I'm afraid I dislike your expression, "We/you/they don't get to do such-and-such." It sounds as little as if you're forbidding it, on authority which you trivially lack. Authors can write about whatever they like. Whether they write honestly (whatever that means in the context of fiction) is largely a matter for them. Whether they write perceptively or interestingly is a matter for us: if their books are rubbish, we won't read.
Fiction (and especially fantasy) necessarily involves the author in describing what they haven't themselves experienced. (Which is one reason why I'd be very bad at it: I have to constantly remind myself that other people's perspectives don't coincide with mine.)
"Most of these Interesting Cultures are actually really poor and deprived and don't have luxuries like time to write, a thriving publishing industry, or even a corpus of work in their own language and cultural idiom to grow up with."
I realise that you are not intending to be entirely serious here, but I do feel it reflects an uncomfortable perception that people "over there" are "poor and deprived". There are no countries at all where everyone is poor and deprived. In the case of India, which is where we started, they have more billionaires than the UK, and a large class of people who are as prosperous as you or I. I know plenty of people who have been to Mumbai and report that it's just like the City of London (only hotter). Of course, we know (and they know) that there's another India, but it's a mistake to think that one is more real than the other.
This relates to my discomfort with the terms "developed" and "developing". Surely we're all developing? And we've all developed in the past? I've seen people recently referring to China as developing, and really, it's the third richest country in the world.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-01-20 04:51 pm (UTC)Fiction (and especially fantasy) necessarily involves the author in describing what they haven't themselves experienced. (Which is one reason why I'd be very bad at it: I have to constantly remind myself that other people's perspectives don't coincide with mine.)
"Most of these Interesting Cultures are actually really poor and deprived and don't have luxuries like time to write, a thriving publishing industry, or even a corpus of work in their own language and cultural idiom to grow up with."
I realise that you are not intending to be entirely serious here, but I do feel it reflects an uncomfortable perception that people "over there" are "poor and deprived". There are no countries at all where everyone is poor and deprived. In the case of India, which is where we started, they have more billionaires than the UK, and a large class of people who are as prosperous as you or I. I know plenty of people who have been to Mumbai and report that it's just like the City of London (only hotter). Of course, we know (and they know) that there's another India, but it's a mistake to think that one is more real than the other.
This relates to my discomfort with the terms "developed" and "developing". Surely we're all developing? And we've all developed in the past? I've seen people recently referring to China as developing, and really, it's the third richest country in the world.