The Sword and Laser discussion

Finished the book about two weeks ago and found it kind of...mid. Not great but not terrible either.

Want to acknowledge two things before I start:
* I generally find "literary SF" pretentious so it faces an uphill climb with me. It can work (looking at the great use of language, sentence/paragraph construction and the epistolary format for This Is How You Lose The Time War here and, well, all of Bradbury) or can lose me entirely (I Station Eleven's pretentiousness and pretend-discovery of century old tropes) or just leave me cold (rather have middling anything with a rocket than any Vonnegut.)
* There's an informal tradition of not bagging on the book for the first week or so, to not discourage readers. Or maybe I just have a lengthy memory of some requests from years back. Anyway, nothing against picking the book - it's book club and I'm glad Tom and Veronica are here to pick 'em and talk about 'em. The book didn't grab me and I see it's about 50/50 for "loved it / left me blah" on Discord. The book is undeniably popular; LAPL has 300 (!) copies. It just wasn't for me.

So NEway, my criticisms...

The blatant self insert: The MC is a British national with a refugee Cambodian mother and a native-born pasty white Brit. She feels out of place in her home country. The author is a British national with a refugee Cambodian mother and...well, you get the idea.

The journey of discovery: The MC slowly discovers she loves her country through her burgeoning love for one of its historical figures. Well, for me this is better than the "hate your country" trope I've seen far too much. It's just transparent that Gore is a stand in for her journey of self discovery that Britain, historical warts and all, is a pretty good place.

The "Manly Men only exist outside her culture" trope: Immediately loathed this on seeing it in the Vorkosigan books. Eye-rollingly silly for me. I guess this is a Romance trope. As I think about it, this also came up in the "Hunt the Stars" trilogy (Jessie Mihalik) where at least the whole thing was so over the top I didn't mind one more trope.

And then there's the disjointed treatment of time travel. The author makes a sop towards the idea that there's no point in trying to understand the physics. That made me flash on the bit in the Austin Powers movies where the Q stand-in says "don't worry about it" while almost breaking the fourth wall. Overall tho we get only a bare taste of time travel in the first half, and it's really only the end where it comes in at all.

So. Decent, not great book. I'm glad the author is making money. I don't feel the desire to seek out her other works.

When I first read this, my inclination was to put it in the "different strokes" category. No book is going to work for every reader. That's true even of the best literary works that are widely acknowledged as such so it's certainly going to be true for any other novel.

But one aspect of the criticism kept niggling at me. The first critique listed is this:

"The blatant self insert: The MC is a British national with a refugee Cambodian mother and a native-born pasty white Brit. She feels out of place in her home country. The author is a British national with a refugee Cambodian mother and...well, you get the idea."

And I finally realized why it kept bothering me. I've searched my memory and I can't really recall a white male author being critiqued for "blatant self-insert" because their protagonist is a white man. White men are still considered the 'default human' and neither race nor gender are often even mentioned for them. It has to be explicitly pointed out if a character is anything else.

I suppose that would technically be labeled a "microaggression" but like most things labeled such, it's not particularly "micro" at all.

And in this instance, the author has specifically addressed that critique up front in an interview included in the book itself. (I read this book with my eyes so I don't know if the interview was included in the audio version of the book.) I'll reproduce that specific question and answer in full.

You and your unnamed narrator share an ethnicity -- mixed white British and Cambodian. Were you ever concerned that she might be read as an author proxy?

All the time. This is a problem shared by anyone with a marginalized identity who is writing first person narration.

In the first versions of the book, the bridge wasn't British-Cambodian. She wasn't anything, really. She was a cipher. I knew I wanted her to be mixed-race and white-passing, but I dithered over making her British-Indian or British-Burmese -- from a country colonized by the UK rather than France, which I thought would make more sense in a story about Britain's imperial legacy. But it was just so weird and disingenuous for me to do that. I had a specific set of references and a specific experience of being white-passing that I could draw on. Of course I was worried that I'd be accused of writing a self-hating self-[insert here], but if I worried about the judgement of strangers then I'd never write anything.

I ended up taking this bridge out of another book I was drafting, which was about the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian diaspora in the UK, because I felt the character in that book shared a number of concerns I developed in this bridge. I hope she reads as someone that anyone -- not just an author who shares her ethnicity -- could become, including her ability to change her mind.

I could add more, but I'll let the author's words speak for themselves. You can decide she's lying, of course, which is a different form of aggression, but they should sit alongside the critique.

I'm recalling Ringworld in which the main character is a curmudgeonly old loner who returns to civilization once in a while (between exploring the stars with effortless verve) and has a beautiful young (like 100 years younger) woman take up with him in a no-strings-attached, enthusiastically sexual relationship. It won the Hugo.

In this book, maybe I'm a little skeptical of the author's claim not to have inserted some of herself in the book - but I just don't think I care. It isn't blatant wish-fulfillment (things go well until they don't). And her character actually has interesting things to say about the parallels between being able to 'pass' and being from a diasporic community - whether you're displaced in time or in geography/culture. It serves the book that both author and the character share these attributes because the author can share some of her own observations. Also, the author demonstrates her ability to write characters that aren't herself - Gore and the rest of the folks from the past are sufficiently different that you can tell she's done her research and actually thought about how they would think differently. Compared to Niven writing a female, she's miles ahead.

The author does describe how she's used elements of her experience and that in the end it felt disingenuous for her to use a character with a different background to try to express those elements. But I think we generally assume any author is going to draw on their experience as well as knowledge when writing fiction. That's different than a self-insert character.

And yes, I had any number of white male authors in mind. Niven is one example but there are plenty of others. There's no shortage but it's not normally mentioned or acknowledged.

Seth wrote: "I'm recalling Ringworld in which the main character is a curmudgeonly old loner who returns to civilization once in a while (between exploring the stars with effortless verve) and has ..."

Ah, Ringworld. I was just referencing that book over on Discord. Yep, Teela Brown is about 20 while Louis Wu is ~200. But it gets, ah, "better!" Later on in the book, after they discover that the Ringworld has rim-launch ramships, they run across Halrloprillalar, a recent returnee from nearby space whose job was to have sex with the crews. Yee hah! Love the Ringworld concept but it is rife with silly forced-in sexual situations. Don't even let me get started on the "vampire" humanoids who induce you to have sex with pheromones so they can suck your blood. Yeaaah.... And also Glory Road (Heinlein) where the two MCs take a shoehorned-in side trip where they are expected to have sex with their hosts. But not just men: McCaffrey put in dragon-induced sexual frenzy in Dragonflight and other Pern books. It seemed to be a required plot point of the SF of the day.

I don't begrudge the romance subplot, but the "look, the character is just like me and she rescues a historical figure just like the one I was obsessed with" went a little far for me. Have we gotten better over the last 50 years? Apparently not. But, who can argue with the results. The books I referenced sold well, and TMoT is selling gangbusters.

As much as I know it is not the case, and plenty of authors have done it before. When someone uses an exclusive one pov protagonist in a first person written story, it is hard for me not to think they have put some of themselves into that character. I don't have a problem with this, but it sometimes does make it harder for me to relate to the story, and other times it helps.

In this case I did have a harder time relating to the bridge, but I think that has more to do with her age and stage of life and where mine is then with any of the other factors about who she is. That being said, that is exactly why it is a very good thing to have diverse leading characters in all art, so it is easier for everyone to find someone they relate to.

I know that 'self-insert' can have very negative connotations, and if the author herself is insistent that the bridge *isn't* a self-insert character, then I will accept that. It's clear that Bradley used aspects of her own experiences to inform the bridge's perspective and behaviour, and that's absolutely a fundamental -- even unavoidable -- literary technique. It's how it's done that matters, and fwiw I think Bradley does it very well. The way the dislocation of being the child of refugees was compared to Graham Gore's dislocation as an 'ex-pat' in time was one of my favourite aspects of this book.

I've debated whether or not to dive further into this topic. Once it clicked what was bothering me, I remembered the author had specifically discussed how that's a problem with the way marginalized authors of any sort are treated any time they write first person narration and I wanted to make sure her comments from the material included in the book were part of the discussion. But I guess I'll add some of my own thoughts on the subject.

I think I want to start with the simple fact that author self-insertion is a long-standing literary technique. In SF/F, one example that comes to mind for me is Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, in which the first person narrator who interjects at times is pretty overtly the author. And if I recall correctly (having read it decades ago at this juncture), the opening and closing chapters also center around the author as character. That's a pretty overt use of the technique, but it need not be made as clear in the text. It can be more subtle. Either way, like all literary techniques, it can be employed well or it can be done poorly.

But that's not where the "negative connotations" arise because almost no casual criticism about a novel being "self-insert" that I can recall seeing has been discussing how the literary technique of author self-insertion was employed in a novel. It's why Bradley discusses 'author proxy' as something every author with any sort of marginalized identity who chooses to write a person narrative has to navigate.

The top "criticism" presented in this post was "the blatant self-insert" as if that alone was somehow a flaw. But it gets worse because that assertion was justified solely on the basis that the main character was a British national with a refugee Cambodian mother and white British father and the author is also a British national with a refugee Cambodian mother concluding with a "well, you get the idea."

I was mulling how to make the absurdity of using that as any sort of "criticism" clear. I finally settled on slightly modifying it to make it a "criticism" levied at Anthony Burgess for A Clockwork Orange, another novel using a first person POV from the perspective of the main character, Alex DeLarge.

The blatant self insert: The MC is a British national with a white British mother and a white British father. He has a taste for violence. The author is a British national with a white British mother and...well, you get the idea.

Anyone presenting that as some sort of valid or legitimate criticism of A Clockwork Orange would rightly be looked at askance. That's the "problem" Bradley was referencing in her comment on the topic. Why is it considered some sort of legitimate criticism when directed at an author whose identity falls in one or more marginalized groups?

I think that's a question that answers itself. Patriarchy and white supremacy are the air we breathe from the moment we are born. None of us are free from it. Within "Western" societies, I've listened to discussions about internalized sexism and racism by members of different marginalized groups who deal with it within their groups and in themselves. It's simply inescapable.

I don't share those sorts of marginalized identity experiences, but I can relate to some extent. As an autistic person in our deeply eugenicist society, I have an ample helping of my own internalized ableism. I've worked hard, starting when I was nine, to try to make any identifiable markers less outwardly visible, mostly to be a little safer. But that then brings into play the complex array of issues associated with "passing", at least to some extent. I did note this particular author also touches on that in the novel.

At least in my experience, "self-insert" as some sort of criticism is most often directed at women and is used in a manner that seems intended to be dismissive of the work. There are other "critiques", like labeling a character a "mary sue" that are often used in similar ways.

Sure, this novel started with Bradley's own obsession about a historical figure she initially encountered in different fictional work, but ideas that develop into completed artistic works spring from all sorts of places. That's how human creativity operates. It's interesting to read what she shares about the journey from idea to actual novel, but the inception doesn't somehow inherently define the completed work itself.

In this particular instance, the author addressed the question about whether or not the bridge was operating as an author proxy in the novel in material included with the book. But if that wasn't the case and there was something in the text itself that made a reader believe the author was employing self-insertion, an actual critique would at a minimum need to explain why it was or wasn't an effective use of the technique.

I do want to be clear that I'm not attributing any specific prejudice or intent on the part of the OP. I don't know him personally, but nothing he's written here or elsewhere that I've seen would lead me to think anything negative about him. Like I said, it's everywhere. It's the water in which we swim and the air we breathe. In this particular case, it happened to hit my 'something doesn't feel right' sense, almost certainly because I had read what the author wrote about it. But in a different scenario, it could easily be me writing something similar.

Hopefully that's more helpful to the conversation than not.

And with that out of the way, I wanted to go ahead and write a bit on the other criticisms.

The criticism about the way time travel was used by the author strike me mostly as in the 'different strokes' category. Bradley was doing something a little different with it in the novel. I happened to appreciate and enjoy how she used it, but I can easily see how others wouldn't and could find some aspects off-putting.

The other two, however, made me feel like we had read entirely different books. I'm not sure exactly what you were criticizing about the journey of discovery you described, but where did you get the idea the main character discovered that she loved her country through her love of Gore? It seemed pretty clear to me the MC arc of discovery about her country went in the opposite direction. She began as a pretty comfortable British national working in government bureaucracy (established before she gets the bridge position) who is pretty naive and unquestioning about the organization for which she works. By the end of the novel, after everything that happens, she's pretty thoroughly done with at least the government of her country. In her closing conversation with the Secretary of her ministry, the bridge bluntly tells him, "You're evil." That doesn't translate into learning that she loves her country to me. So my reaction to that was almost entirely, "Huh?"

And I had a similar reaction of "Huh?" to the description of a "Manly Man only exists outside her culture trope". I assume the "Manly Man" you're referencing is Gore, but his character is whole lot more complicated than that. While Graham is not as outwardly or demonstrably sensitive and caring as Arthur, he is much closer to that than the only somewhat stereotypically "Manly Man" character (through the bridge's not necessarily completely reliable lens), Cardingham. Nor did I get the "outside her culture" part. Other than being from a different time period, Graham and the bridge shared the same fundamental British culture. (Yes, the bridge had the additional complicating factor of being mixed race, but she was born and raised in Britain. She was British. That was her culture.)

Those criticisms seem so different and even opposite from the book I read I'm not sure what to think. It really does feel almost like we didn't read the same book.

John (Taloni) wrote: "The blatant self insert: The MC is a British national with a refugee Cambodian mother and a native-born pasty white Brit. She feels out of place in her home country. The author is a British national with a refugee Cambodian mother and...well, you get the idea."

This is pretty much the case in every book, though. Why does it bother you more here than there?

I’ve recently been reading the Count Crowley: Reluctant Midnight Monster Hunter #1 comics by actor David Dastmalchian and Minor Threats, Vol. 1: A Quick End to a Long Beginning by actor Patton Oswalt. Usually when an actor “writes” a comic the protagonist is not just a stand-in for the writer, it’s an actual self-insert placing the actor in the hero role, clearly a bid to make it a movie. Not so with Dastmalchian and Oswalt; their main characters are women and there are no other secondary characters they could play. They’ve written genuinely interesting stories with terrific characters. It’s so uncommon that these books really stand out.

So few authors do this that it’s rare indeed. Bujold with Miles Vorkosigan, McCaffrey with Jaxom in The White Dragon, Varley with Steel Beach, Forward with Dragon's Egg. These books are few and far between.

Trike wrote: "So few authors do this that it’s rare indeed."

I think you're shifting into the category of authors who successfully and believably write characters unlike themselves with a dissimilar experience or background. Out of the works you reference I know The White Dragon and Dragon's Egg well and agree with your assessment. I'm pretty sure I've only read Varley's Titan trilogy, so don't know the book you mention. And strangely, given how much SF/F across so many authors I've read over my life, I don't think I've ever read Bujold at all.

I would note writing a character drawing on your background and experiences to a greater or lesser degree is not exactly the same thing as author self-insertion or author proxy in which a character in the novel is either overtly or more covertly directly representing the author in the text.

But it is a challenge and quite the accomplishment when an author can write a fleshed out, believable character who is very different from themselves. I don't think it's an exactly uncommon skill among talented authors who have worked to develop their craft, but some absolutely do stand out as being pretty amazing at it.

Among younger authors than those you mentioned, one of the first names that popped into my head was Max Gladstone. He was a co-author of This is How You Lose the Time War and that led me to explore his Craft Sequence books. And wow, the array of characters he develops throughout that series with incredibly different backgrounds, experiences, motivations, and perspectives on their world blew me away. Becky Chambers also came to mind, especially for the way she brings an array of very different non-human characters to life. The most recent Wayfarers novel didn't have any human characters and I thought it was pretty incredible. I also thought of Joseph Fink's Alice Isn't Dead novel. (There is also a fiction podcast he did first and which is a similar but different story from the novel.) The main character in it does have anxiety similar to his experience of his anxiety. (He's discussed that.) But other than that, she's a very different person from him and absolutely amazing. (And Jasika Nicole is amazing as the voice actor for the audiobook of the novel and the podcast.)

More keep coming to mind as I type, so I'll stop there. But in TMoT, I think Bradley also demonstrates that ability. I think she does a great job developing the character of Graham Gore (the one we get the most time with), but I was also really impressed by Arthur and badly wanted more of him than we got. And if the bridge is more like the author, then Maggie has to be pretty different from the author as well. And that's a character I wanted more from every time she was on the page.

I was talking more of protagonists/main characters, which is why I wouldn’t count Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet since the main character is pretty much the author.

Which I’m not against, certainly not for Long Way and not for Ministry either, despite the fact I cheekily called the bridge a Mary Sue at some point. Almost every author does it, but that’s a far cry from being a self-insert. Larry Niven certainly dips into Marty Stu territory all the time, as do Heinlein and Clarke. Asimov less so, but his characters are more sketches than deep dives so it’s sometimes hard to tell. Virtually every main character Scalzi writes is borderline Marty Stu despite their surface differences. Same with Zelazny and GRRM.

While I think Bradley has used her own life as a jumping-off point, it’s definitely not a Mary Sue situation.

With Becky Chambers, you need to read the 2nd and the 4th in the series in particular to see what I was driving at. Each book has a connection to the crew from the first book, but centers and explores entirely different characters. The second explores both non-human and a very, very different human background. And as I mentioned, the 4th not only brings in all new characters (with one alien involved providing the connection back to Ashby), none of the characters are even human. The 3rd takes a slant that's hard to describe. Anyway, I have no clue if the primary POV character in the first book is basically the author or not, but whether or not that's the case, the POV is wildly different in the other books. It's not a series in the sense that it follows the same set of characters around. It's more telling different stories set in a shared universe with some sort of connection back to the Wayfarer.

That’s why I only mentioned the first book. Maybe the second one, too, but it branches out enough to not fall under the “this is the author” umbrella.