arbitrary magical-falling-water inserted to make it something Tor.com would publish.
Which is why I'm putting it at No Award. Sure, it's well-done. But a magical infallible lie detector would have an impact on how people interact, and this story would come out the same without it. We even have “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” to demonstrate how inflexible truth can change things.
I have the same problem with "Wakulla Springs." Snip the last paragraph and there's no SF/F element at all.
Maybe some authors write about gay or Asian or (insert marginalized group) people because they are a member of that group? Or they care about someone who is? Or they're just representing society as it is? Is every story that includes characters who aren't straight, white and Western "pandering?" That comment is a short step from saying that these writers are "playing the race* card."
I guess it just makes some people uncomfortable to encounter certain characters - who up until recently have been pretty much invisible - in their reading material. So that must mean those characters were inserted purely for political correctness or to cash in on a popular fad. That's pretty insulting to the people who are represented by those characters. Maybe they're in the stories because - here's a crazy concept - they exist in real life?
*race card, sexual orientation, or whatever card you think they're playing.
I didn't say that nobody ever wrote about them, I said that they were "pretty much invisible." To people who know where to look, perhaps not so invisible, but to the majority of readers, I think it's been pretty unusual to come across important characters of color in stories populated by mostly white characters. Gay people have been even more invisible
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I didn't say that nobody ever wrote about them, I said that they were "pretty much invisible."
And yet, there were stories about them, going all the way back to the pulp era. So hardly invisible.
I don't bitch when there's a black guy as the captain of a ship, or a lesbian couple in a story. I bitch when those characters seems to be underlined and circled in red, as if to say "Look how inclusive I'm being!"
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Which is why I'm putting it at No Award. Sure, it's well-done. But a magical infallible lie detector would have an impact on how people interact, and this story would come out the same without it. We even have “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” to demonstrate how inflexible truth can change things.
I have the same problem with "Wakulla Springs." Snip the last paragraph and there's no SF/F element at all.
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I guess it just makes some people uncomfortable to encounter certain characters - who up until recently have been pretty much invisible - in their reading material. So that must mean those characters were inserted purely for political correctness or to cash in on a popular fad. That's pretty insulting to the people who are represented by those characters. Maybe they're in the stories because - here's a crazy concept - they exist in real life?
*race card, sexual orientation, or whatever card you think they're playing.
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Obviously not.
You're certainly wrong in believing that until recently, no one ever wrote about characters who were not straight, white, and Western.
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And yet, there were stories about them, going all the way back to the pulp era. So hardly invisible.
I don't bitch when there's a black guy as the captain of a ship, or a lesbian couple in a story. I bitch when those characters seems to be underlined and circled in red, as if to say "Look how inclusive I'm being!"
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