Friday Moment: Recipe for insta-crush on China Mieville

If you have a world in which Orcs are evil, and you depict them as evil, I don't know how that maps onto the question of "political correctness." However, the point is not that you're misrepresenting Orcs (if you invented this world, that's how Orcs are), but that you have replicated the logic of racism, which is that large groups of people are "defined" by an abstract supposedly essential element called "race," whatever else you were doing or intended. And that's not an innocent thing to do. Maybe you have a race of female vampires who destroy men's strength. They really do operate like that in your world. But I think you're kidding yourself if you think that that idea just appeared ex nihilo in your head and has nothing to do with the incredibly strong, and incredibly patriarchal, anxiety about the destructive power of women's sexuality in our very real world.

Source.

I've never read any of his work before, but clearly now I need to.

On fiction...

One of the books I'm reading at the moment is To the Hermitage by Malcolm Bradbury. This isn't a write-up of the book because I'm only a third of the way through reading it, and desperately trying to finish it because my friend leant it to me almost a month ago! Sadly I am also up to the eyeballs in assignments at the moment so that probably won't happen this weekend. You have no idea how desperately I am hanging out for my semester holiday in June.

Anyway, one of the characters in To the Hermitage is a writer (based, I think, on Bradbury himself) and has a lovely little spiel about why fiction is so much better than facts, which I thought I'd share, not least since it more or less reflects my own ideas on the subject!

"... fiction is infinitely preferable to real life, which is a pretty feeble fiction anyway. As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences, dull passages, worthless days, useless contingencies than the careless plot of reality written in Destiny's above. Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life. Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, moving, profound. There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfilments, twists, turns, gratified resolutions. Unlike reality or for that matter history, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed."

Amen.