Before I head off to bed, I just want to say: I'm planning this Damia read/skim, not from a place of malice - I genuinely loved McCaffrey growing up and still feel a lot of affection for aspects of her work - but to demonstrate something that's (hopefully) important about SFF.
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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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