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I forget what brought up this subject, precisely, but it's something ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teinedreugan and I were discussing while pootling around Montgomery County.
A while back I learned that whatever I write, no matter what I'm doing, will wind up dealing with the persistent question of the relationship of the outsider to the community. Sometimes it's more blatant than others, but I always have that outside-looking-in quality. I don't do it intentionally, but it seems to be the sort of story that I have to tell. Or perhaps I'm just limited by my experience in being able to tell other stories. Whichever. So in the event that some lit-critter in posterity wants to analyse my stuff, that's my personal bugbear.
I think one of the reasons I'm so fond of Cherryh is that as far as I can tell, she's got a similar one. Only hers is "Where is the border between 'person' and 'alien'?" (This is pretty close to the 'outsider relationship to the community' in a lot of its manifestations, especially as she has a habit of doing things like "single member of [species|group] A in a community of [species|group B]", sometimes on multiple levels.)
I started reading Cherryh with the Chanur series (and the Merovingen Nights books, but since those are braided it's harder for me to pull out the bits). And here we have the first incomprehensible, the human, Tully, and the increasingly more incomprehensible: the mahendo'sat, the stsho, the kif, the tc'a, the knnn. But we learn how to make the human one of the people -- because 'people' starts out as being 'hani' here, and the alienness of the human is something that has to be slowly brought down.
It's easiest to see in those -- first the human among hani, then the kif and the mahe among hani, all sorts of means of evaluating 'people' and learning how to make sense of each other. Also the atevi books, explicitly handling the gap between alien mindsets with the central character of the translator. (And the mri books, but I've only read those once and am not sure about it.)teinedreugan says he gets frustrated sometimes with these things because he wants to say, "Look, it's possible to make sense of these other people if you put in the effort!" but I think that's sort of the point.
Then the Fortress books -- is Tristen human? Is he people? These are in many ways the central obsessions of the works, the question of whether each new thing in some way disqualifies him from humanity, from being a friend, from being a man; the alien is exploring his nature to figure out whether he's categorisable.
The Union/Alliance books are dealing with the question in an almost entirely human system (Forty Thousand in Gehenna aside). The development of the different cultures, mutually incomprehensible -- Union, Alliance, Old Earth, the Fleet, all of them operating under somewhat different principles. The Union infiltrator who has his reality taken away from him. The Downers. The mutation away from comprehensibility of the children on Gehenna, until they have their own culture, until they "look at things on a slant".
Born-men like fractal patterns. Are azi human? Are azi people? These questions are almost a toy bounced back and forth between Justin and Grant, debating whose mind is put together rightside up and whose wrong. Psychogenesis, sociogenesis, the obsessions of Ari; the shaping of a society, the creation of a humanity. Raising the question, of course, of "Is Ari alien?" And "Does genius make one alien?" And a variety of other places from which us contemplates them in incomprehension.
I'm not sure what I'm going on about. It's just . . . fascinating to me. These are my obsessions, y'know?
teinedreugan and I were discussing while pootling around Montgomery County.A while back I learned that whatever I write, no matter what I'm doing, will wind up dealing with the persistent question of the relationship of the outsider to the community. Sometimes it's more blatant than others, but I always have that outside-looking-in quality. I don't do it intentionally, but it seems to be the sort of story that I have to tell. Or perhaps I'm just limited by my experience in being able to tell other stories. Whichever. So in the event that some lit-critter in posterity wants to analyse my stuff, that's my personal bugbear.
I think one of the reasons I'm so fond of Cherryh is that as far as I can tell, she's got a similar one. Only hers is "Where is the border between 'person' and 'alien'?" (This is pretty close to the 'outsider relationship to the community' in a lot of its manifestations, especially as she has a habit of doing things like "single member of [species|group] A in a community of [species|group B]", sometimes on multiple levels.)
I started reading Cherryh with the Chanur series (and the Merovingen Nights books, but since those are braided it's harder for me to pull out the bits). And here we have the first incomprehensible, the human, Tully, and the increasingly more incomprehensible: the mahendo'sat, the stsho, the kif, the tc'a, the knnn. But we learn how to make the human one of the people -- because 'people' starts out as being 'hani' here, and the alienness of the human is something that has to be slowly brought down.
It's easiest to see in those -- first the human among hani, then the kif and the mahe among hani, all sorts of means of evaluating 'people' and learning how to make sense of each other. Also the atevi books, explicitly handling the gap between alien mindsets with the central character of the translator. (And the mri books, but I've only read those once and am not sure about it.)
teinedreugan says he gets frustrated sometimes with these things because he wants to say, "Look, it's possible to make sense of these other people if you put in the effort!" but I think that's sort of the point.Then the Fortress books -- is Tristen human? Is he people? These are in many ways the central obsessions of the works, the question of whether each new thing in some way disqualifies him from humanity, from being a friend, from being a man; the alien is exploring his nature to figure out whether he's categorisable.
The Union/Alliance books are dealing with the question in an almost entirely human system (Forty Thousand in Gehenna aside). The development of the different cultures, mutually incomprehensible -- Union, Alliance, Old Earth, the Fleet, all of them operating under somewhat different principles. The Union infiltrator who has his reality taken away from him. The Downers. The mutation away from comprehensibility of the children on Gehenna, until they have their own culture, until they "look at things on a slant".
Born-men like fractal patterns. Are azi human? Are azi people? These questions are almost a toy bounced back and forth between Justin and Grant, debating whose mind is put together rightside up and whose wrong. Psychogenesis, sociogenesis, the obsessions of Ari; the shaping of a society, the creation of a humanity. Raising the question, of course, of "Is Ari alien?" And "Does genius make one alien?" And a variety of other places from which us contemplates them in incomprehension.
I'm not sure what I'm going on about. It's just . . . fascinating to me. These are my obsessions, y'know?
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For some reason her SF works better for me then her fantasy. They are pretty much the same in composition I think but the explicit alien environment in the SF fits better to it, for me anyway.
There was a panel on this topic at World Con I intended to go to but it got swamped by something else for me.
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It would be wonderful to find other Pagans in my general area interested in Kemetic religion.
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Thanks for the reply.