Some comments on The Thirteenth Child

A few of you might know that Patricia C. Wrede was among my favorite authors when I was in the 7-11 age range. I've probably read her Enchanted Forest series more times than any other text, with the possible exception of the Duino Elegies (and I'm not even too sure about that). I've been reluctant to return to them as an older reader out of fear that they wouldn't hold up, but I have a feeling that they would.

Wrede recently published a YA novel called The Thirteenth Child (review here, with overview of the premise) which has been the subject of controversy. It's an alternate-historical fantasy set in early nineteenth-century America, and one of the AU aspects is that the Americas were not colonized by humans prior to European contact.

Some commentators immediately argued that the premise was objectionable, in that it replicated the genocide and cultural erasure of American Indians¹ by European colonists. My immediate reaction was to be dismissive, and I still think it would be premature to criticize this aspect of the book in the absence of further context. After all, a text framed as an alternate history comes with a giant blinking sign that says "This is not how it actually is." That's the point of alternate history. A text that erased American Indians and made a point of grappling with the historical consequences of that change would not be problematic in this way — indeed, it would emphasize the historical presence of American Indians. I also think it would be unproblematic to write a text where the Americas were absent or for some reason uninhabitable, in order to examine the development of the Old World in their absence.

But neither of those is the book Wrede wrote.


A writer here has reproduced some of the comments Wrede made on rec.arts.sf.composition explaining her creative decisions. What jumps out at me here is that she explicitly defined a history without American Indians as not being "wildly divergent history, because if it [went] too far afield [she wouldn't] get the right feel." The "not wildly divergent" part is clear offensive on its face, but also wrong even from a Eurocentric perspective. Some of the reasons for that are easy to see, and anyway they have been enumerated by others, in writings that have been linked here and elsewhere. I'm going to focus on the second part of the statement.

I've seen some people express confusion about Wrede's apparent failure to consider the historical consequences of an empty New World. If she was capable of doing the research she did, then surely she could have noticed these issues and avoided such "shoddy worldbuilding." I think she could have, but didn't, because the sense I get from her earlier writings is that the grand historical and economic sweep is not what interests her as a writer. She's more concerned with "feel." This is not a bad thing in and of itself. It's one of the most interesting and distinctive tasks of SFF to create a feel, a strong aesthetic and emotional impression that uses bits and pieces of imagery drawn from the varied reaches of human experience to create something new and distinctive. Even if I barely remember the plot of a book I read years ago, I can remember the feel.

It seems to me that Wrede was trying to capture the particular feel she associated with certain American frontier stories, and enhance it with fantasized elements. Because she didn't want a dark and depressing feel, she wasn't able to include the Indians in her story, at least without resorting to egregious stereotyping. So she threw them out. If the problem was not apparent before, it should become apparent here.

It's a very attractive thing to be a fantasist. All of human history, culture and aesthetic experience is laid out before you, and you can pick and choose whichever bits you like and combine them into something new and beautiful. But you are not really abstracting those bits from their original associations. If you want to be a thoughtful writer – or, more bluntly, if you don't want to be a jerk – it pays to think about where they come from, and whether you're replicating a version of history that is somehow pernicious. I still plan to read this book, but there are issues with it that deserve to be raised.

No doubt all that is obvious to many people, but it apparently wasn't to Patricia C. Wrede, and it certainly wasn't to me.

(End primary topic; secondary topic begins.)

The Wrede discussion is a good deal less frustrating to read than the earlier "Racefail" exchange which involved many of the same people, in that it's about something definite, rather than an ever-expanding web of comment threads referencing each other. I won't dismiss that entire exchange as a flamewar, because a lot of good writing came out of it² and important topics were brought into the open, but a flamewar was clearly one aspect that it had. The discussion was nominally supposed to be about writing the other and secondarily about Elizabeth Bear's novel Blood and Iron, and after reading quite a lot of it I don't know that I've learned much about either of those topics. OTOH, I learned a lot from it about ways not to act in discussions of race.

More broadly, it clearly brings up a lot of issues related to the negotiation of participation in internet conversations. In a medium where indefinite numbers of strangers can participate, it's clearly necessary to informally regulate who can participate in the conversation and how, or productive discussion about a contentious issue is impossible. But Racefail shows that these informal controls are subject to abuse, or just mistaken application. This is particularly tricky when the issue of tone comes up, since people are so selective in perceiving tone. Some seem to want to throw out tone policing entirely, but I think tone is kind of important, especially in written communication. (Of course, people from different internet communities often have different ideas about the form and purpose of said informal controls, which is also a problem.) I don't mean to say "Gee, no one really screwed up here, we're all just victims of the internet," but I think this sort of thing made things worse, and that someone (probably not me) could write a worthwhile paper about it.

And of course we regulate our reading, not just writing. After I'd read enough to conclude that Will Sh*tt*rley³ (to name the most prominent of several examples) was not a good-faith participant, I bracketed him out and ignored everything he'd written. It took me a while to figure out why other people might not want to, or be able to, mentally toss out people whose contributions were not worthwhile. I'm steeped in the norms of debate as they exist in the political blog culture, which depend on an assumption of impersonality that can't always be maintained when the topic is intimately related to the self.⁴

Anyway, the only real suggestion I have to make here is that anyone reading that discussion should reserve judgment for quite some time, because it's rather complex and my sympathies have shifted (a lot) over the few weeks I've spent thinking about it. I've had more than one "Aha! Now I get it" moment that didn't actually signal my having gotten it.

¹Which term I use in preference to "Native Americans" for a few reasons, but mainly because "Native Americans" is not used in Latin America.

²This post in particular is extremely good, and some of the comments (not, regrettably, all) are very much worth reading. I found it interesting when I first came across it, but on rereading I appreciate all the more how well-written it is and how much it makes me think about things I really ought to think about as a reader and (haltingly, uncertainly, as I wash the dust from my throat) a potential writer of SFF.

³Name written thus because he's one of those people who Googles his own name and inserts himself into any discussion where he's mentioned.

⁴I suspect this culture difference also explains some aspects of Teresa Nielsen-Hayden's response, although that doesn't lessen my disappointment in what she wrote, which still rather mystifies me.