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Feb. 8th, 2023 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariI’ve found the words for why I don’t respect a lot of “literary” fiction, but it involves judging a book I haven’t read yet.
I found a “literary” book on the library shelves that looks like it’s about an evil spider monster as a metaphor for racism against Japanese-Americans. The kind of story I would normally be interested in would be about racism against spider monsters, worldbuilding as if spider monsters were a real thing. When you don’t think about how the world you’re creating works, you may fail to examine the concepts you’ve imported from your view of this world. E.g. you might give your monster all the negative traits you assume real-world trans women have, because the monster is “bad” and to you trans women are “bad.” When you consider what the monster does and why, you also consider why the monster is really “bad” in the first place, and what you’re really arguing against, and your argument becomes accordingly more solid. Worldbuilding is by no means proof against bad assumptions, but it’s the only way in which fiction has more insight or intellectual value than nonfictional essays.
I checked out the book. I’ll see if I’m underestimating it.
I found a “literary” book on the library shelves that looks like it’s about an evil spider monster as a metaphor for racism against Japanese-Americans. The kind of story I would normally be interested in would be about racism against spider monsters, worldbuilding as if spider monsters were a real thing. When you don’t think about how the world you’re creating works, you may fail to examine the concepts you’ve imported from your view of this world. E.g. you might give your monster all the negative traits you assume real-world trans women have, because the monster is “bad” and to you trans women are “bad.” When you consider what the monster does and why, you also consider why the monster is really “bad” in the first place, and what you’re really arguing against, and your argument becomes accordingly more solid. Worldbuilding is by no means proof against bad assumptions, but it’s the only way in which fiction has more insight or intellectual value than nonfictional essays.
I checked out the book. I’ll see if I’m underestimating it.
