As for your formula of incomprehensible + threatening = monstrous, well, I love it. Succinct and true. Works not only for SF as you said, but to pernicious stereotypes and even the kind of humans we openly call monstrous like serial killers with questionable culinary habits. Take Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’. Terrifyingly unknowable despite his intellectual acumen and prodigious cultural knowledge. Add in the overwhelming sense of danger, and you have a true monster.

Also, as an end note, I’ve added ‘The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms’ to my Amazon Wishlist. If your blog posts are this thought provoking and stimulating, I can’t wait to get my hands on an entire novel.

Ciao!

Am very much enjoying your book, by the way, and will be e-mailing you soon with a question to add to our original interview. :)

Though..in my experience, people aren’t just single-issue bigots. There’s a strategic aspect to intersectionality (I know I’m sort of misusing the word but I can’t think of a better one) in that if someone disparages group X to your face and you aren’t a member of that group, or displays the kind of behavior you know is a danger signal, the chances they are doing it to you behind your back go up significantly. This goes beyond solidarity; I tend to assume that someone who has certain attitudes about PoC or so on are probably not people to trust on my own account.

But what do you do with people who otherwise seem decent but have huge, privilege-spangled blind spots, and just refuse to see it? I sure would like to know.

Or our annihilation, if we fuck with somebody who’s better at it, yeah. =P

Interesting idea, though I’m not sure I agree with it. It seems to me that the structures of what we call civilization are rooted in the avoidance of conquest. It’s easy to call up a posse and go attack somebody, after all; more complicated to build walls to defend against attackers and grow food to withstand siege and design weapons to kill from a distance (for good defense) and so on.

As you illustrated, an intelligent species stops being monstrous once we understand it, but that’s precisely the problem – how do you create an intelligent species that retains its monstrous nature? Aaand I guess the answer is precisely what you said–by partially humanizing them.

Well, no. Once an “other” is humanized — i.e., understandable — it can’t be a monster anymore. This plays into how racism works; many of the stereotypes that have floated around about PoC are those which resist our humanization in the eyes of white people. (e.g., Black people are innately violent, less intelligent, sexually voracious, good at music and dance but bad at literature and the sciences, whatever; anyone who believes these stereotypes feels less guilt/hesitation at treating us unfairly) The same thing applies to stereotypes about Southerners, actually — maybe it’s a remnant of the Civil War, but a lot of Northerners and Westerners are quick to dehumanize Southerners by assuming they’re all racist, or more racist, or all ignorant religious nuts, or whatever. It’s not nearly as bad as racism, but there’s still some significant prejudice involved here.

But back to fantasy. IMO the only way to keep an “other” monstrous is to make them completely incomprehensible. But incomprehensibility alone isn’t enough — most of us worship deities that are incomprehensible, after all, and we don’t think of those as monsters. So in addition to incomprehensibility, they have to be a threat. Or so diametrically opposed in values as to amount to a threat — that would make them “evil” in our eyes, though it’s still a relative thing.

Have you ever read Jacqueline Carey’s BANEWREAKER and… er, I blank on the second one, but basically she wrote a duology that essentially reverses the focus of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien, Dark Lord Sauron was monstrous because his values seemed incomprehensibly immoral — he was all down with the genocide, had no problem with destroying the world, used other races (e.g., the elves, whom he mutated into orcs) slaves and tools against their will, and so on. In Carey, she tries to show things from the Dark Lord-figure’s perspective. He thinks humans are a threat to the other races of the world (and they are, through overpopulation and their tendency to try and conquer everyone in sight), so he has no problem wiping them out by the bajillion in order to protect the orcs and so on. He knows the elves are planning to launch a preemptive strike, so to prevent it he kidnaps one of their princesses, figuring they won’t attack if he’s got her. (They do anyway.) And so on. All the things Carey’s DL does are “evil” from a certain perspective, but perfectly reasonable actions from another take. One author’s monster is another author’s pragmatist.

FYI, ANCIENT has asked me to give you his/her email address, in case you want to continue the convo privately: Jeremiah2004@bellsouth.net.

And I agree with your assessment of the human drive to conquer any sentient other. I read somewhere that our warmongering actually proved to be a means through which we achieved civilization: those who were peaceful and remained content with their lot were dominated by those who were able to organize and impose enough martial discipline on their ranks. Basically the urge to conquer resulted in the need to organize. Interesting to think: if we were to encounter an intelligent alien race, our urge to conquer them would result in our own consequent advancement in terms of technology, organization, unification, etc.

As for what I meant by ‘monster’, I guess I meant ‘other’, something with an alien and inhuman nature or quality that defies our ability to understand them. As you illustrated, an intelligent species stops being monstrous once we understand it, but that’s precisely the problem – how do you create an intelligent species that retains its monstrous nature? Aaand I guess the answer is precisely what you said–by partially humanizing them.

The closest I’ve seen to creating an intelligent, resolutely ‘other’ being is China Mieville’s multi-dimensional being in the form of a giant spider called the Weaver in his ‘Perdido Street Station’. It speaks in torrents of poetical free verse, is obsessed with scissors and is completely unpredictable to those who interact with it.

Ok, I’m rambling here, but it’s great to get these thoughts out on paper. I’m in the process of brainstorming some stuff of my own, and this has been very helpful, so thanks!

Yeah, and I want to smack them, but at worst, I ask them if they really hear what they just said.

Thanks for pointing out the anti-Catholic stuff; I have so much trouble understanding ANCIENT’s posts that I’d missed that. Yeahno, I’m not fond of bigotry against any group; that’s not acceptable here.

But frankly I’m tired of talking about this, and annoyed that ANCIENT has succeeded in derailing the conversation I wanted to have. I should’ve shut him/her down sooner. ::sigh:: Well, live and learn.

I’m putting you on moderation. If you can bring yourself back to the point, I’ll approve your comments going forward, but otherwise you’re done with this thread.