Your thoughts about Butler vs. Hopkinson are interesting thoughts that I don’t entirely understand. :) Probably that’s because I haven’t read enough of either author to get a sense of what larger themes they keep returning to. I will say that I didn’t think Brown Girl in the Ring (despite the title) was about race much at all. The characters happened to almost all be of a race that is different from mine, and that is different from most writers and readers of science fiction, but there was almost nothing in the book about interracial interactions, or what it means to be Black or White or whatever (Hopkinson capitalizes those, so I will here too, even though I don’t normally). There were White people trapped in blockaded Toronto too; city/’burbs was more about class than race.

ps: 1) if you want people to comment here, leaving a comments link at the bottom of the lj post would probably help.

That’s not actually easy. The LJ post is a syndication of my RSS feed, which just pulls my Parenthetical posts whole and sticks them on LJ. I could add a comments link to the bottom of every Parenthetical post, which would be weird for people who read them not on LJ (but maybe I’ll do that anyway; that’s probably the simplest of a lot of klugey solutions). Or I could have another LJ account that isn’t a feed, into which I paste every post and add a comments link. Or I could go back to just having the feed run the “summary” of the post, which is just the first couple of lines and therefore not really long enough to entice anyone to read the rest. Or maybe there’s another option I don’t know about, like a WordPress plugin. (Anybody have any ideas?)

2) no no, you’re thinking of “Kindred” — that’s the timetravel/slaver one. The “Parable” books are the dystopian future/syncretic religion ones. And I haven’t read those, either.

Oops — you’re right! The only Butler I’ve read is Xenogenesis (which I read in high school), so I got confused.

There’s probably a paper to be written about how this reflects the different ways in which they are working through and metabolizing the Western idea of “race,” Butler confronting the biological-difference-as-destiny part of that idea and transforming it, and Hopkinson working with a more fluid, more modern idea of culture. But I don’t feel like writing it.

In part because Hopkinson is a great author I’ve never actually read. I’ve read *in* her books, but haven’t read *through* them. As with Butler, whose blurbs and covers I examined with fascination as a kid in the sf section (it was the copy that inexplicably features a white Lilith); I had to wait til I was ready. Maybe now’s the time.

…

ps: 1) if you want people to comment here, leaving a comments link at the bottom of the lj post would probably help.

2) no no, you’re thinking of “Kindred” — that’s the timetravel/slaver one. The “Parable” books are the dystopian future/syncretic religion ones. And I haven’t read those, either.

Newford is kind of a guilty pleasure for me, especially the Celtic magic connections, but the fact that it’s already fantasy rather than sci-fi makes it easier to interweave the traditional magic. (And “Misc. Southwest Native American” is pretty accurate — which is to say that it’s a white-guy view of The Holy Native Americans, and therefore probably not terribly accurate at all. DeLint always seemed like a wolf-shirt-wearer to me. See “guilty,” above.)

And white people can absolutely be traditional! Celtic and Russian are good examples. Norse mythology. Christianity or Judaism would count for my purposes too; modern religions of course also have traditional “magic” (even if they wouldn’t call it that) and a mythology. What interests me is the intersection / combination of The Future (science fiction) and The Past (“traditional culture”).

I haven’t read Parable of the Sower — from the blurbs it looks like the “science fiction” part is just a way to get the main character back in time to slavery; is that not the case? Is there more futuristic context?

Marc:

I have, and I loved it! It definitely felt like it was set in a specific place (Zimbabwe), but… Oh! I was about to say that I didn’t remember anything about traditional cultures, but then I remembered about the village they get trapped in! That was awesome. Good call!

That, of course, assumes that the phrase “traditional cultures” doesn’t give you the willies — which it does for me, being raised by an anthropologist and all. What is “traditional”? “Traditional” changes all the time. Can white people be “traditional”? Or is “traditional” for non-normative Others? Etc. etc.

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents were actually the first similar books that came to mind.