Virtue and virtue-signaling in science fiction & fantasy, Part IV: The fall of Seth Dickinson
So... this is the post that I have been long-meaning to write, and long-dreading. I truly did like The Traitor Baru Cormorant, and more than that, as I wrote in Part III of this series, I found it to be an expertly-handled job of addressing complex and often controversial social issues from a clear ideological perspective without falling into the "virtue-signaling" pit. Instead, Seth Dickinson took a set of tropes and inverted them. It was a brave book, because a bad-faith reader could accuse him of such things as "fridging," or "burying his gays," but only in bad faith, because what Dickinson actually did was use those tropes against themselves. Nevertheless, the fact that he did run that risk was noteworthy, because bad-faith readers, by definition, aren't going to care if the trope is inverted. Just that it's there. In the case of The Traitor Baru Cormorant, it worked out for Seth Dickinson. It didn't have to. He could have gone the way of Isabel Fall. If you don't know that name, consider it a teaser for next week. As I recently read, even my favorite author, NK Jemisin, screwed that one up. (Oh, Nora! Say it ain't so!)
For today, let's deal with Book 2 in the Baru Cormorant series, The Monster Baru Cormorant. This is where everything falls apart for Seth. Quick plot recap. At the end of Book 1, Baru has betrayed the revolution that she, herself, led in Aurdwynn. That was the point-- to show that fighting Falcrest is pointless. They're way ahead of you, and you'll lose, so don't bother. She betrays Aurdwynn in order to become a cryptarch-- one of the secret string-pullers behind the throne of the faceless emperor of Falcrest. Falcrest captures her lover, Tain Hu, and expects Baru to beg for her life so that Hu can be held as a hostage, and used to control Baru. Instead, Baru lets her die. It turns out that Hu preferred to die than live as a hostage, so it's not quite as bad as you originally think, but Baru is still a psycho. And mostly, she wants power. So, Baru lets Tain Hu die, then spends the book running from a renegade admiral-- Ormsment-- who is pissed about such a psycho being elevated to cryptarch, while trying to negotiate escalating tensions between Falcrest and Oriati Mbo, who are barreling towards war. That's Book 2, which ends on a cliffhanger.
The first book avoided all of the pitfalls of virtue-signaling. Book 2... not so much.
Recall my basic arguments about why The Traitor Baru Cormorant could not, in good faith, be called a virtue-signaling book. While Falcrest is a critique of right-wing ideology in America and western capitalism, Aurdwynn didn't serve as a stand-in for anyone, and the book was a rather misanthropic book without pure good-guys via whom Dickinson signaled virtue as real world analogs. Second, the tropes, when they appeared, were all inverted.
This stops being the case in The Monster Baru Cormorant. While Aurdwynn has no clear, real-world analog, Oriati Mbo does. They're Africa. Period. It's not subtle. Their bardic storytellers and such are even called "griots," in reference to the Malian tradition. Falcrest is the evil empire of America/western capitalist imperialism. Their rival is Africa.
Recall the matter of how Dickinson portrayed Baru herself in Book 1. When you introduce an oppressed minority, there's tokenism, there's stereotyping, and there's making them unimpeachable. Those are the problem-writing techniques. The objective is to avoid all three of those. Once you are in major character/plot territory, you're out of tokenism. So, avoid the stereotypes in order to not write like a bigot, and avoid the pedestal in order to not engage in virtue-signaling. Dickinson did that with Baru by inverting the tropes. That was the genius of Book 1 and the main character.
With the Oriati Mbo, he went the pedestal route. That way lies virtue-signaling.
Dickinson repeatedly wrote about how the Oriati Mbo are a diverse people who cannot be summed up in any kind of cursory way, echoing the fact, and commonly-phrased entreaty, that Africa is a diverse continent. Can you combine Morocco and Botswana as though they are one place? No. Obviously not. Dickinson intends to say the same with the Oriati Mbo. Yet, Dickinson's writing didn't convey it. He simply put the Oriati Mbo on a pedestal, via the specific Oriati characters in the book, and the unifying ethos that the book says describes the whole of the Oriati Mbo. Rather contrary to the claim that they are a diverse people that cannot be summed up so easily, so Dickinson contradicted himself, but that's just the start of the problems. So, let's deal with the ethos that unifies the whole of the diverse Oriati Mbo (contradiction).
"Trim." I'm... not going to link to Urban Dictionary here, but... moving on. Anyway, here's what Dickinson meant by "trim." The Oriati Mbo care about one thing. Trim.
The Oriati Mbo value social connectedness above all. Trim is what they call their sort of karmic system of social connectedness. Fostering social connectedness leads to good stuff, and actions that damage social connectedness lead to bad stuff, in a karmic kind of way. So, cultivate your trim.
So, what's the issue with this? From a fantasy perspective, isn't this just a kind of alternate philosophy that a culture could have? The problem is as follows.
Social connectedness, family, etc. Good or bad? I dare you to say, "bad." Or even, "neutral." And, the dynamics of Seth Dickinson's world are such that the society that values those things-- the normatively good things-- and in fact, builds itself around those values, is the stand-in for Africa. They're the ones with the good values, and the stand-in for America/the west are the villains. Cold, capitalist imperialism, racism, homophobia, etc. The good guys are Africa, and the bad guys are America/the modern west.
Well, OK, but a couple of things. Remember the slave trade? Ongoing exploitation of Africa and resource-rich countries? That's still going on. There are lots of justifications for portraying a dynamic between America/Europe and Africa in ways that are not favorable to where you are probably reading this.
Are you wearing a ring on your finger? Ever think about the materials? Just sayin'...
But... that doesn't automatically make the exploited side good. Book 1 got that. People in Aurdwynn weren't necessarily good. They didn't have a normatively good ethos, and many of them were terrible people. Still, let's go with it. Introduce a good ethos for the Africa stand-in.
It's still just a value system. What about individuals? Have you ever met an American who claims to value freedom and yadda, yadda, yadda, but doesn't really have the follow-through?
Hey, I'm writin' about science fiction today! News? Watch me hide from my regular job! Just sayin'. Country and culture-level value systems versus individuals. They aren't the same.
Greatest movie ever?
Anyway, plenty of cultures have value systems that sound fine, with the big problem being the hypocrisy and unwillingness of individuals to follow through. So, Dickinson could get away with having the Oriati Mbo hold a culture-wide value system superior to Falcrest as long as the individual Oriati characters are fully fleshed-out, flawed people, as hypocritical and horrible as everyone else in his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad world. Otherwise, there's an Africa stand-in where everyone is awesome, in contrast to the America/west stand-in, which is evil and where everyone is terrible. That'd be virtue-signaling.
Unfortunately, Dickinson goes the virtue-signaling route.
How any of this plays out depends, to an extent, on how Dickinson writes about "trim." So let's address that. There are several ways that Dickinson could have written trim into the book. It could work supernaturally, as an operative, karmic system. It could work as a metaphor for the golden rule. Or, it could just be a cultural superstition.
The reader's view of the Oriati, and trim, comes largely through Tau-Indi Bosoka. Note the African-tinged family name. Tau is Oriati royalty, and unlike anyone in the first book, winds up being a kind of moral center to the book, and becomes Baru's Jiminy Cricket. (Tain Hu could have used you, Tau! A little late, is all I'm sayin'!) Anyway, Tau is firm believer in trim. But in what way? The book does not appear to present trim as operating in any kind of supernatural, karmic way, such that people who disrupt social connectedness have magical forces of the universe acting against them. In fact, Tau repeatedly describes trim as acting through people. If you are connected to other people, then your actions affect other people, and there are ripple effects. So, do good-- meaning, foster social connectedness-- and good comes back to you, via "trim." Not magically, but just because people interact with people. Who are the luckiest people...
The thing is, without a level of realism, Tau would look like a fool, and having your moral center look like a fool is a problem, particularly when the book is setting up the Oriati Mbo as the side of right, and foils for Falcrest.
You see where this is going, right?
Baru first encounters Tau-Indi in the open ocean on a sinking ship, and offers rescue. Tau-Indi refuses rescue, because... trim, or something. Instead, Tau-Indi decides to invite Baru and another character into a cabin on the sinking ship, lock them all in, and insist that they must talk, and establish social connectedness, so that trim saves them. Trim will save them.
OK, Dickinson, how good a writer are you? Because if you aren't an absurdly good writer, this'll suck.
It sucked. Tau-Indi spent a while rambling about trim. They play a game of six-degrees-of-separation, and lo-and-behold, they aren't that many degrees separated.
Trim! Right?
No, this is a novel. Of course those connections are there. That happens in every novel. The authors just don't have a character ramble about "trim" when the connections are revealed. Do the conversations that reveal their social connections have anything to do with their escape from the cabin on the sinking ship? The problem that Tau created?
No. Baru got sick of Tau rambling about trim, pulled out whatever her world's equivalent of duct tape and a Swiss Army Knife are, and MacGyver-ed her way out of the problem. There is no interpretation of the sequence in which trim had anything to do with their escape.
Do you see a problem here for trim, and the characterization of the Oriati Mbo? I do. That's what happens when you go for virtue-signaling over plot and character. The novel suffers.
As we get to the end of the book, Baru, Tau, and the rest of the cast arrive at a set of reef settlements around a dead volcano in the middle of the ocean. They go to the Oriati embassy. Admiral Ormsment catches up, and shows up at the same embassy.
After chasing Baru half way around the world for revenge, and mutinying against her own government, Ormsment says, oh well, you're in an embassy, I guess I have to give up now.
[Facepalm.]
I don't even know where to start here except to point out that this is bad writing. Anyway, Ormsment just says, I challenge you to a duel, or I'll hunt down and kill your parents. You... psychopath who executed your own "lover" and then had breakfast like nothing happened, because you're a total psychopath.
The thing is, Baru isn't that psychopathic. Jiminy Cricket-Tau* tells her that if she steps into the duel with a pure heart, and her trim is in order, and blah, blah, blah... trim will save her because... trim!
Baru steps into the dueling circle.
Does the resolution have anything whatsoever to do with trim?
Of course not.
Baru steps into the dueling circle, and some random character who was involved in an insurrection in the reef settlement lets loose a bunch of plague-infected people to act like it's a zombie apocalypse. All of this, of course, was based on actions set in motion long before Baru or Ormsment got to Kyprananoke, and the release of the plague-zombies was going to happen whether or not Baru stepped into the dueling circle, so none of this had anything to do with Baru's "trim," making the whole resolution absurd, and making Tau look foolish for constantly rambling about something that has nothing whatsoever to do with any plot element in the book.
The only function "trim" serves, then, is to portray the Africa stand-in as having a morally superior value system, and not just one held at the culture level, but one held at the individual character level. Without having a plot that connects to it in a coherent way, though, it's just virtue-signaling.
One could give a straight reading of the book that simply says that within Dickinson's world, trim is nonsense. Your social connectedness and actions regarding it are irrelevant, within the world of Baru Cormorant. Every time Tau appeals to trim, the events repudiate that interpretation. And funnily enough, Tau does end up a dupe in the end, betrayed to "the Cancrioth." Who are they? Sentient, cancerous tumors that make you immortal, 'n stuff. [More bad writing. Don't ask.]
So, did Dickinson mean to say that trim is nonsense, and don't listen to Tau-Indi? I don't think so. I just don't think he figured out how to plot out the novel, and that he was more interested in the virtue-signaling aspect of writing about trim. When I wrote about Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, I argued that her pronoun gimmick was poorly executed, but ultimately, did not undercut what was otherwise a truly smart book. In this case, Dickinson undercut himself with the virtue-signaling gimmick.
Speaking of pronouns, though, did you notice something? Probably not. I never used a pronoun for Tau-Indi. Tau is non-binary. (Personally, I hate "they," and think the language should settle on a gender-neutral, singular pronoun. I can't bring myself to type, "they," but that's what Dickinson used. We can be considerate and respectful, and still be grammar-nazis!) The whole point of Tau is to be Jiminy Cricket (sorry again), as well as a political symbol of diversity for the Oriati-are-the-good-guys thesis. Let's call it a problem that Tau turned into a dupe, but will I call virtue-signaling on the use of a non-binary character as the moral center?
No. Nonsense. Baru is the main character, and essentially the villain. Dickinson does a great job with LGBTQ characters at the individual level as fully fleshed out characters. The fact that a non-binary character happens to be the moral center doesn't mean that Dickinson is doing the pedestal thing with LGBTQ characters. Not with Baru there! So, that's not virtue-signaling.
However...
Dickinson made a strange choice here. Tau-Indi is Oriati royalty. Scratch that. African royalty. And, non-binary. This is both a missed opportunity, and suggestive of virtue-signaling with respect to portrayal of the Africa stand-in.
Dickinson is very interested in LGBTQ issues, and his perspective is clear. But, if you're going to write about Africa, there are some considerations. The US recently recalled its ambassador to Zambia for challenging the Zambian government's extreme hostility to the LGBTQ community. That's one recent example, but many African countries are extremely hostile to LGBTQ rights. I'm not going to make this post a list of all of the horrendous things done to the LGBTQ community across the African continent, but there's a lot.
So when Dickinson constructs his Africa stand-in, he makes its spokesperson and royal leader a non-binary person, where everyone among the Oriati is just totally cool with that. You know, like it is in Zambia, and similar countries.
This is a long-running issue for the left. How do you balance multiculturalism as a value with respect for, say, the LGBTQ community when there are cultures that don't respect the LGBTQ community? Sure, the US has political fights over... bathrooms... but compared to Zambia, or Uganda, or many other African nations, the US is far more open and friendly to the LGBTQ community than much of Africa. How do we assess these competing values? This is a long-running tension within the left, and if you're looking for an answer from me, that's certainly not the point of this post.
Rather, the point is that Dickinson wanted to have his cake and eat it too. That meant writing an Africa stand-in where everyone is totally cool with the LGBTQ community, in addition to having every individual character hold to a morally superior ethos so that it can serve as a moral foil to the evil of Falcrest.
There was one sequence in which Dickinson had an Oriati griot of the "satirist" variety mention, during a performance to the royalty, that yeah, everything's awesome for royalty, but there are actually poor people for whom stuff maybe ain't so great, but it was a throw-away line, nothing was done with it, and it was brushed aside.
That ain't gonna cut it. Not when his America/West stand-in is portrayed as such a uniform evil, because other than that, Dickinson wrote an Africa stand-in that was practically perfect in ev-er-y way. And in that world of horrors, that was a choice. A choice to signal a view of Africa based on Dickinson's personal virtue.
This interpretation of The Monster Baru Cormorant relies on the premise that Falcrest is America/Western right-wing ideology, and the Oriati Mbo stand in for Africa. The Oriati really are Africa. Africanized names, griots, discussion of their history with slavery, the whole deal. Science fiction and fantasy are always about metaphor, and once we accept the idea that Dickinson is critiquing American and western right-wing ideologies through Falcrest, ducking the Africa metaphor becomes truly unsustainable. Don't believe me? Read it. See if you don't think it's Africa. And at that point, putting it on a pedestal gets into virtue-signaling. That's a stark contrast to The Traitor Baru Cormorant.
And quickly, let's do a contrast to Octavia Butler, just for fun. Yes, I keep mentioning the Earthseed books, because I recently read them, and they stuck in my head, even though they aren't her best books. But, even her weaker books are better than the vast majority of what's out there.
Anyway, like most of Butler's work, they dealt with issues like racism and misogyny. Slavery, sexual assault, and a range of heavy stuff. Octavia Butler. However, dealing with racism and misogyny head-on does not mean either making all men or all white people villains, nor does it mean making all women or African-Americans unimpeachably good. Racism and misogyny are tendencies that can be expressed to varying degrees among different people, and within different institutions, but individuals are different. (Just like Brian tells you to be.) Lauren Olamina's brother, Keith, was African-American, but that didn't mean he couldn't be a sociopath. Her brother, Marcus, while not a sociopath, wound up complicit with the organization that enslaved her for a year and a half, then knowingly kept her daughter from her after her daughter was stolen. Why? Because people as individuals can be complex, and react according to a varied set of influences. Even Lauren, herself, could be viewed through different lenses, and her daughter's comments after her death showed some truly valid critiques. Fascinating. Painting an entire people as the good guys, though? No.
But Dickinson did. To signal his virtue.
So I'm going to end this post with a question. What if Dickinson didn't? What if he had written a place called Oriati Mbo, which was clearly Africa, and the people there were awful? If they were awful in ways that had any resemblance at all to existing stereotypes... he'd have problems.
H.P. Lovecraft was among the more famous genre writers, but he was also really racist, if you read the subtext. Dickinson was basically doing the anti-Lovecraft by putting the Oriati Mbo on a pedestal, knowing that we all now know to look for Lovecraft racist subtext.
Dickinson over-corrected. And that's really a good definition of political correctness: over-correcting for bigotry. Just because bigotry is real, and it is, doesn't mean you can't engage in problematic behavior in an attempt to correct for it. When readers in the science fiction & fantasy community do that, they can turn into an ugly mob, going after an innocent person.
Just ask Isabel Fall. Who is she? Stay tuned, for next week.
*Sorry for all the Jiminy Cricket stuff. This is particularly on my mind at the moment, as I am currently reading Cory Doctorow's Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom. OK, but not a strong recommendation.
For today, let's deal with Book 2 in the Baru Cormorant series, The Monster Baru Cormorant. This is where everything falls apart for Seth. Quick plot recap. At the end of Book 1, Baru has betrayed the revolution that she, herself, led in Aurdwynn. That was the point-- to show that fighting Falcrest is pointless. They're way ahead of you, and you'll lose, so don't bother. She betrays Aurdwynn in order to become a cryptarch-- one of the secret string-pullers behind the throne of the faceless emperor of Falcrest. Falcrest captures her lover, Tain Hu, and expects Baru to beg for her life so that Hu can be held as a hostage, and used to control Baru. Instead, Baru lets her die. It turns out that Hu preferred to die than live as a hostage, so it's not quite as bad as you originally think, but Baru is still a psycho. And mostly, she wants power. So, Baru lets Tain Hu die, then spends the book running from a renegade admiral-- Ormsment-- who is pissed about such a psycho being elevated to cryptarch, while trying to negotiate escalating tensions between Falcrest and Oriati Mbo, who are barreling towards war. That's Book 2, which ends on a cliffhanger.
The first book avoided all of the pitfalls of virtue-signaling. Book 2... not so much.
Recall my basic arguments about why The Traitor Baru Cormorant could not, in good faith, be called a virtue-signaling book. While Falcrest is a critique of right-wing ideology in America and western capitalism, Aurdwynn didn't serve as a stand-in for anyone, and the book was a rather misanthropic book without pure good-guys via whom Dickinson signaled virtue as real world analogs. Second, the tropes, when they appeared, were all inverted.
This stops being the case in The Monster Baru Cormorant. While Aurdwynn has no clear, real-world analog, Oriati Mbo does. They're Africa. Period. It's not subtle. Their bardic storytellers and such are even called "griots," in reference to the Malian tradition. Falcrest is the evil empire of America/western capitalist imperialism. Their rival is Africa.
Recall the matter of how Dickinson portrayed Baru herself in Book 1. When you introduce an oppressed minority, there's tokenism, there's stereotyping, and there's making them unimpeachable. Those are the problem-writing techniques. The objective is to avoid all three of those. Once you are in major character/plot territory, you're out of tokenism. So, avoid the stereotypes in order to not write like a bigot, and avoid the pedestal in order to not engage in virtue-signaling. Dickinson did that with Baru by inverting the tropes. That was the genius of Book 1 and the main character.
With the Oriati Mbo, he went the pedestal route. That way lies virtue-signaling.
Dickinson repeatedly wrote about how the Oriati Mbo are a diverse people who cannot be summed up in any kind of cursory way, echoing the fact, and commonly-phrased entreaty, that Africa is a diverse continent. Can you combine Morocco and Botswana as though they are one place? No. Obviously not. Dickinson intends to say the same with the Oriati Mbo. Yet, Dickinson's writing didn't convey it. He simply put the Oriati Mbo on a pedestal, via the specific Oriati characters in the book, and the unifying ethos that the book says describes the whole of the Oriati Mbo. Rather contrary to the claim that they are a diverse people that cannot be summed up so easily, so Dickinson contradicted himself, but that's just the start of the problems. So, let's deal with the ethos that unifies the whole of the diverse Oriati Mbo (contradiction).
"Trim." I'm... not going to link to Urban Dictionary here, but... moving on. Anyway, here's what Dickinson meant by "trim." The Oriati Mbo care about one thing. Trim.
The Oriati Mbo value social connectedness above all. Trim is what they call their sort of karmic system of social connectedness. Fostering social connectedness leads to good stuff, and actions that damage social connectedness lead to bad stuff, in a karmic kind of way. So, cultivate your trim.
So, what's the issue with this? From a fantasy perspective, isn't this just a kind of alternate philosophy that a culture could have? The problem is as follows.
Social connectedness, family, etc. Good or bad? I dare you to say, "bad." Or even, "neutral." And, the dynamics of Seth Dickinson's world are such that the society that values those things-- the normatively good things-- and in fact, builds itself around those values, is the stand-in for Africa. They're the ones with the good values, and the stand-in for America/the west are the villains. Cold, capitalist imperialism, racism, homophobia, etc. The good guys are Africa, and the bad guys are America/the modern west.
Well, OK, but a couple of things. Remember the slave trade? Ongoing exploitation of Africa and resource-rich countries? That's still going on. There are lots of justifications for portraying a dynamic between America/Europe and Africa in ways that are not favorable to where you are probably reading this.
Are you wearing a ring on your finger? Ever think about the materials? Just sayin'...
But... that doesn't automatically make the exploited side good. Book 1 got that. People in Aurdwynn weren't necessarily good. They didn't have a normatively good ethos, and many of them were terrible people. Still, let's go with it. Introduce a good ethos for the Africa stand-in.
It's still just a value system. What about individuals? Have you ever met an American who claims to value freedom and yadda, yadda, yadda, but doesn't really have the follow-through?
Hey, I'm writin' about science fiction today! News? Watch me hide from my regular job! Just sayin'. Country and culture-level value systems versus individuals. They aren't the same.
Greatest movie ever?
Anyway, plenty of cultures have value systems that sound fine, with the big problem being the hypocrisy and unwillingness of individuals to follow through. So, Dickinson could get away with having the Oriati Mbo hold a culture-wide value system superior to Falcrest as long as the individual Oriati characters are fully fleshed-out, flawed people, as hypocritical and horrible as everyone else in his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad world. Otherwise, there's an Africa stand-in where everyone is awesome, in contrast to the America/west stand-in, which is evil and where everyone is terrible. That'd be virtue-signaling.
Unfortunately, Dickinson goes the virtue-signaling route.
How any of this plays out depends, to an extent, on how Dickinson writes about "trim." So let's address that. There are several ways that Dickinson could have written trim into the book. It could work supernaturally, as an operative, karmic system. It could work as a metaphor for the golden rule. Or, it could just be a cultural superstition.
The reader's view of the Oriati, and trim, comes largely through Tau-Indi Bosoka. Note the African-tinged family name. Tau is Oriati royalty, and unlike anyone in the first book, winds up being a kind of moral center to the book, and becomes Baru's Jiminy Cricket. (Tain Hu could have used you, Tau! A little late, is all I'm sayin'!) Anyway, Tau is firm believer in trim. But in what way? The book does not appear to present trim as operating in any kind of supernatural, karmic way, such that people who disrupt social connectedness have magical forces of the universe acting against them. In fact, Tau repeatedly describes trim as acting through people. If you are connected to other people, then your actions affect other people, and there are ripple effects. So, do good-- meaning, foster social connectedness-- and good comes back to you, via "trim." Not magically, but just because people interact with people. Who are the luckiest people...
The thing is, without a level of realism, Tau would look like a fool, and having your moral center look like a fool is a problem, particularly when the book is setting up the Oriati Mbo as the side of right, and foils for Falcrest.
You see where this is going, right?
Baru first encounters Tau-Indi in the open ocean on a sinking ship, and offers rescue. Tau-Indi refuses rescue, because... trim, or something. Instead, Tau-Indi decides to invite Baru and another character into a cabin on the sinking ship, lock them all in, and insist that they must talk, and establish social connectedness, so that trim saves them. Trim will save them.
OK, Dickinson, how good a writer are you? Because if you aren't an absurdly good writer, this'll suck.
It sucked. Tau-Indi spent a while rambling about trim. They play a game of six-degrees-of-separation, and lo-and-behold, they aren't that many degrees separated.
Trim! Right?
No, this is a novel. Of course those connections are there. That happens in every novel. The authors just don't have a character ramble about "trim" when the connections are revealed. Do the conversations that reveal their social connections have anything to do with their escape from the cabin on the sinking ship? The problem that Tau created?
No. Baru got sick of Tau rambling about trim, pulled out whatever her world's equivalent of duct tape and a Swiss Army Knife are, and MacGyver-ed her way out of the problem. There is no interpretation of the sequence in which trim had anything to do with their escape.
Do you see a problem here for trim, and the characterization of the Oriati Mbo? I do. That's what happens when you go for virtue-signaling over plot and character. The novel suffers.
As we get to the end of the book, Baru, Tau, and the rest of the cast arrive at a set of reef settlements around a dead volcano in the middle of the ocean. They go to the Oriati embassy. Admiral Ormsment catches up, and shows up at the same embassy.
After chasing Baru half way around the world for revenge, and mutinying against her own government, Ormsment says, oh well, you're in an embassy, I guess I have to give up now.
[Facepalm.]
I don't even know where to start here except to point out that this is bad writing. Anyway, Ormsment just says, I challenge you to a duel, or I'll hunt down and kill your parents. You... psychopath who executed your own "lover" and then had breakfast like nothing happened, because you're a total psychopath.
The thing is, Baru isn't that psychopathic. Jiminy Cricket-Tau* tells her that if she steps into the duel with a pure heart, and her trim is in order, and blah, blah, blah... trim will save her because... trim!
Baru steps into the dueling circle.
Does the resolution have anything whatsoever to do with trim?
Of course not.
Baru steps into the dueling circle, and some random character who was involved in an insurrection in the reef settlement lets loose a bunch of plague-infected people to act like it's a zombie apocalypse. All of this, of course, was based on actions set in motion long before Baru or Ormsment got to Kyprananoke, and the release of the plague-zombies was going to happen whether or not Baru stepped into the dueling circle, so none of this had anything to do with Baru's "trim," making the whole resolution absurd, and making Tau look foolish for constantly rambling about something that has nothing whatsoever to do with any plot element in the book.
The only function "trim" serves, then, is to portray the Africa stand-in as having a morally superior value system, and not just one held at the culture level, but one held at the individual character level. Without having a plot that connects to it in a coherent way, though, it's just virtue-signaling.
One could give a straight reading of the book that simply says that within Dickinson's world, trim is nonsense. Your social connectedness and actions regarding it are irrelevant, within the world of Baru Cormorant. Every time Tau appeals to trim, the events repudiate that interpretation. And funnily enough, Tau does end up a dupe in the end, betrayed to "the Cancrioth." Who are they? Sentient, cancerous tumors that make you immortal, 'n stuff. [More bad writing. Don't ask.]
So, did Dickinson mean to say that trim is nonsense, and don't listen to Tau-Indi? I don't think so. I just don't think he figured out how to plot out the novel, and that he was more interested in the virtue-signaling aspect of writing about trim. When I wrote about Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, I argued that her pronoun gimmick was poorly executed, but ultimately, did not undercut what was otherwise a truly smart book. In this case, Dickinson undercut himself with the virtue-signaling gimmick.
Speaking of pronouns, though, did you notice something? Probably not. I never used a pronoun for Tau-Indi. Tau is non-binary. (Personally, I hate "they," and think the language should settle on a gender-neutral, singular pronoun. I can't bring myself to type, "they," but that's what Dickinson used. We can be considerate and respectful, and still be grammar-nazis!) The whole point of Tau is to be Jiminy Cricket (sorry again), as well as a political symbol of diversity for the Oriati-are-the-good-guys thesis. Let's call it a problem that Tau turned into a dupe, but will I call virtue-signaling on the use of a non-binary character as the moral center?
No. Nonsense. Baru is the main character, and essentially the villain. Dickinson does a great job with LGBTQ characters at the individual level as fully fleshed out characters. The fact that a non-binary character happens to be the moral center doesn't mean that Dickinson is doing the pedestal thing with LGBTQ characters. Not with Baru there! So, that's not virtue-signaling.
However...
Dickinson made a strange choice here. Tau-Indi is Oriati royalty. Scratch that. African royalty. And, non-binary. This is both a missed opportunity, and suggestive of virtue-signaling with respect to portrayal of the Africa stand-in.
Dickinson is very interested in LGBTQ issues, and his perspective is clear. But, if you're going to write about Africa, there are some considerations. The US recently recalled its ambassador to Zambia for challenging the Zambian government's extreme hostility to the LGBTQ community. That's one recent example, but many African countries are extremely hostile to LGBTQ rights. I'm not going to make this post a list of all of the horrendous things done to the LGBTQ community across the African continent, but there's a lot.
So when Dickinson constructs his Africa stand-in, he makes its spokesperson and royal leader a non-binary person, where everyone among the Oriati is just totally cool with that. You know, like it is in Zambia, and similar countries.
This is a long-running issue for the left. How do you balance multiculturalism as a value with respect for, say, the LGBTQ community when there are cultures that don't respect the LGBTQ community? Sure, the US has political fights over... bathrooms... but compared to Zambia, or Uganda, or many other African nations, the US is far more open and friendly to the LGBTQ community than much of Africa. How do we assess these competing values? This is a long-running tension within the left, and if you're looking for an answer from me, that's certainly not the point of this post.
Rather, the point is that Dickinson wanted to have his cake and eat it too. That meant writing an Africa stand-in where everyone is totally cool with the LGBTQ community, in addition to having every individual character hold to a morally superior ethos so that it can serve as a moral foil to the evil of Falcrest.
There was one sequence in which Dickinson had an Oriati griot of the "satirist" variety mention, during a performance to the royalty, that yeah, everything's awesome for royalty, but there are actually poor people for whom stuff maybe ain't so great, but it was a throw-away line, nothing was done with it, and it was brushed aside.
That ain't gonna cut it. Not when his America/West stand-in is portrayed as such a uniform evil, because other than that, Dickinson wrote an Africa stand-in that was practically perfect in ev-er-y way. And in that world of horrors, that was a choice. A choice to signal a view of Africa based on Dickinson's personal virtue.
This interpretation of The Monster Baru Cormorant relies on the premise that Falcrest is America/Western right-wing ideology, and the Oriati Mbo stand in for Africa. The Oriati really are Africa. Africanized names, griots, discussion of their history with slavery, the whole deal. Science fiction and fantasy are always about metaphor, and once we accept the idea that Dickinson is critiquing American and western right-wing ideologies through Falcrest, ducking the Africa metaphor becomes truly unsustainable. Don't believe me? Read it. See if you don't think it's Africa. And at that point, putting it on a pedestal gets into virtue-signaling. That's a stark contrast to The Traitor Baru Cormorant.
And quickly, let's do a contrast to Octavia Butler, just for fun. Yes, I keep mentioning the Earthseed books, because I recently read them, and they stuck in my head, even though they aren't her best books. But, even her weaker books are better than the vast majority of what's out there.
Anyway, like most of Butler's work, they dealt with issues like racism and misogyny. Slavery, sexual assault, and a range of heavy stuff. Octavia Butler. However, dealing with racism and misogyny head-on does not mean either making all men or all white people villains, nor does it mean making all women or African-Americans unimpeachably good. Racism and misogyny are tendencies that can be expressed to varying degrees among different people, and within different institutions, but individuals are different. (Just like Brian tells you to be.) Lauren Olamina's brother, Keith, was African-American, but that didn't mean he couldn't be a sociopath. Her brother, Marcus, while not a sociopath, wound up complicit with the organization that enslaved her for a year and a half, then knowingly kept her daughter from her after her daughter was stolen. Why? Because people as individuals can be complex, and react according to a varied set of influences. Even Lauren, herself, could be viewed through different lenses, and her daughter's comments after her death showed some truly valid critiques. Fascinating. Painting an entire people as the good guys, though? No.
But Dickinson did. To signal his virtue.
So I'm going to end this post with a question. What if Dickinson didn't? What if he had written a place called Oriati Mbo, which was clearly Africa, and the people there were awful? If they were awful in ways that had any resemblance at all to existing stereotypes... he'd have problems.
H.P. Lovecraft was among the more famous genre writers, but he was also really racist, if you read the subtext. Dickinson was basically doing the anti-Lovecraft by putting the Oriati Mbo on a pedestal, knowing that we all now know to look for Lovecraft racist subtext.
Dickinson over-corrected. And that's really a good definition of political correctness: over-correcting for bigotry. Just because bigotry is real, and it is, doesn't mean you can't engage in problematic behavior in an attempt to correct for it. When readers in the science fiction & fantasy community do that, they can turn into an ugly mob, going after an innocent person.
Just ask Isabel Fall. Who is she? Stay tuned, for next week.
*Sorry for all the Jiminy Cricket stuff. This is particularly on my mind at the moment, as I am currently reading Cory Doctorow's Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom. OK, but not a strong recommendation.
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