Recent reading

[luzula]

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker (2017, audiobook)
Okay, this was an eye-opener. I really didn't know how many bad effects there were of not getting enough sleep. I usually do get enough sleep, but this book convinced me to be more vigilant about it.

Svälten by Magnus Västerbro (2018, The Famine, only in Swedish)
A historian writes about the Swedish famine years 1867-1869. This book won prizes and was reviewed widely, so I picked it up. And it's good--definitely popular science, but in a good way. The writing is sort of like painting, like, it pauses and meanders a bit, filling in more details. Although the subject is heavy, obviously.

I also did not manage to finish Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, which I was reading for my fannish book club. The writing did not engage me, and I rolled my eyes at the approaching YA romance (the main characters are two brother-sister sets! obviously they will pair up in the predictable way!). Maybe YA is just not for me. (I think that, and then I remember Frances Hardinge.)

But I wanted to talk (yet again) about magic and democracy. This book has downtrodden persecuted magic users again, although to be fair it's more realistic here because they don't actually have magic anymore (at least in the beginning). But in general I feel like people who have magic are usually a bad metaphor for downtrodden minorities. It seems more probable to me that people who have magic would become powerful and be the people who are doing the treading down. Magic as a metaphor for the rich and powerful? But there's a reason why it's not written that way: magic is cool, right? You want your heroes to be cool and have magic. But you also want your heroes to be the underdogs.

Comments

[dolorosa_12]

I've certainly read some books where magic is a metaphor for privilege, but you're right that in YA dystopias it tends to be the other way around. Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown is a Regency-era fantasy where magic is very much the province of upper class white men -- and their horror at the fact that other people (women, non-white men) also possess magical powers. Vic James wrote a series (of which I've only read the first book, Gilded Cage) where magical people are essentially the upper class in modern Britain (and they behave and live in ways that are clearly meant to be read as the real-world British upper class), and where the non-magical people are enslaved as indentured servants.

But in general, it's rare. I remember talking to Sophia McDougall, who wrote one of my favourite series, the Romanitas trilogy (my default icon is made from a sketch McDougall drew of one of the main characters), in which two of the main characters are slaves on the run from a global empire. The series is, for the most part, a political thriller — except that these two slave characters have supernatural powers. She said she wrote the series like that because she felt the odds were too much against them (two escaped slaves under threat of death, trying to run from the military and surveillance might of a global empire), so she gave them powers to make their survival a bit more realistic. I guess that's the case for those other dystopian stories about oppressed people with magical powers: if they didn't have magic, they would have been dead before the story started.

[luzula]

But see, I didn't like the ending of Sorcerer to the Crown. : ( Prunella by the end was so powerful that she's basically a dictator, and I don't think the book actually shows that she can be trusted to handle that much power. The book explicitly says "magic is not a democracy" like it's a good thing, just when Prunella becomes the head magician (or whatever it's called). I mean, it's not like dictatorship becomes a good thing just because it's a woman who's a dictator.

I guess that's the case for those other dystopian stories about oppressed people with magical powers: if they didn't have magic, they would have been dead before the story started.

But haven't most oppressed people been used for labor, not killed outright? I mean, sure, specific people were killed, but as a class they were useful to the rulers.

I'll look up the Vic James series! I remember isis has been reccing that too. Oh, and there was a book with magic oppressors that I read a while ago, but it was unfortunately terribly bad in other respects.

[dolorosa_12]

You're not the only one who disliked the ending to Sorcerer to the Crown. I didn't mind it, because it made sense from a character perspective: it was clear from the beginning that Prunella was kind of a self-centred (and indeed selfish) person whose experiences had taught her that the only way to survive was by accumulating as much material comfort and social status as posssible — so becoming dictatorial was simply a more extreme step in that direction.

But haven't most oppressed people been used for labor, not killed outright? I mean, sure, specific people were killed, but as a class they were useful to the rulers.

The characters I was thinking of were those inclined to fight back or challenge the status quo — not those who were prepared to miserably accept their lot in life as exploited labor. And, as I say, based on discussions I've had with authors who wrote this type of character (revolutionaries, essentially), they gave such characters magical powers so that they would have a realistic chance at fighting back against overwhelming odds. But you are right that rulers tend not to directly kill all oppressed people — just the ones likely to undermine them.

That book you reviewed sounds terrible. I googled the author to confirm that she was from the US — and she was — because it sounded from your review like a typical American representation of revolution. I see it time and time again in US media in particular — a fundamental inability to understand and represent why oppressed people might want to overthrow their oppressors. It's either represented as jealousy (wanting wealth/power to be distributed more equally becomes a selfish desire to take things from those who have more), or it's grudgingly depicted as legitimate, but only if the revolution is carried out entirely without violence, and, if possible, without taking anything away from those in power, because to do so would be 'to go too far.' Frequently in this latter kind of story there is a conflict between the 'good' revolutionaries who don't want to hurt anyone or take anything away from the powerful, and the 'bad' ones, who are portrayed as extremists, unable to let go of their anger and grievances, or just wanting power for themselves to become new oppressors. It's the same mentality you see in the real world when people get angry that protesters are blocking traffic.

Once I recognised this pattern I realised it was everywhere in depictions of revolution. It's like the authors want to write a story about overthrowing oppression, but they subconsciously side with the oppressors, and it bleeds into the story without them noticing what they're actually implying.

[akamine_chan]

Sleep is so so so very important, and most people over here are chronically underslept. :|

[luzula]

Yeah, the book goes through the consequences of that for individual people and for society...

[scribe]

So perhaps you could say that Why We Sleep was really...an eye-closer? :D :D :D

(sorry, I'll show myself out)

[luzula]

Heh, I guess I left myself wide open for that!

[chestnut_pod]

Oh, another did-not-finish for Children of Blood and Bone, that's heartening. I managed to get to the end only through a monumental skimming effort. I'd be interested to hear what the book club had to say about it. What did its fans like about it?

Although I personally did not like CL Polk's Witchmark for petty reasons of pet peeves, it did have an interesting magic worldbuilding tweak that showed the different ways in which magic is treated based on the wielder's class position. Lots of people liked it much more than I, so you might too.

[luzula]

I dunno, ask a fan maybe? The others in book club liked it better than me, but I don't think any of them was super-enthusiastic.

So what's your pet peeve about Witchmark? I haven't read it.

[skygiants]

Legend of Korra attempted to do something with the magic-as-privilege-or-perceived-privilege thing re: benders and non-benders in the first season and ... almost entirely failed, because they were attempting a more complicated story than they had the skills to tell, but it was an interesting attempt.

[luzula]

Thanks, that sounds interesting! Sadly I am still not in a TV-watching mode, so any recs of TV series will probably fly right past me...it's funny, fifteen years ago I would mainline anime series.

[espresso_addict]

Magic as a metaphor for the ability to have children?

Is it a recent phenomenon? The kidlit of my childhood mostly tended to have dominant-class magic users. I don't recall the persecuted magic user trope before the relatively recent televised Merlin.

[luzula]

Magic as a metaphor for the ability to have children?

Hmm, how do you mean?

Is it a recent phenomenon? The kidlit of my childhood mostly tended to have dominant-class magic users. I don't recall the persecuted magic user trope before the relatively recent televised Merlin.

I don't know much about Merlin, but you're right! If we look at earlier fantasy like Tolkien, The Dark Is Rising, Earthsea, etc, then magic users are powerful, not persecuted. Hmm, the earliest example with persecuted magic users that I can think of is actually X-Men. Okay, that's mutants, but it's basically magic, and there becoming a mutant is kind of a metaphor for coming out as gay? Not just that, of course, but it's one of the ingredients.

[espresso_addict]

Just the 'magical' ability to give birth to new life in a historically underprivileged sector of society.

X-Men crossed my mind as soon as I'd saved the comment, and there's also (I think) earlier things like Chrysalids, where the children are telepathic, and other Wyndham now I think about it.

[oneiriad]

I feel that Jemisin did a fairly good job of a persecuted magic user narrative in her The Broken Earth trilogy. Mind you, those books also made it very clear what sort of extremes you'd need to go to to actually turn people with powerful magic into the downtrodden and hated minority, and what the consequences might end up being.

But in general, to me, having powerful magic users as the oppressed minority works about as well as when urban fantasy makes their vampires a metaphor for LGBTQ+ people. It gets hard to follow the claim that disliking vampires is just small-minded bigotry, when the vampires in question have literally been eating people for centuries, in some cases.

[luzula]

I haven't read the Jemisin one, hopefully I'll get around to it one day.

But in general, to me, having powerful magic users as the oppressed minority works about as well as when urban fantasy makes their vampires a metaphor for LGBTQ+ people. It gets hard to follow the claim that disliking vampires is just small-minded bigotry, when the vampires in question have literally been eating people for centuries, in some cases.

Yeah. To be fair, I've written persecuted werewolves fic myself. But those werewolves didn't have any power other than turning into wolves, and wolves themselves are persecuted as it is, so.

[oneiriad]

Werewolves as a persecuted minority can work well enough, especially if they don't turn into Wolfman-style man-eating monsters out of a horror movie. Vampires - not so much, most of the time.

[luzula]

Mine were just actual wolves. People get such different things out of the werewolf trope--some are into the horror, some want sexual dominance stuff. I mostly want connection with nature.

[oneiriad]

Yeah, those would definitely fit easily into the persecuted minority. Even in modern Europe, what with farmers still getting worked up about wolves, no matter how few (seriously - Denmark has - maybe 5 at the moment, tops? - and listening to some sheep farmers, you'd think it's the end of the world, as if dogs haven't been eating their sheep all along.)

[baronjanus]

There are several bits of media where magic is vaguely a metaphor for being queer. It's less about the power, more about being different, no better nor worse than the "mainstream" but hunted down regardless, and unable to stifle the spark within that makes you different. Unlike the comment above, it isn't about magic users who (like vampires) have any real power, let alone misuse said power. It's more about "something you have inside that, if extinguished, will make you less of what you are". That of course doesn't work in more structured worlds where magic users have their own cities or great powers or any of that thing, only where they're a minority often born within non-magic families.

[luzula]

Yeah, okay, that can make sense!

I mean, I've written persecuted werewolves fic myself. But those werewolves didn't have any power other than turning into wolves, and wolves themselves are persecuted as it is, so. It's just when people have powerful magic that it doesn't make much sense to me.