examination of nature vs. nurture and the way the subjectivities of the observer/experimenter affect the experiment. It is disappointing and noninquisitive about the racial aspect of that. She writes about alienness but her humans are so white. We don't even see it.
JHK: I'm interested in the role of science, as a former physicist. I'm interested in the role of social components of how everything works within science, even a supposedly objective science like physics.
EB: I'm trained as a linguist, here as a reader. I was interested in the Steerswoman books, mainly. The idea of this elite culture of intellect -- that question gets at a lot of things about Steerswoman. If there were ever a series I didn't want to spoil, it's these, so I'm going to be elliptical. One of the driving antagonisms of this book is between science as an intellectual culture that's passed down as the practice of a people, and science as a practice and set of morally neutral techniques. The wizards who consider science to be the defining characteristic of her culture are on the side of the oppressors. The ones who consider science as a set of techniques are on the side of justice. Rowan does not think of herself as a scientist, but as a navigator, but she works out the idea of orbit as a way of dissociating herself from.. having just asked her buddies to torture someone for information.
KJT: The torture scene is awful. She looks at her knowledge of humanity to extract the max amount of pain. The steerswomen are posited against the women. They're invested in the scientific method but it's this open-source white-geek culture where things are positioned as open and accessible... but that's true only in a completely equal culture, which is not what we have. She tries to apply this to the Outskirters. How do you apply this to the idea that there are some things you shouldn't have access to, some things that aren't yours to take?
RVS: Let's get our definitions on the table. Tell me about your feelings about social justice and the scientific method.
EB: I'm in favor of the scientific method. It can be extracted from social power structures to the extent that anything can... which is not a very great extent.
RVS: Let me springboard off what I know is your answer...
JHK: Science can't be extricated from social structures. It's a social process. This is often misrepresented. There's often a few of individual scientists as being "just smart." Nobel Laureate sperm bank, for example. It's all written in retrospective: they discovered these things, that was their genius, this is what they got wrong. That misrepresents the scientific process as something which many people contribute to. I recommend Pythagoras's Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars. Margaret Wertheim.
MIS: My background in history of science is reading feminist critiques. Evelyn Fox Keller, the work on the social culture of high energy physics. The ways that particular theories are accepted or rejected based on social interactions. There's two different takes on science as social process: the one that sees it as innately self-correcting, and the one that says what you use to correct bad science is good science. There isn't really pure science that gets misrepresented. Eugenics is factually as well as ethically wrong, but you can't extract some concept of pure science from how people misrepresent it. Evelyn Fox Keller talks about how social practice of science, embody ideas about what's evidence, what's knowledge, what you look at, what you except. The "war of the left on science," as opposed to the war of the right, is science as this magic powder that makes everything better. Things are cooler and more exciting because you're in your space ship wearing your space pants.
KJT: Science is a western construct coming out of a very specific time period, woven in with colonialism, and imperialism. You can't separate the scientific method from those. You can't separate it from being human. We all bring our own baggage in.
RVS: You said that scientists need to argue with the social implications of science. Can you talk about that?
JHK: There is often this idea that scientists' job is to discover what the truth is, and someone else's job to disseminate that truth. They get frustrated when the authority of science is challenged. They should consider themselves to have a responsibility. They have to take part in science education. It can be controversial.
RVS: Hard science fiction uses jargon to give itself a sense of authority. Can you speak to that?
JHK: Recently, Blindsight. I was frustrated by the interweaving of a flawed philosophy of Searle's Chinese Room, neurological science and a lot of jargon about space travel and so on.
RVS: I think Robert J Sawyer is guilty of that, where you use a science argument to prop up your bad argument. You're throwing out a lot of terminology that a lot of readers won't get to lend it an aura of authenticity.
RVS: How much do readers by into that?
KJT: I do think that readers reject that. I'm questioning, is all knowledge really open, and what do you get to know? These books look at the practice of science maybe without questioning that some people may not have the right to know, especially in social science and the subject/object position. They may not push it as far as I want, even if they question it.
RVS: American SF has a tendency to place itself in a subject position.
KJT: What you're talking about with Cherryh and Cyteen, this question of studying the Other and going native to learn their ways. A strong anthropological tradition in Sf that doesn't necessarily question this.
RVS: Anthropology began as a colonialist endeavor. To find out how we can oppress colonized people better. Its origins are really problematic. Also, Earthy Woman vs. Male Scientist.
KJT: We draw blank spaces on the map when WE don't know what's there, but they're not blank. They're not there to be filled in. People DO live there already.
RVS: The recent kablooie --
KJT: It's positioning America as a blank space ready to be colonized.
MIS: Galiano has a story about this one Spanish conquistador who was said to be the first person to stand where he could see the Atlantic and Pacific at the same time, but no, there were surely native inhabitants there first.
MIS: Patricia Wrede's 13th Child -- you can't erase the American Indian civilizations from America and expect things to turn out the same way. I think readers DO buy into this. We recognize this 50s science fiction, in the future there will be magic food to make us smart, as silly -- but we have our own narratives. One of the things about Sarah Connor is how it challenges and reinforces science fiction as individual achievement. It's very explicitly talked about AI intelligence as a historical inevitability. It's being developed in multiple places and it's just a matter of when and how. You can stop one person from inventing AI, but other people are doing that work elsewhere. Same thing with the A-bomb, which is connected to colonialism and race. There was discussion of using it on Germany, but it wasn't used on a white nation, it was used on a nonwhite nation. Some of this is so obvious but nobody says it.
EB: I think that readers tend to buy into the colonialist viewpoint, subject position. It's an easy thing to fall into. To what extent does the shiny science further that? That's something that's easy to fall into, I think, even if you resist the shinyness of the science. There might be two paths there.Those cultural narratives go a lot better than Western modernist science is good. The science-is-good narrative spread as widely as it did because it buys into existing cultural narratives.
JHK: You can't conflate that with all of rationality. You don't have to reject the idea that there's an objective reality that we're studying. We don't have a good picture of what science would be like in another culture.
KJT: I think a lot of SF is written from a subject position, but there are ways to read around that. When they're talking about those objects that they're studying -- they're writing about me. I'm not going to put myself in the position of the white male explorer, I'm putting myself in the position of the Outsiders.
RVS: Is that easier for readers to do, than to create text that will be read that way? It's difficult to create fiction from an American perspective and flip the narrative, force them to identify with somebody else.
MIS: I want to problematize some of the things we've been saying on the panel. I don't have the expertise to address this, but I'm concerned by talking exclusively about the western tradition of science. That's an imperial narrative. It ignores the fact that different scientists in other parts of the world were way more advanced! Mathematical work done in India and Arab countries, astronomy in south America, medical knowledge of the Islamic world in the middle ages. Christian medicine sucked in the middle ages. Science from another perspective is not an alternate history -- it's OUR history. Just because we're not aware of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
KJT: I have a problem with the term, "the scientific revolution." As if it's the only one, the only one that counts. It's coupled with imperialism. If not for that, it wouldn't BE the scientific revolution.
MIS: There's a late development in the Steerswoman books. It's too spoilery to talk about. Cherryh's Atevi books were mind-splitting -- they crash-land into a sentient race on the verge of an industrial revolution. Very weird colonialist vibes, and then there's discussion where the Atevi are distressed by faster-than-light travel. It violates their religious principles. She's established that the Atevi have a finer sense of topology and mathematics than humans do. They're not superstitious, they have a gut understanding of the theory of relativity. They're RIGHT. They're ACCURATE. That turns around the entire assumption of who has a superior understanding of science -- technology equalling an understanding of science.
KJT: You can't compare the Christian right war on science to this. It depends on who's the colonizer, who's the colonized.
RVS: I edit a magazine, and we attempt to publish anti-racist works, and reading audience reactions, the people who react tend to be white male libertarians. They feel like they have permission to speak authoritatively. They keep saying, I don't get this, it's about nothing. Clearly it IS about something. When they hit a narrative that counters their narrative they just ignore it. I'm trying to figure out how you get people to look at things they don't want to look at. It should work to set them up with a narrative they're comfortable with and then subvert it, but then... they keep going, huh? Can you help me out, how can science fiction do better?
KJT: Read Octavian Nothing. In which the narrative flips, and you're like what, I don't get it! Rewriting these tropes from a different point of view. Having those stories out there.
JHK: You have to reduce the scope a lot. Rather than having jargon, educate. Be less far-reaching and just have a core point which you explain from a number of points of view. Simplify the science and the social aspects.
MIS: A lot of these texts are not hard science fiction, they're weird alternates or historical fiction. Steerswoman is one of the few that talks about the scientific method. Octavian Nothing, too.
EB: I read this book on your recommendation... I spent the first chapter trying to figure out if I was reading a science fiction book.
KJT: It's not science fiction. It's our history.
MIS: That reminds me very much of Cherryh's Cuckoo's Egg, which is about a child raised by aliens. This says a lot about science fiction.
A: You have to decide whether you're going to vitiate your fiction by putting in an explanation for the stupid. That makes the fiction less good than it could be. Some guys are just not going to get it.
RVS: But then they get really mad if you DO explain it.
JHK: I think a lot of good fiction uses science... not to explain it to the reader.
EB: A good science fiction story can use science without teaching it.
Timmi Duchamp: I'd like to talk about Vandana Singh. Long Distances is about a mathematician. Male reviewers don't like it, it doesn't fit their notion of a mathematician. She's developing mathematical models in a completely foreign culture. She has stories about Indian physicists. In one, he's very old and doesn't fit with the image that science fiction likes to give us. It's not read as hard SF but I think it is.
RVS: The way you write science fiction that disclaims the problematics of science is... it becomes something else?
KJT: (a writer I didn't catch) is very good at looking at gender ans sex, but... she doesn't note that she's doing this anthropological thing with the Japanese scientists. There's this racial issue that I'm not sure if she sees.
MIS: There's this Octavia Butler book where they can't put a black woman on the cover, so they made her green? SF readers can't identify with a black woman, but they can identify with a green woman?
KJT: SF is so metaphorized that... you have to bring it back out of metaphor. You can have green people, but no brown people.
MIS: It's hard to take the recognition of your subjectivity all the way down. It just keeps expanding, you have to look more deeply.
RVS: Octavia Butler uses the aliens to metaphorize the white people -- Amnesty, Blood Child.
Aud: How is the free market taking the same role, with What The Market Wants as a rationale?
RVS: Whether our current colonial adventures have put the more direct metaphors into fashion.
MIS: I forgot we hadn't address your comments. But Neo-Colonialism, not so Neo. It's not just history, but the present implication.
KJT: The free hand of economics will supposedly level the playing field -- it's the same myths as the myth of scientific objectivity. Giant multinational corporations use these organizations to change postcolonial countries.
JHK: Economics pretends to be a science, but economic understanding feeds back into how economics behaves. It's not a scientific process but we're treating it like it is. That causes massive problems.
(Panel is almost done, missing some bits because of severe ouchies.)
Deepa D. asks for books - fantasy rather than SF - that approach herbalism, shamanic medicine, etc. seriously? In a non-head-exploding way?
Amblingalongtheaqueduct.blogspot.com for book recommendations -- I am not writing this down but will link later.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
26/5/09 21:02 (UTC)(no subject)
27/5/09 16:45 (UTC)