Update: I have ordered a cheapo copy of Damia and when it arrives PREPARE TO BE SUBJECTED TO ITS HORRORShttps://twitter.com/fozmeadows/status/1356888740715581443 …
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The book wasn't "about" how other races and cultures were ignorant or bad, and so I missed it completely, even though, as an adult, I can see now that it's a constant narrative undertone. But if the book had made similar declarative asides about Australians? I'd have seen it.
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What I remembered about Pegasus, though, was the age-gap proto- "romance" - something I'd been fine with as a kid, but which rang alarm bells in my adult memory. So when I went back to check the details, I was genuinely floored by just how much racism was in the book.
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The point being: it's no shame to have read something uncritically at an earlier time in your life, or to have had those details fail from memory. But this becomes problematic when, so often, SFF lists recommended for newcomers include old books on the BASIS of those memories -
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- instead of any recent re-reading to see if they hold up. People ask for recommendations on what to give teen readers now to usher them into adult SFF, and people list out books written 20+ years ago which, in all probability, they themselves haven't read in over a decade.
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And it's not that these books are necessarily bad, or even all bad! Even skimming through Pegasus, I could tell the pacing was good, the main plot compelling, the characterisation mostly great: there was a reason my uncritical younger self enjoyed it! BUT:
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If we, as a community, don't ever take the time to look over old books with fresh eyes - or if we dismiss those efforts and their critical lens as cancel culture, or hating, or some other nonsense - we're ignoring not just our own progress as people, but as a genre.
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So when my copy of Damia arrives and I write a thread detailing its issues, it's not because I want to tarnish McCaffrey's memory specifically. It's because I want to illustrate the necessity of thinking critically about even our favourite old books before recommending them NOW.
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There's a lot to love in the worlds McCaffrey, and others like her, created. But if we can't admit to the biases and bigotries that were allowed to proliferate in those works, we won't understand the significance of so much that has come afterwards - that is being written *now*.
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Especially for white and otherwise privileged SFF fans, I do think it's important to reckon with how much racism (and homophobia, and sexism, and other bigotries) was casually and not-so-casually simmering in many of our foundational stories, and how that might've shaped us.
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Does that mean we have to wholesale disavow our affection or nostalgia for those stories? Of course not! But there's a difference between saying "this book was important to me despite its problems" and "because this book was important to me, it can have no problems."
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ANYWAY. I really need to go to bed, but I'm going to keep chewing on these thoughts because I think it really matters. FIN
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End of conversation
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