That Hugo Time of Year; Rape as a Fictional Device

It's that time again. As BoingBoing announced, the Hugos are up and nominated. Naomi Novik and Neil Gaiman are among the nominees (in two different categories).

The last time I truly paid attention to the Hugos was in 2003. I was running the Science Fiction and Fantasy book group for the Barnes and Noble in West Bloomfield, Michigan. That year, we read something like two thirds of the novels, which included winning title Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer, with whom I was working on an autobiographical essay at the time, and Kiln People by David Brin. That was the book that made me fall in love with cross-genre private eye noir.

I may try to follow them again this year (as much as I can) and see how many I can read before the voting happens. Not that I'll make it to WorldCon in Japan... but it will be fun to follow.

--

Funny that I should mention Sawyer this morning, as I was just thinking about him last night. I started reading King's Peace, by Jo Walton, which begins, in the first chapter, with the main character's rape. One of the problems I had with Hominids, which Sawyer actually dealt with very well and with great sympathy, is that the main female character is raped very early on in the novel. Rape generally bothers me as a fictional device, and I'm astonished how much both rape and attempted rape come up in manga and anime designed for the young female audience.

My friend Lydia Laurenson (whose newest title, The Books of Sorcery: The White and Black Treatises came out in January) has written several very good short essays about the dangers of using rape as a storytelling device in roleplaying games. Sometimes in storytelling, rape is used as a short-hand for how evil the villain is In Hominids or King's Peace, from what I've read of the second so far, as the rapists are mostly nameless and faceless, I suspect that the rape is designed to give the heroine an internal struggle to overcome.

I tend to find almost all uses of rape as a fictional device off-putting at best. In the case of King's Peace, where I had yet to invest in the character, I seriously questioned whether I wanted to continue a book that started with this kind of event. So here's my question: why rape? Is the intention to make the audience uncomfortable (I suspect this is the case in Hominids)? Or have readers in general become desensitized to this type of violence?

More on "Writer's Block" (if that's what this is)

Back in 2003, my sister and I took a trip to the Isle of Man. We bought an ordnance survey map in order to find stone circles, fairy hills, and what not. It was a brilliant map, large and exhaustively detailed, with walking paths measured out all over the island. So, we set about hiking.

Funnily enough, the walking paths, though they're public, are neither well kept nor well marked, which serves as part of their charm, I suppose. Sometimes one will disappear, or only go in the opposite direction it seemed to lead on the map (which could cause a navigator to put the ocean on the wrong side, as my sister is delighted to remind me; I still claim that this is not my fault). In other instances, the walking path may cut through someone's field, making it so that not only must you pass over a stile to continue on your way, but you must make friends with a herd of curious cows.

Walking on the Isle of Man is an adventure, and it's small enough that, even if you get lost, you'll eventually find your way back. Unfortunately, those moments of being lost are not the fun moments (thought they often make the best stories).

Right now, in my writing process, I have a map. It's a lovely ordnance survey with all of the sites I want to visit labeled in large, bold letters. I know where I've got to go. But the walking paths are all wrong, and I feel as though I'm about to trespass on the breeding grounds of herring gulls (oh, yes, that's one of the stories from that fateful trip) or am facing a herd of unfamiliar cows, and one of which could be a bull in disguise. The worst bit of it is that I can see Millner's Tower (a landmark of Port Erin, Isle of Man) from here. I just can't see how to get there.

--

The reason I'm writing this now is two-fold. One is that my husband laughed at me when I told him I was looking at cows across a stile. And two is shameless procrastination.

Look what a good blogger I am when I'm avoiding writing a novel!