Actually, so do I. My criticism of Mieville is different… I feel like he’s trying to capture the Victorian tone, but falls short.

It’s not really the time and place for me to indulge my language snobbery, though. ;) I agree with you re: political use of sex work, and its thorniness.

Well, okay… and there are writers who will argue that no one should ever write outside their own group and the default, but it’s a sentiment that’s mostly fallen out of vogue (rightly, I feel).

Yeah, that one’s thorny, especially when it involves a group that’s also a massively charged issue. I’m just uneasy with seeing the female body taken and used, by a man, as a philosophical prop. Seeing ‘meaning’ ascribed to sex work. The world would probably be sadder if no one wrote out-of-group about it, though.

Petar: I said in the original post that with Night Watch (as I was with Iron Council), I was taking the central ‘past’ part of the book as being separate from its present-Disc bookends - because Sybil and Angua aren’t present in the main story at all. The Agony Aunts are working in the sex industry - just as enforcers rather than whores. The ‘real seamstress’ and Vetinari’s aunt are both referred to in jokes about prostitution - they’re not sex workers, but they’re treated as being potentially sex workers. And having every single woman who was not in the sex industry being assumed to be so was kinda annoying.

And frankly speaking, that book was set in the ‘bad old times’.

Yeah, and how fucked-up is it to equate prostitution with the ‘bad old days’? Is that how sex workers see themselves, do you think? Is it even true that prostitution - indeed, that male entitlement to sex - decreases as society gets to be, on the whole, a nicer place for women? (The UK answer to that is a resounding no; the sex trade is booming and becoming ever more culturally acceptable, just as the government’s finally been forced to implement real equal pay legislation). Besides, saying prostitution will All Go Away After The Revolution (as Ide Cyan pointed out in comments on the original post) totally lets men off the hook - men as individuals (and as a class) are not innocent machine-cogs when it comes to sexism. They could give up their entitlement to sex any time they liked. Many do. Others don’t.

I agree with you about Thud!, but I don’t think that’s him not getting women so much as not getting young women who socialise that way; cool story here, but when Equal Rites came out (long before Discworld was famous), it was read aloud on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 and a fair few feminists wrote him nice letters about it, some of whom addressed ‘Terry Pratchett’ as a woman. I think you’ve got to get bonus Male Feminist Author points for that.

As for ‘Night Watch’, are you sure that most of the women are prostitutes? The
Agony Aunts are muscle, one of the seamstresses is a real one, the protagonist’s
wife is definitely not one, and one really has to stretch the definition for
Vetinary’s aunt. And frankly speaking, that book was set in the ‘bad old times’.
If anything, the recent Ankh-Morpork books show women with more power
than they would be likely to have in a similar society.

On the other hand, the female friends with whom I’ve discussed ‘Thud’ think
that the scene of the policewomen hitting town is proof that Terry Pratchett has
no clue about women. I just thought it was bad and pointless.

I find Mieville unreadable on a line level (for which I feel guilty already :( ) so I haven’t read Iron Council. I dug through Perdido Street and stopped. I know the fault is mine, not Mieville’s. Politically, I’m sure I’d enjoy the books.

Anyway, I fear I’m therefore at a disadvantage in discussing it, but the conversation you report was fascinating.

“It’s also, I feel, touching on appropriation; using a real-world group (sex workers) to explain your politics, your stories, your world.”

Well, okay… and there are writers who will argue that no one should ever write outside their own group and the default, but it’s a sentiment that’s mostly fallen out of vogue (rightly, I feel).

Ideology is a part of issues. you seem to be drawing an assumption that emotional baggage is necessarily bad. Ideology forms and is formed by psychology. and the incidental display of ideology (especially when ideology can be as broadly defined as “boundless optimism” as I did previously) is just as revealing for the inner workings of a person.

Second, I’ve no idea why you think it’s not similarly detectable what the obsessions of mainstream authors are.

They often are, I never made a claim to the contrary. But SF is often more stark about it. Fiction often has a component of wish fulfillment to it. “This is what I think would be cool.” I’ve never seen anyone so flatly detached from the process of writing that it’s merely an exercise in grammar and trying to write what they think will sell, even if the author finds it interminably boring. In addition to being fiction, it’s fiction with a whole new world to describe. In doing so, you have to say what you think “would be cool” if it were true, not just for some family or the cool nightlife of your protagonist in the seedy underbelly, you have to describe EVERYTHING as what you think is interesting. Interesting and good is usually a fairly slim line that blurs regularly.

Third, I still don’t think you’re picking a representative sample of SF people, while at teh same time you’re making a really broad claim that’s going to encompass a lot of work you’re not talking about.

Well, I’ve read SF from more than 32 authors in my time, and more often than not I’ve been able to pick out details of what the author considers “good,” which if my memory serves 32 is the minimum sample to produce a statistically valid study, so I’d say it is representative. But I’m being glib.

Yes, I’m sure there are SF authors who DON’T have 70 pounds of psychological baggage they’re dragging around. I know there are. I’ve read some. I’ve read SF where I truly couldn’t get inside the author’s head, and the only personality trait I could determine was that they have a fantastic imagination. But I don’t feel I owe it to some imagined plighted scifi author offended at the idea that a critical reader could crawl around inside their head and find what they think to scale back my phrasing to the point that I’m either saying nothing at all or narrowing what I’m talking about to EXCLUDE most of what I’m talking about. Broad strokes aren’t a bad thing, especially since you’d have to be straining credulity to read my comments as “Every person who has ever picked up a pen or tapped at a keyboard to write a work of science fiction is a sex-crazed pervert misogynist who only writes scifi because they knew if they tried to fulfill those fantasies, they’d be arrested for child rape.”

I’ve been accused of wanting to censor Card and burn all his books when I say this, or been told that I don’t have the right to decide whether or not I want to read something on the basis that the author thinks that lesbian and gay people should be arrested just for being lesbian or gay.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either taking an author’s views into account like this or ignoring them when shopping for books, though. I don’t really care if anyone else reads Card, I just won’t.

I think it depends on whether they rub your noses in it. I enjoyed Ender’s Game (yeah, it’s adolescent pulp, but it was fun) even though I know that Card is a bit of a nutbar. I liked some of the Pournelle/Niven team-ups, but Pournelle loves to get didactic and is really similar to Miller in the way they paint every character as a Strong-Jawed Hero That Does What It Takes (even if it involves horrible, horrible things) held back by the Weak Stupid Liberals.

The most painful book I read all the way through was Fallen Angels, which was a perfect mix of the worst of Barnes, Pournelle, and Niven. The story was one-part Barnes’ idiotic fan-service (sci-fi conventioneers save the world) one-part Pournelle’s liberal-bashing (the Evil Dark Lord is Ralph freaking Nader) and one part random Niven weirdness (walking along on a glacier with a bunch of naked Inuit while being gently roasted by an orbital microwave beam).

No, and it’s a problem that equally effects literary and SF people I know and work with. Both groups have detractors who say that’s an unacceptable reason for setting aside someone’s work, and both groups have people who say, “Yes, but why spend my time reading [whoever] when there are so many wonderful writers to read who don’t portray women as walking pussy? It’s not like I’m going to run out of books to read.”

UPDATE: Ah, misread you. And no, there are plenty of people who enjoy books from whatever perspective. I assume most people fall in between. I like Wagner, I don’t like Mein Kompf.

Iain McEwan. *winces* But, am I the only one who has little problem enjoying, or artistically appreciating, authors whose ideology I do not share? Tolkien, for instance.

Another thought about sci-fi sex workers: I can think of two otherwise decently, neutrally, non wish-fullfillyly portrayed ones - Tricia from Promethea and Niki from Heroes - who are overcoming alcohol addiction. Stereotype much?

edit:
Ampersand, from that link-of-link there:

In the meantime, we’re all prostitutes. Most of the prostitutes I know keep one little private thing. Some prostitutes won’t kiss. Some of them save the anus for the person they love. Or they might refuse to say “I love you” except to the person they love. Whatever it is, they keep one tiny little broken shard of their integrity. I don’t want to use the word integrity because it sounds as if they’re doing something bad. They aren’t. They’re just living on the capital they have, which is themselves.

My own way of being a prostitute is that I let magazines damage my work in any way they care to.[…]

*headdesks at all the appropriation* Wow. So if I can come up with some spurious analogy, I could claim I was a doctor, or an airline pilot, or a movie star? I could try that now. I have to do everything a dozen times before I get it right, so I must be like a movie star. I understand everything about movie stars now and can use them in my writing however I like, isn’t that great?

KB I’m asking this because the conventional reader might think you degrade women in your writing.

WV I have many female readers. They can see that I love women.

Hear that? I bet some of his best friends are women, too!

First, I’m not sure why ideology = issues. Second, I’ve no idea why you think it’s not similarly detectable what the obsessions of mainstream authors are. Third, I still don’t think you’re picking a representative sample of SF people, while at teh same time you’re making a really broad claim that’s going to encompass a lot of work you’re not talking about.

The story is initially set in a bar. An Irish bar. It’s remarked that everyone is male, and simply observed that there must be some sort of aura of “no girls allowed” over the place. Female characters do come and go, though. Still, it’s heartwarming, sappy sci-fi/fantasy about human problems.

And then, abruptly, he stopped writing about Callahan’s, and started writing about Callahan’s wife’s place. Lady Callahan ran a similar establishment, in that it was a sappy magical place about human problems. But her place was a brothel. And one of the key points of the book is that it treats selling sex like any other service job. It tried to be nice about it, describing how it was a really nice, well-run establishment, but it struck me as mostly wish-fulfillment by the author, how he wished the sex industry could work - to the point of it starting out with a girl trapped in the typical abusive ho/pimp relationship before she makes it to the “house”.

Yeah, I couldn’t finish that book.

Oh, gods, Sharon Green. Here I thought I was the only one who had stumbled across her work (at age 15?). There is a woman who believes in the BDSM stereotypes of what women want. I believe that the only reason she was ever published is because of the type of porn (Normanesque, at times) that she writes.

Not read the second volume. The first one bugged me enough.

virtually every scifi author leaves their personal baggage on display. it’s part of the appeal of the genre. Some people have creepy sex-obsessed issues, others have technophobia (too many to count), or unrelenting idealism (Asimov springs to mind). Most people can list scifi authors they know for a fact they ideologically agree with (Michael Moorcock, for instance) and others they ideologically loathe due to their being, for example, slightly to the right of Satan (Ayn Rand, David Weber). These aren’t small names that only output boilerplate, a male equivalent of the trashy romance novel.

Which is why I chose the language I did, and not “sex-obsessed perverted pulp writers.” I was speaking more broadly than “the creeps who want a magical world where their self-insert character is lusted after by space whores and they kill the evil emperor who looks like their father”