![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Reader Assumptions, Lock In, and the Status Quo
Yesterday, Jed posted a link to a really awesome essay by sci-fic/fantasy author Kate Elliott, "The Status Quo Does Not Need World Building" (also mirrored on Tor.com). It's fantastic, and you should all go read it. Elliott provides a lot of food for thought, but here's a key quote:
This is a fantastic observation, and I would extend it a little further -- when the writer leaves out world building details, the readers are going to fill them in, and whether it was the author's intention or not, the readers will default to either the writer's dominant culture or their own. And this got me to thinking about John Scalzi's latest novel, Lock In.
(Note: Spoilers ahead! Well, sort of. No plot spoilers, but there are storytelling spoilers, one in particular that Scalzi seems to have gone out of his way not to mention. So if learning that kind of thing in advance of reading the book will bother you, read the book before you read my comments. It's a great book, and a fast read. So go on, read it. We'll wait.)
Lock In is a near-future detective story set in a world where a significant portion of the population contracted a disease called Haden's Syndrome, which leaves many of its victims "locked in" -- fully conscious, but unable to move, speak, or otherwise interact with the world without assistive technology. The book features a complex and satisfying murder mystery, but it's also about the ways in which Haden's Syndrome has changed the world. The main character of the story, Chris Shane, is a Haden and a rookie FBI agent deeply involved in the murder case.
Scalzi's world building is somewhat minimalist, which is typical of his style, but for the most part it works. He drops just enough detail at just the right time to give readers the sense of how the world has changed and how it's remained the same. But that's not why the Elliott article struck a chord with me in regards to this book.
The really fascinating thing Scalzi does with this book involves how he describes his protagonist, which is essentially not at all. Although hints are dropped earlier in the story, it's not confirmed that Chris is African-American until near the end of the book (when Chris's father, Marcus, is described as a black man), and Chris's gender* is never revealed. When I noticed what was happening, about halfway through, I couldn't quite believe it -- I figured there must have been some throwaway pronoun use I had forgotten. So I went back to check, and lo and behold, I was right. The book is written in first person, and no one ever uses a pronoun or a gendered term of any sort to refer to Chris in dialogue. But this narrative choice is completely seamless. It never makes the writing awkward, largely because Chris has no physical presence in the story. In almost every scene, Chris has no body to describe, so we never look for the author or narrator to describe it. I might not ever have even noticed, if I hadn't been thinking idly about the audiobook, which was produced in two different versions, one read by Amber Benson (a woman) and the other by Wil Wheaton (a man). And that's when I realized that Chris could be any gender, including agender, genderqueer, bigender -- anywhere on the spectrum. We don't know how Chris identifies, and that identity has absolutely no bearing on the story.
My first thought was along the lines of "Well that's pretty awesome; kudos to John Scalzi for pulling it off." And I still feel that way, and I hope people have lots of interesting conversations about identity and presentation in a post-Haden universe, where technology makes it possible to interact with the world without depending on a human body. But that's not what this essay is about. This is about the assumptions made by readers. When I first started the book, I assumed that Chris Shane was a white man. I never made any kind of conscious decision to cast Chris as white and male; it's simply that I've learned to default to that assumption in the absence of further information -- a name, a pronoun, a physical description, stereotypically gendered behavior (of course all these assumptions can also be problematic). I was forced to confront my assumptions about Chris's race fairly early on, when we learn that Marcus Shane was a professional basketball player (see what I mean about problematic?). But nothing in the text ever challenged my assumptions about Chris's gender -- I came to my realization based on factors completely outside the reading of the book itself. And as I read Kate Elliott's essay, I had to wonder: how many people, reading that book, will make the same assumption I did and cast Chris as a man, never realizing what they have done?
I want to be clear that I don't mean this as a criticism of Scalzi or of the book. Whether Scalzi obscured Chris's gender as a writerly exercise or as a purposeful commentary on the post-body society, I think it was an interesting choice, and I enjoyed seeing how he made it work. But we should also never forget that ambiguity will always tend toward the status quo, unless we work hard to fight against it.
*It bears mentioning that Chris's sex is also kept ambiguous.
When people write without considering the implications of material culture & social space in the story they are writing, they often unwittingly default to an expression of how they believe the past worked. This is especially true if they are not thinking about how the material and the social differ from culture to culture, across both space and time, or how it might change in the future.
Which details a writer considers too unimportant to include may often default to the status quo of the writer’s own setting and situation, the writer’s lived experience of social space, because the status quo does not need to be described by those who live at the center of a dominant culture.
This is a fantastic observation, and I would extend it a little further -- when the writer leaves out world building details, the readers are going to fill them in, and whether it was the author's intention or not, the readers will default to either the writer's dominant culture or their own. And this got me to thinking about John Scalzi's latest novel, Lock In.
(Note: Spoilers ahead! Well, sort of. No plot spoilers, but there are storytelling spoilers, one in particular that Scalzi seems to have gone out of his way not to mention. So if learning that kind of thing in advance of reading the book will bother you, read the book before you read my comments. It's a great book, and a fast read. So go on, read it. We'll wait.)
Lock In is a near-future detective story set in a world where a significant portion of the population contracted a disease called Haden's Syndrome, which leaves many of its victims "locked in" -- fully conscious, but unable to move, speak, or otherwise interact with the world without assistive technology. The book features a complex and satisfying murder mystery, but it's also about the ways in which Haden's Syndrome has changed the world. The main character of the story, Chris Shane, is a Haden and a rookie FBI agent deeply involved in the murder case.
Scalzi's world building is somewhat minimalist, which is typical of his style, but for the most part it works. He drops just enough detail at just the right time to give readers the sense of how the world has changed and how it's remained the same. But that's not why the Elliott article struck a chord with me in regards to this book.
The really fascinating thing Scalzi does with this book involves how he describes his protagonist, which is essentially not at all. Although hints are dropped earlier in the story, it's not confirmed that Chris is African-American until near the end of the book (when Chris's father, Marcus, is described as a black man), and Chris's gender* is never revealed. When I noticed what was happening, about halfway through, I couldn't quite believe it -- I figured there must have been some throwaway pronoun use I had forgotten. So I went back to check, and lo and behold, I was right. The book is written in first person, and no one ever uses a pronoun or a gendered term of any sort to refer to Chris in dialogue. But this narrative choice is completely seamless. It never makes the writing awkward, largely because Chris has no physical presence in the story. In almost every scene, Chris has no body to describe, so we never look for the author or narrator to describe it. I might not ever have even noticed, if I hadn't been thinking idly about the audiobook, which was produced in two different versions, one read by Amber Benson (a woman) and the other by Wil Wheaton (a man). And that's when I realized that Chris could be any gender, including agender, genderqueer, bigender -- anywhere on the spectrum. We don't know how Chris identifies, and that identity has absolutely no bearing on the story.
My first thought was along the lines of "Well that's pretty awesome; kudos to John Scalzi for pulling it off." And I still feel that way, and I hope people have lots of interesting conversations about identity and presentation in a post-Haden universe, where technology makes it possible to interact with the world without depending on a human body. But that's not what this essay is about. This is about the assumptions made by readers. When I first started the book, I assumed that Chris Shane was a white man. I never made any kind of conscious decision to cast Chris as white and male; it's simply that I've learned to default to that assumption in the absence of further information -- a name, a pronoun, a physical description, stereotypically gendered behavior (of course all these assumptions can also be problematic). I was forced to confront my assumptions about Chris's race fairly early on, when we learn that Marcus Shane was a professional basketball player (see what I mean about problematic?). But nothing in the text ever challenged my assumptions about Chris's gender -- I came to my realization based on factors completely outside the reading of the book itself. And as I read Kate Elliott's essay, I had to wonder: how many people, reading that book, will make the same assumption I did and cast Chris as a man, never realizing what they have done?
I want to be clear that I don't mean this as a criticism of Scalzi or of the book. Whether Scalzi obscured Chris's gender as a writerly exercise or as a purposeful commentary on the post-body society, I think it was an interesting choice, and I enjoyed seeing how he made it work. But we should also never forget that ambiguity will always tend toward the status quo, unless we work hard to fight against it.
*It bears mentioning that Chris's sex is also kept ambiguous.
no subject
Thanks for this mini-review of John Scalzi's Lock In. I am now curious to read it, both to see how he handled the writerly aspects of this story and to see what commentary, if any, he may be making about the post-body society. This is very relevant to one of my orig WIPs but I am hesitant to say any more about it in a google searchable space. ;)
Although I cannot make sound comments until I have read this book, if the text is seamless written and the focus of the story (thus, the focus of the reader's attention) is a search for clues that solve the mystery, it is quite plausible that the reader projects the status quo into the narrator, or, perhaps, in the case of the audio book, visualizes a gender for the narrator that matches the gendered voice of the audiobook reader. Love how two versions of the audiobook were created.
(hm.... I am sitting in a bookstore cafe right now. Might be time to head back into fiction for one more purchase before I leave. Lol, and this is after spending *enough* money for one day. haha. Oh well.)
no subject
I have to imagine that anyone who encounters the book first as an audio book will imagine the protagonist as the gender of the narrator. I listened to the audio samples provided by the publisher (Tor), and it was really interesting to see how different the performance feels, just from a short snippet.
If you do read it, I'll be curious to hear what you think!
no subject
Me (to my husband, Cam): So, you've read Lock In. What gender is the protagonist?
Cam: Well, he's....OH. IT'S NEVER STATED. I JUST ASSUMED HE WAS A GUY.
Heh. Apparently it totally blew his mind :) Now he's wondering how they'll deal with the tv show.
The thing about the world building that struck me when Cam described the story was the MASSIVE IMPLAUSIBILITY of "US president's wife gets chronic illness, said chronic illness gets massive financial support and a dedicated support industry". I have heard too many horror stories about US attitudes to chronic illness, and have spent too much time watching people construct paranoid conspiracies any time Obama does anything that can be seen to be EVEN SLIGHTLY biased towards black people. I mean you guys had a president with polio and afaict people with polio did not get extra special treatment as a result.
I realise it was just the set up he needed for his story but it bugged me.
no subject
What happened with the Haden's research and support industry taking off is detailed more in Scalzi's companion novella "Unlocked", which is available free on Tor.com. It wasn't quite as simple as "president's wife got sick and the country rallied behind her". The version of the story he tells in "Unlocked" read to me more like a moonshot or New Deal type situation, where a forceful leader used a perceived emergency to arm-twist Congress into giving him his way, which makes a little more sense to me. And I can understand why Chris, who has been locked in since age 2 or so, and has quite a lot of class privilege, might have a less nuanced view of a situation that would then come through in Lock In. But yeah, it's still not a perfect set-up.
no subject
Huh ok, thanks.
no subject
As to the TV show, I'm not sure that the casting problem would be specific to Chris -- how are you supposed to cast for any of the Haydens when they exclusively communicate and interact using mechanical bodies or digital means, and many of them don't bother to make these bodies or means reflect gender expectations? As to Chris's body, I figure if they 1) care and 2) are worried about viewers projecting a gender based on that, they can always obscure it with loads of medical equipment or whatnot.
no subject
I don't know much about the world of Locked In, but I have very little faith in media's interest in making robots anything but 100% unambiguously gendered in very conventional ways.
no subject