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Foz Meadows
Mar. 6th, 2012 09:15 pmEvery so often, I'll come across a new blog that is so good, that lines up with my own tastes and beliefs and interests so perfectly that I'll scream its praises to the sky, fling links and quotes about with abandon and generally behave like an excitable toddler hyped up on sugar. 'This is what the internet should be like! It should be like this all the time! And now I'm going to READ ALL THE POSTS! INTERNET! FOREVER!' I shout excitedly when I encounter a blog like this.
Foz Meadows' blog is one such blog. I can't believe I didn't discover it sooner. Hers is one of those voices that has been floating around the same circles I frequent (SF/F and YA online literary communities and commentariat, social justice sites that focus on pop culture), and from time to time, someone I follow has linked to one of her posts. But I never sat down and read her blog (or her books) in any focused kind of way until today.
And what a treasure trove I was missing out on! Here she is on the problems with the current crop of YA dystopian novels:
It’s the Ferris wheel effect: a nostalgia for the present day rooted in being grateful for what we have, rather than in asking where we’re headed. It’s dystopia with the safeties on - and that is, to me, an alarming inversion of how the genre should work. I have nothing against stories being written purely for escapist purposes, but dystopia is not the ideal genre for it. Of course, as in all things, your mileage may vary, in which case you’re wholly entitled to disagree. Yet I’d ask that you ask yourself: what, exactly, is escapist about an uncritical dystopia? While critical protagonists set out to change society, allowing us the fantasy of being world-altering revolutionaries, uncritical protagonists remain wrapped up in themselves, dealing with immediate, personal obstacles rather than tackling their root causes. Such characters can still change the world, of course – or rather, be instrumental in its change – but the difference is one of intention: their rebellion stems from a desire to be left alone, not to combat injustice, and this difference shows in how the story treats them. They are kept safer than their critical counterparts – exposed to action and loss, rather than danger and consequence – because if something sufficiently bad were to happen or be realistically threatened, then their stories would no longer stand as purely escapist fictions: the audience would no longer want to share in their experiences.
To which I say, yes, and yes!
Like me, she's an Australian living in the UK (in fact, she's only a year younger than I am, and her time at Sydney Uni overlapped mine by at least two, and possibly three years, so I'm sure we knew people in common). Like me, she finds being IDed at UK supermarkets annoying.
She writes with eloquence about the frustrations of being a teenager, of not having your voice heard (and although I loved most of high school, her words resonate):
High school students of the world: you are not prisoners. You are not stupid. You have rights. You have opinions. You know what you feel. The rest of us have either forgotten or are in the process of forgetting, because where you are now? It’s about survival. Once you’re out of the jungle, you don’t go wading back in to fight the tigers and tame the lantana. But that’s why those things persist. You get out, and you’re safe, so you forget. You see the little tweaks and changes on the news, and you forget how bad it really was. You grow up. You start to doubt your teenage intelligence. You wonder if it was just because you were seventeen and an idiot that you hated your creepy geography teacher, the one who knocked the girls’ pens off their desks so he could peek down their shirts when they bent over to pick them up, or that you couldn’t find any practical or intellectual application for what you were asked to do, or that nobody would listen to you or had the power to do anything when you told them you were depressed or being bullied.
Her social justice awakening was almost identical to mine:
[W]hat I’m coming to realise is that being white and well-off is like living in a bubble, and that racism – and sexism, and homophobia, and all those other terrible creeds and isms – are like a raging river on which you float, unaffected. And if none of the river’s attendant perils threaten you personally – if you are not really interested in what goes on beneath your feet – then you will never notice the un-bubbled masses dashed against the rocks; or see the snares which threaten so many others; or worry about a shifting sandbank changing the course of the river; or spare a thought for those who drown, unable to fight the current. And even if you inflate your bubble with a spirit of kinship, love and charity, without that further awareness, you will be a lesser person than might otherwise be the case.
Her words about growing (up?) are taken from my mouth, where they lay heavy like stones, and given an eloquence I couldn't possibly manage:
Nobody ever grows up. We just grow. But our language, which betrays so much of culture, suggests otherwise: hierarchies are linear, top to bottom: growing up means growing better. Nobody grows down. And yet up connotes even more than that. It makes us think of a fixed destination when there is none; it makes us want to not only cast off who we were, but disparage it as unnecessary, as though the very notion of ever being someone else is embarrassing, taboo; as though that prior person were utterly unrelated to every single subsequent incarnation.
Hello, new internet hero! Where the hell have you been all my life?
ETA: We also both used to write for the ABC Book Show's blog. Can't believe I didn't remember that!
Foz Meadows' blog is one such blog. I can't believe I didn't discover it sooner. Hers is one of those voices that has been floating around the same circles I frequent (SF/F and YA online literary communities and commentariat, social justice sites that focus on pop culture), and from time to time, someone I follow has linked to one of her posts. But I never sat down and read her blog (or her books) in any focused kind of way until today.
And what a treasure trove I was missing out on! Here she is on the problems with the current crop of YA dystopian novels:
It’s the Ferris wheel effect: a nostalgia for the present day rooted in being grateful for what we have, rather than in asking where we’re headed. It’s dystopia with the safeties on - and that is, to me, an alarming inversion of how the genre should work. I have nothing against stories being written purely for escapist purposes, but dystopia is not the ideal genre for it. Of course, as in all things, your mileage may vary, in which case you’re wholly entitled to disagree. Yet I’d ask that you ask yourself: what, exactly, is escapist about an uncritical dystopia? While critical protagonists set out to change society, allowing us the fantasy of being world-altering revolutionaries, uncritical protagonists remain wrapped up in themselves, dealing with immediate, personal obstacles rather than tackling their root causes. Such characters can still change the world, of course – or rather, be instrumental in its change – but the difference is one of intention: their rebellion stems from a desire to be left alone, not to combat injustice, and this difference shows in how the story treats them. They are kept safer than their critical counterparts – exposed to action and loss, rather than danger and consequence – because if something sufficiently bad were to happen or be realistically threatened, then their stories would no longer stand as purely escapist fictions: the audience would no longer want to share in their experiences.
To which I say, yes, and yes!
Like me, she's an Australian living in the UK (in fact, she's only a year younger than I am, and her time at Sydney Uni overlapped mine by at least two, and possibly three years, so I'm sure we knew people in common). Like me, she finds being IDed at UK supermarkets annoying.
She writes with eloquence about the frustrations of being a teenager, of not having your voice heard (and although I loved most of high school, her words resonate):
High school students of the world: you are not prisoners. You are not stupid. You have rights. You have opinions. You know what you feel. The rest of us have either forgotten or are in the process of forgetting, because where you are now? It’s about survival. Once you’re out of the jungle, you don’t go wading back in to fight the tigers and tame the lantana. But that’s why those things persist. You get out, and you’re safe, so you forget. You see the little tweaks and changes on the news, and you forget how bad it really was. You grow up. You start to doubt your teenage intelligence. You wonder if it was just because you were seventeen and an idiot that you hated your creepy geography teacher, the one who knocked the girls’ pens off their desks so he could peek down their shirts when they bent over to pick them up, or that you couldn’t find any practical or intellectual application for what you were asked to do, or that nobody would listen to you or had the power to do anything when you told them you were depressed or being bullied.
Her social justice awakening was almost identical to mine:
[W]hat I’m coming to realise is that being white and well-off is like living in a bubble, and that racism – and sexism, and homophobia, and all those other terrible creeds and isms – are like a raging river on which you float, unaffected. And if none of the river’s attendant perils threaten you personally – if you are not really interested in what goes on beneath your feet – then you will never notice the un-bubbled masses dashed against the rocks; or see the snares which threaten so many others; or worry about a shifting sandbank changing the course of the river; or spare a thought for those who drown, unable to fight the current. And even if you inflate your bubble with a spirit of kinship, love and charity, without that further awareness, you will be a lesser person than might otherwise be the case.
Her words about growing (up?) are taken from my mouth, where they lay heavy like stones, and given an eloquence I couldn't possibly manage:
Nobody ever grows up. We just grow. But our language, which betrays so much of culture, suggests otherwise: hierarchies are linear, top to bottom: growing up means growing better. Nobody grows down. And yet up connotes even more than that. It makes us think of a fixed destination when there is none; it makes us want to not only cast off who we were, but disparage it as unnecessary, as though the very notion of ever being someone else is embarrassing, taboo; as though that prior person were utterly unrelated to every single subsequent incarnation.
Hello, new internet hero! Where the hell have you been all my life?
ETA: We also both used to write for the ABC Book Show's blog. Can't believe I didn't remember that!
