Or, when you realize that things you may like originate from morally bankrupt people.
I was browsing the internets today as I am wont to do, when, by chance, I happened to stumble upon the wikipedia article for The Legend of Earthsea, a subpar Sci-Fi miniseries. Perhaps subpar is not the correct word to describe it — It was on par for Sci-Fi miniseries, which is to say it was cheesy, uninspiring, and generally bad. It was better than some of the other programming on Sci-Fi, but much worse than any episode of Battlestar Galactica.
Down at the bottom of the page you’ll notice an intriguing link: The whitewashing of Earthsea. Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I read the first Earthsea book about a decade ago, so my memory of it is not the clearest, to say the least. I have not read beyond that book. I took a look at the link.
Reading LeGuin’s essay was a real eye-opener for me. While I can sympathize with her outrage over changing the story’s timeline, characters, plot points, LeGuin apparently is most concerned with the decision to depict the main character as white. I find the superficiality of her objections astounding and, not even astounding but repulsive. The vacuousness of her stance on this issue belies a much deeper intellectual corruption. Upon further exploration I found even further disgusting, anachronistic views from LeGuin, such as her commentary that it was only in her fourth book that she grew courageous enough to throw off the shackles of male perspective.
At least now I know never to take anything she has written or said seriously ever again.
I was reading through your site, enjoying your wit and intelligence, and then I hit this post and don’t know what to think.
LeGuin *is* most concerned with the racial aspects, because when she was dreaming up the story, this thought came to her:
“Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?”
The fact that her characters weren’t white provided an enormous amount of contextual implication and backstory. It’s a central pillar in the architecture of her story.
This same argument came up in The Matrix - another story where there was a very conscious decision to bring more color into the cast. If you thought about it (and watched the Animatrix) you’d see that white cultures were the ones who used the machines the most, so they were the first to go when the machines rebelled. Plus we’ve got missiles pointed everywhichway and we’re using up resources at an unsustainable rate. All signs point to a future with fewer white people.
Any good science-fiction writer is going to try to mix logically consistent science with their fiction. A future in which whites are a smaller part of the genepool is almost assured… so LeGuin chose that as an element of the ’science’ part of her fiction. It wasn’t just tacked on later, so it can’t just be lopped off without destroying one of the core concepts of the story.
Her arguments are neither superficial, disgusting, or anachronistic. Those epithets do apply, however, to the producers of the film, who didn’t have the balls to present the story as it had originally been told. And apparently they also apply to you.
If I were you, I’d ask myself why you got so upset when you read that article. You might learn something.
Well qwerty, I’m certainly willing to accept the possibility that I’m jumping to conclusions on the issue. As I mentioned in the post, I only read the first book in the Earthsea series and that was at least ten years ago.
Here’s the catch though — LeGuin doesn’t make a case for why changing the main character from her “red-brown” color to white, or any of the other characters for that matter, is significant except insofar as it doesn’t coincide exactly with the book as-written. To my knowledge the Earthsea books are not an alternate-history Earth. What exactly is the “contextual implication and backstory” that their skin color then provides? You assert it is so, but provide nothing to demonstrate your claim.
The only justification LeGuin seems to provide is that she didn’t want to write a book about “honkeys” — Hardly a legitimate justification in my eyes. I read three different versions of her thoughts about this matter and while the Slate version is more truncated and focused on the race issue than longer versions, she simply doesn’t make an argument for why the change in any way alters the story.
You bring up the Matrix, but I’d like to bring up a good Sci-Fi series — Dune. Conveniently this is another series of books that the Sci-Fi channel has adapted for television (twice).
What LeGuin is objecting to seems to me to be like objecting if the Sci-Fi channel had made the spice melange cause spice-addicts’ eyes to glow green rather than blue. A cause for concern and perhaps a canary in the mine as far as the quality of the series, but ultimately trivial.
On the other hand, the ethnicity of the Fremen is something that I find to be seriously intertwined with understandings and interpretations of Dune. With regards to that the Sci-Fi channel did preserve an ethnic appearance for the Fremen (though I would have preferred an even more pronounced one, but I suppose a few thousand years might change the look of a people).
Changing the race may not seem like a big deal to you, but it really does matter.
I recommend reading Pam Nole’s essay “Shame” about this:
http://www.infinitematrix.net/faq/essays/noles.html then maybe looking up some of Tim Wise’s commentaries on race.
%name said:
Maybe in a social sense, meaning the audience’s reactions to the story, yes. Does it make a difference to the story itself? I can’t see how it does without adopting essentialist notions of race (ie, “racism”).
Which of course is the entire point of criticizing Le Guin on the matter.
%name said:
I read the link you provided, but I am not going to bother seeking out other material as though I need to be [re]educated. I didn’t find the essay to provide any compelling rationale to suspend the freedom of artists to choose the race of their characters as they wish. Plenty can be said about movies that bastardize the stories they’re based off of, but in this particular case I don’t see anything to get upset about. Le Guin’s analogy of the bastardization that took place with Earthsea is to having Frodo become a new Sauron … Which is not only racist, but it’s just plain absurd.