![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
There are answers back in the book.
Jun. 8th, 2011 12:06 amCorrvin asked me to post about this outside of our private conversation.
She had a situation at work where training failed and asked me, "Seriously, who doesn't know that's an emergency?"
I said there is a book by Catherine Asaro. In it the main character goes up to the main receptionist at a government building. This is on a planet she doesn't normally live, which doesn't have a high concentration of her rare specialty, and no one else is going to need this service, ever. The character has a rare moment of introspection when she realizes that the receptionist was trained for this specific situation even though it was so unlikely to happen that people would go their whole careers without it happening. This woman is an augmented super soldier who carries a hand-held nuclear-powered weapon and she wants to see the "heart bender", their equivalent of a shrink for people who have been augmented. It's not the time you want to have your receptionist say anything but, "Of course, [insert directions]."
Now, when I see something that probably should be obviously an emergency situation where there was a failure in training, I think, "Your planet blows up."
When I needed to learn to balance on one foot for tai chi class, I stood on the concrete retaining wall to an outside staircase. If I fell, it would have been catastrophic. But I knew I wasn't going to get there until there were consequences I could see for failure.
This is why I worry about people who don't read books and who don't read fiction. There are things you can't have happen in real life but being able to see how they play out in the extreme can be clarifying.
I'm sure the people who like historical non-fiction think the same thing about me being the lazy-ass reader that I am, because I'm not conscious of the historical repetition, nor am I more than nominally conscious of the mistakes that have been made previously.
But I'm also thinking about Mercedes Lackey and how she managed to create a whole series of books where gay and lesbian characters were just who they were.... and they could carry a series anyway. Without it devolving to humor so no one was upset. Vanyel was the dominant character in his series and his situation was almost never funny. It changed my mind because I'd only seen the caricatures before this, the campy excessive kinds of people who feel like they're so different they'll never blend and they might as well confront the world all the time. But it felt antagonistic to me--- anyone who is campy and "humorous" all the time, who can't ever be serious or taken seriously, is someone I don't want to know because it's not grown up of them. It's hard to respect someone who wants to be acknowledged for their grown-up decisions when they don't act like they deserve that respect. Vanyel, despite being a fictional character, despite being a bratty kid when we first meet him, is a regular person who happens to be gay. He wasn't extraordinary because he was gay and really fucking annoying about it, he was extraordinary because he did extraordinary things and died a heroic death in the process.
It's one of the things that bothers me when I complain about a trope in fanfic... like the recent spate of "chastity is a virtue for girls" stories. I much prefer the ones where women get a power-boost from sex. And there have been those. To a certain extent, the point of having fiction is to explore things being different.
Asaro has psychiatrists her characters can see without any flack, compared to the regular world where mental health issues are an embarassment to most people and treatment of them is severely restricted by most health insurance.
Lackey has gay people being just like everyone else.
And I want to see stories where characters say contraception makes the sex better. I want to see stories where men and women both enjoy sex and there isn't a societal expectation that women pretend otherwise. I want to read books about characters who are happy and live happily ever after, when they don't toe the line of societal expectations. That means no "divorce means you can't fall in love again", it means no "childless couples are miserable and divorce over it" (Which is always ironic since most divorces seem to be caused by the stresses from adding children to an unstable relationship.), it means people who want to be different fight their battles but that's not the extent of who they are.
Reading means I can see how someone else solved that. It means I can think a problem through without risk to myself or the situation. I wonder if the people who don't read at all still think about things which are outside their normal spectrum.
She had a situation at work where training failed and asked me, "Seriously, who doesn't know that's an emergency?"
I said there is a book by Catherine Asaro. In it the main character goes up to the main receptionist at a government building. This is on a planet she doesn't normally live, which doesn't have a high concentration of her rare specialty, and no one else is going to need this service, ever. The character has a rare moment of introspection when she realizes that the receptionist was trained for this specific situation even though it was so unlikely to happen that people would go their whole careers without it happening. This woman is an augmented super soldier who carries a hand-held nuclear-powered weapon and she wants to see the "heart bender", their equivalent of a shrink for people who have been augmented. It's not the time you want to have your receptionist say anything but, "Of course, [insert directions]."
Now, when I see something that probably should be obviously an emergency situation where there was a failure in training, I think, "Your planet blows up."
When I needed to learn to balance on one foot for tai chi class, I stood on the concrete retaining wall to an outside staircase. If I fell, it would have been catastrophic. But I knew I wasn't going to get there until there were consequences I could see for failure.
This is why I worry about people who don't read books and who don't read fiction. There are things you can't have happen in real life but being able to see how they play out in the extreme can be clarifying.
I'm sure the people who like historical non-fiction think the same thing about me being the lazy-ass reader that I am, because I'm not conscious of the historical repetition, nor am I more than nominally conscious of the mistakes that have been made previously.
But I'm also thinking about Mercedes Lackey and how she managed to create a whole series of books where gay and lesbian characters were just who they were.... and they could carry a series anyway. Without it devolving to humor so no one was upset. Vanyel was the dominant character in his series and his situation was almost never funny. It changed my mind because I'd only seen the caricatures before this, the campy excessive kinds of people who feel like they're so different they'll never blend and they might as well confront the world all the time. But it felt antagonistic to me--- anyone who is campy and "humorous" all the time, who can't ever be serious or taken seriously, is someone I don't want to know because it's not grown up of them. It's hard to respect someone who wants to be acknowledged for their grown-up decisions when they don't act like they deserve that respect. Vanyel, despite being a fictional character, despite being a bratty kid when we first meet him, is a regular person who happens to be gay. He wasn't extraordinary because he was gay and really fucking annoying about it, he was extraordinary because he did extraordinary things and died a heroic death in the process.
It's one of the things that bothers me when I complain about a trope in fanfic... like the recent spate of "chastity is a virtue for girls" stories. I much prefer the ones where women get a power-boost from sex. And there have been those. To a certain extent, the point of having fiction is to explore things being different.
Asaro has psychiatrists her characters can see without any flack, compared to the regular world where mental health issues are an embarassment to most people and treatment of them is severely restricted by most health insurance.
Lackey has gay people being just like everyone else.
And I want to see stories where characters say contraception makes the sex better. I want to see stories where men and women both enjoy sex and there isn't a societal expectation that women pretend otherwise. I want to read books about characters who are happy and live happily ever after, when they don't toe the line of societal expectations. That means no "divorce means you can't fall in love again", it means no "childless couples are miserable and divorce over it" (Which is always ironic since most divorces seem to be caused by the stresses from adding children to an unstable relationship.), it means people who want to be different fight their battles but that's not the extent of who they are.
Reading means I can see how someone else solved that. It means I can think a problem through without risk to myself or the situation. I wonder if the people who don't read at all still think about things which are outside their normal spectrum.
