Reading Wednesday

[liv]

Not much this week, busy busy. But let's not leave horrible stuff at the top of my journal.

Recently read: Not much reading at all this week. I really enjoyed nicki's take on Cinderella.

I sort of skimmed the last chapter of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality over jack's shoulder. I started reading the fic when it was only about a third complete, and decided that although it has some real strengths, it also has too many of Yudkowsky's annoying tics, and I gave up at the point where it had a long soliloquy about how death is the most terrible thing and everybody should spend all their efforts preventing death, followed only a few paragraphs later with a justification of why the good guys should kill their enemies. It's a bit unfair on a work to read just the first third and the final chapter, but I think I probably won't in fact read the whole thing.

Currently reading: Still Imajica, which is getting dramatic.

My junior PhD student's literature review, plus a bunch of drafts of first year med student dissertations. This is one of the fun parts of my job, reading stuff that students are really interested in. Some of them are going to be hard work, because they have no idea how to write and I need to line-edit, but some of them are actually teaching me things, which is always satisfying.

Up next: Not sure, but I did want to pass on the news that the next Vorkosigan novel is going to be about Cordelia. Both kate_nepveu and the vorkosigan comm are as much wary as excited, and personally I think the series went way downhill after Komarr. I'm probably more keen to read dsudis' long fanfic; everybody is excited about the coincidence that Dira Sudis' choice to expand the minor character Jole matches the title of the upcoming Bujold.

I'm making note of some of the recs from jimhines' Invisible 2, cos it's a pretty rare experience to see diversity recs that cover anything beyond the obvious half dozen books that get rec'd everywhere.

I'm also seeing reviews of Jo Walton's The Just City starting to pop up, and I'm trying to get a sense of the book without spoiling myself. I mean, I'm pretty much right in the centre of the target audience for a geek take on Plato, but I'm picking up the impression, particularly from this interview, that there's rather more rape in the book than I'm entirely happy reading about. I mean, I very nearly gave up Walton's first novel, The King's Peace because it opens with a rape scene, and I'm glad I kept going but I don't know if I can handle much more exploration of the theme of why men rape women than that. Can anyone who's read the book comment? I can cope with graphic if it's just a few lines of description of what the assailant did to another person's body, but I'm less keen on a lot of exploration of how rapists feel about rape, or if the whole context rests on the assumption that women's lives are dictated by fear of rape or suffering caused by rape.

Comments

[legionseagle]

Oh, phew! I'm glad someone else bailed on Methods of Rationality; I couldn't get along with it at all (plus, this wasn't an AU Harry given a different upbringing, it was Spock under the name Harry.)

Rape/Consent in The Just City

[forestofglory]

I was surprised by how much stuff about rape and consent was in the book, and I might have waited to read it had know what I was getting into. (I try to save difficult books for when my mental health can deal with them.)

So consent and the idea that people have equal significance are major themes.

One of the view point characters is Apollo and the book opens with him wondering why Daphne would rather be a tree than be raped by him. He doesn't rape anyone else in the book, but he does spent time thinking about why he was wrong.

I would not say that the women's lives are dictated by fear of rape. A female view point character is raped, but she doesn't live in fear. Also people are assigned sex partners for the purpose of procreation by the city government and those scenes are of dubious consent at best.

[jenett]

On _The Just City_

The book is, as a whole, about questions of consent and free will, and the ability to make choices, and the limitations society places on choices, in a variety of ways, of which sexual consent is one branch but not the only one (and I'd say not the primary one, but it's the kind of thing where if you left out sexual consent issues there'd be a gaping hole, because they're both a part of life in general, and of that particular setting in particular.)

The most explicit of the actual scenes in question is about two screens on my phone (mostly dialogue) and then some discussion afterward about what one does about it (with reasonable nuance and complexity.)

There's some later discussion of how rapists feel about it, but it's proportionately much less than how other people feel about, and why it's a problem. There's also instances of people doing horrible things and then figuring out later why those things are bad and doing reasonable things to change that. (And not in the 'I have done horrible things, now I am apologetic, you must forgive me!' mode.)

The characters whose choices are not respected deal with it in varying ways, but it's uniformly much more "That was a horrible thing, and X is responsible for choosing to do a horrible thing when I said no, but I am going to get on with my life, much of which I enjoy, even if this setting means I have to keep seeing X in various places." than anything else. (Bearing in mind that the context of the book means that just moving somewhere else/never seeing that person ever again are not really options.)

There's also a certain amount of "If you go off privately with someone of the opposite gender, people are going to assume you want to do sexual things with them" but again, it's not out of proportion with the context of the book and the societal assumptions about meaningful relationships (given the take on that in Plato's _Republic_.)

[hatam_soferet]

Yesyes! I thought it was dreadfully self-conscious and really rather boring.

[naath]

I have read The Just City. I can comment on the rape but not without some minor spoilers. I hope you don't mind.

The opening is Apollo musing on why Daphne wouldn't let him catch her (it seems other nymphs liked to be chased and caught). Daphne is of course not raped, but rather becomes a tree. Apollo does not understand this, his personal journey to understand better that *everyone* (even non-Gods! shock!) deserves to really be treated as have Equal Significance (is this taken straight from Plato?) takes up a fair chunk of the book, it isn't limited to sexual consent but to all types of situations in which some people are sometimes denied agency.

One of the female POV characters (there are at least two (sorry, memory fail)) in the book is raped "on-screen", the scene is brief but painful, the rapist is not brought to justice, and denies that he has done wrong thereafter (in at least one on-screen conversation, we never get into his POV).

Multiple characters in the book reference historical rape, of themselves and their family members, sometimes in graphic (but brief) detail.

As per Plato's Republic (at least according to Walton, I have not read it) the majority of the characters are expected not to form personal sexual relationships but to have sex with partners selected by (rigged) lottery following festivals of Hera. Several such experiences are depicted directly or discussed; none of the participants describes the experience as rape, but clearly not all of them are happy with the situation, and their consent is at best coerced by their society.

The Just City (per the Republic?) is generally portrayed as a good place to be a woman with equal opportunities in almost all areas of learning (it seems only women get to do child care) and the characters are not portrayed as being constantly worried about rape (neither outwardly nor in their own POV sections).

[cjwatson]

I read something like 80 chapters of HP:MOR when I first heard about it; it was sort of gripping in its own way, but it reminded me of somebody who's playing an RPG and has cranked their character up to the maximum in all possible ways and is now having fun wandering around stomping everything. Entertaining for a while, but it got a bit overdone, so I probably won't go back and read the end. (Plus I cannot abide Yudkowsky's view of the world at all: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/rokos-basilisk-wants-you.html and http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/cultofbayes.html are interesting takes, the former essentially bizarre but the latter rather more serious.)

[slashmarks]

I gave up on Methods of Rationality when he (spoiler) killed off Hermione to give Podpersoned!Harry angst. She was the only character I felt I could actually empathize with, even if the other characters were kind of entertaining to watch. I think the Machiavellian stuff and Hermione were the only reasons I read that far -- I tend to react badly to books written as ideological tracts even when they are widely agreed to be masterpieces. On the whole, I think the problem with MOR is that the hero is never allowed to be wrong about anything, along with some serious blind spots.

(Regarding blind spots: The tract about how all the world is darkness except for civilizations stemming from the Enlightenment was, um, painful. There's also a one line shot against people w/ repressed memories that I occasionally still think about, consider emailing the author about alongside a list of relevant studies, and decide that would be pointless.)

[liv]

I was actually quite taken with the conceit of exploring what happens if you put Spock into a context where there is not only magic, but inconsistent magic. (Mind you, I'm thinking back to our discussion about the term Mary Sue, given that this Harry is about the most literal Mary Sue imaginable, he's avowedly a self-insert character for Yudkowsky, with even more awesome powers than the original Boy Who Lived. Male author, male character, over a hundred chapters of him saving the world and being loved by everybody and the internet thinks it's a work of genius.)

So my problem wasn't the set-up of the AU. It's not quite in the tradition of the best fanfic where an AU is used to explore canon characters in a new setting, but I'm not in principle uninterested in using original characters to explore a canon setting. It just didn't work for me, either for providing new insights into the HP-verse or as an allegory of moral philosophy, in large part because the underlying moral philosophy ranges between sophomoric and just plain awful.

[liv]

Yeah, it's got way too much explaining probability and genetics and other fairly basic scientific concepts in infodumps that get in the way of the story. The self-consciousness didn't bother me too much, I'm at least somewhat interested reading about a child prodigy coming to understand that it takes more than academic smarts to handle life. That said it's hugely self-indulgent for Yudkowsky to work out his issues over a hundred chapters and publish it on the internet, which outweighed how much interest I had in said issues.

Re: Rape/Consent in The Just City

[liv]

Thank you, this is really helpful, it's exactly the sort of information I needed to decide whether I want to read this book. I think I will at the very least save it for when I'm feeling strong, and I might skip it altogether. Cos almost worse than explicit rape for me is spending a lot of time in the head of a rapist thinking about why what he did was wrong.

[liv]

Thank you so much, this really answers my exact question while keeping the details of the plot helpfully vague. It's an entire book about consent and free will that includes sexual consent, that's helpful to know. And I'm glad that it avoids the manpain narrative of the repentant rapist, cos that's something I really can't stand.

[liv]

Thanks, naath, this is helpful. I'm not hugely hugely spoiler phobic on this sort of level, otherwise I'd have avoided reading any reviews or author interviews at all, so this much detail isn't a problem for me.

The Apollo thing is what's mainly putting me off, I don't want to read a lot of stuff about his motivations and justifications for the attempted rape or how he feels bad about what he did in retrospect. But your description and jenett's and a certain amount of trust in Walton as a writer make me think I could probably handle it. The partners lottery dubcon thing is about what I was expecting when I saw the book was about Plato's Republic, so I think I can live with that.

[liv]

Yeah, Yudkowsky's philosophy is hopeless, in very large part because he overtly refuses to actually study any philosophy properly and thinks he can figure everything out for himself by thinking really hard. And also because he lacks empathy to understand that the technocratic society he imagines would make him happy would be absolutely rotten for lots of people who are not like him.

The Tennant article is really odd; he has many of the same problems with Yudkowsky that I do, but he also seems to be pushing the idea that Bayesian statistics is somehow the root of all evil and inherently connected to neo-liberal economics, which is a little far out. I did know about the whole ridiculous Basilisk thing, which is exactly typical of what happens if you overrate your own intelligence without reference to any external facts or scholarship.

I do agree about Methods of Rationality, it's not completely unreadably terrible, but it does feel like a write-up of a RPG by someone who identifies a bit too much with his own character. It's not at all bad for an inexperienced writer, but as a story it is far from perfect, even without the weird allegory of extremely weird philosophy.

[liv]

Yeah, the fridging Hermione thing was evident from the final chapter, and it's one of the things that disinclined me from going back and reading the rest. I did start out positively surprised by how Yudkowsky handled Hermione, I was expecting that if he made Harry super-intelligent he would discard Hermione and probably in sexist ways, but she's consistently a strong character whom the narrative obviously respects. In some ways I like the ending she gets in MoR better than the one she gets in JKR's epilogue, but only in some ways.

And yes, I agree, I don't like heavily ideological books, even when they're a lot better written than this. And the ideology here is this bizarre sort of theme park version of the Enlightenment, a fantasy by people who haven't really done more than dabbling in Enlightenment thought, and aren't willing to criticize the ways that the movement was racist and colonialist. I think it's not just that the Rationality crowd have a blind spot about things like race (and gender, oh boy are they awful about gender), it's that they are deliberately refusing to contemplate anything to do with social inequality because it doesn't fit into their world view, and because you can't really study it with physics-like science. That's a real problem.

[atreic]

Cards on the table, I'm gently-pro HPATMOR, although not actually pro enough to feel like going and reading how it ends, at the moment with my very busy life and To Read pile with much shorter excellent books in it. Which is not that I feel it doesn't have it's own huge dollop of problematic stuff, but hey, liking problematic stuff, we can do that.

I just feel twitchy about 'it's hugely self-indulgent for Yudkowsky to work out his issues over a hundred chapters and publish it on the internet'. I'm not sure if I'm twitchy because I don't think this sort of thing is self-indulgent, or because I think that the sentence heavily implies 'this amount of self indulgence is bad'. I guess a) there are a huge pile of non-famous people writing fanfic on the internet that you could levy the same criticism at, who I don't think _are_ doing bad things - they're Creating! And working things out! And maybe making themselves happier about themselves! and no-one is making anyone read what they write! and b) there are some absolutely awesome major works of mainstream literature / classical fiction that could be described as 'working out the author's issues over a long book'.

[kerrypolka]

Oh man, I also started reading Methods of Rationality and went "eh" a few chapters in a few years ago, but I didn't realise it was by the Less Wrong Eliezer Yudkowsky, who I thought was a bit of a crank.

[slashmarks]

I thought she'd probably be brought back, and now I'm curious -- what was her ending in MoR, if you don't mind?

Yeah. The Rationalist fetish for Enlightenment weirds me out a lot, because it's such a... shallow... understanding? It really seems like the point of view of someone who's never so much as read a single book about the era in question, or maybe something based off of what I was taught in (American) high school. Like, they read a one paragraph summary of the ideas and decided that was the Truth.

I've definitely a lot people in the Rationalist crowd who are like that, although I do want to say that there are some who aren't as well. It's largely why I abandoned it as a teenager.

[jack]

*hugs* Yes, I was going to say something similar. I agree with basically all the criticisms of it, but I don't know when those do and don't invalidate the things I liked.

[khalinche]

Thank you so much for the passing mention of Dira Sudis's fic, which has now afforded me a huge amount of reading pleasure. I agree that it's just as much fun to read, if not more, than some of the later books. Certainly comes across as less fanfictiony than Captain Vorpatril's Alliance.

[cjwatson]

From other things he's written about e.g. scepticism, I think Tennant has what for want of a better term I'll call the zeal of the apostate: he used to subscribe to this stuff, and now he's seen its flaws and tends to ascribe everything bad to them. I think he has at least spotted a correlation evident in Yudkowsky's circles that anyone hanging out with them would be well-advised to look out for; more than that I'd be hesitant to claim on my own behalf.