It’s funny, isn’t it, because you’d think most people read genre to access different worlds. We all know that sense of wonder and delight when you start reading a book and get transported to a new world, full of different cultures and expectations … yet it has to be a very standard kind of difference. Try to incorporate different cultures and histories which exist in our world and people start to balk. Like that hilarious Junot Diaz quote: “Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they think we’re taking over.”
I don’t worry about alienating readers because I write about cultures or mindsets that are outside their expectations. For one thing, I think readers are often underestimated by the industry. I confess I’m always mildly surprised when a white man tells me they enjoy my work, but that has happened!
I’ve found being a bit different has often been an advantage in my writing career. I call it the “viola effect”–an acquaintance told me he had learnt to play the viola because if you play the viola you get the chance to do public performances earlier on than, say, a violin player. Viola players are in demand because fewer people learn to play it than the violin or the cello. So if you’re a bit different there will be people who are hungering for what you do, because there’s so little of it out there — there will be people longing for that Chinese American fantasy, or that tender South African YA. That’s real and something to remember when you’re facing all the various discouragements of a writing career in a white/Western-dominated Anglophone publishing industry.
What I actually worry about more is being acceptably different. Colonialism isn’t just about the taking of territory, but about the taking over of cultures and minds–there’s a reason one of the most standard tools of colonialism is preventing subject peoples from speaking their own languages. I am the product of colonialism: I would not live where I live, think and speak in English, or do the work that I do, if not for it. In a sense Malaysia itself is the product of colonialism–people often refer to the characters in my historical fiction as “Malaysian” and I always get a bit annoyed, because the construct that is “Malaysia” did not exist before 1963.
I think of my country and myself as recovering from a long colonial hangover. It’s like we were products that were made for the purposes of Empire and now we have to figure out what we’re for, if not for that. So I worry that my work is too easy for Western readers to digest. It’s too mainstream. And yet being a little mainstream, a little recognisable, is a good way to convey messages that may be unwelcome. Sorcerer to the Crown arises out of the fact that I’m a product of colonialism. But it’s intended as a reminder. It’s saying: “So are you, Britain.
Zen Cho.
SFF in Conversation: Culture, history and novels – A conversation between Aliette de Bodard, Zen Cho, Kate Elliott, Cindy Pon, and Tade Thompson
(via thebooksmugglers)
Currently reading Sorcerer to the Crown, and it is excellent.
(via tkingfisher)
