There’s been a bit of an internet discussion, sometimes quite heated, and some of it incredibly silly, about George R.R. Martin’s world as portrayed in his series that starts with Game of Thrones. You can read the main posts and comments  here and here if you feel so inclined.

But I am not getting into the discussion except to say a few general things that astonish me. In fact, I’m a bit taken aback that they need to be explained.

Firstly, don’t be a reader who confuses the story with the author in odd ways. For such readers, I have some news:  a writer who portrays a misogynist world in his story, is not necessarily a misogynist. In fact, s/he may be quite the contrary. Such a writer may be trying to say quite uncomplimentary things about misogynists, or about the society that allows them to have power.

The selection of the setting for a story says nothing whatsoever about the writer’s beliefs in his or her own life. Really. If I set a book in France, I’m not necessarily Francophile. If I write a story that is set entirely within an army at war, it doesn’t mean I am pro-military. Or pro-war. If I set a book in a matriarchal society, it doesn’t necessarily mean I think a matriarchal society is a good thing.

Secondly, do not confuse a reader’s desire to read certain types of books with their desire to visit the setting — or to hanker after a past that is no more, or to think it was a better world, or to live on the other side of the world. I am jaw-droppingly astonished that anyone has to actually SAY that.

If a reader likes reading war stories — do you REALLY think that says they want to be dropped into a war setting? Let alone one with swords and no modern medics? Do I hanker after medieval Europe because I like reading fantasies set in that world? I’d run a mile rather than be dumped in the middle of the real Wars of the Roses, even if I had a stack of magic at my disposal!

Nor do I want to work in a morgue/police station/hospital/space ship because I watch TV programmes about pathologists/detectives/doctors/spacemen, ok?

Thirdly, this icky question of rape. Believe me, I understand if you don’t want to read a book which has rape inside the pages, let alone several rapes. But please, don’t tell a writer what s/he should and should not write about. Rape and sexual assault is part of — probably — every society on the planet right NOW*. To write a book about war, or about medieval times, and leave sexual assault out of the scenario, and you might just be viewing a story through rosy glasses… My Stormlord Rising was criticised because it portrayed quite a bit of sexual assault (most of it during war and invasion) against both men and women. If you don’t want to read about it, put the book down. Don’t blame the author for being realistic.

Fourthly, don’t assume a medieval society has the same mores as your own, and is only different because they use swords and horses instead of bombs and cars. Some folk were saying Martin was writing about rape and paedophilia. By our standards, yes, he did. But – and it’s a big but – transpose a 13-year old bride to another society, forced to oblige her husband whether she likes it or not, and it is neither paedophilia nor rape. In fact, there are societies right here in the present day (even in Malaysia) where people think of this as normal. Sorry to disallusion those critics who want to think they have a handle on what’s morally right and wrong. It’s not so easy. And be careful about you own sins before you jump down my throat on this one.

Yes, to us, the handing over of a 13-year-old girl to a mature man as his bride is horrific. But for most of history, including YOUR own, children were adults long before we nowadays think of them as adults today. A boy of eleven or even younger was expected to work the same length of day as his father, doing the same sort of physical work, and he didn’t get paid for it, moreover.

A boy milked cows for a neighbour, starting at 5 a.m., before he walked the long distance to school. He was eleven and the year was 1901. At 12 he left school altogether (he had no choice in the matter, even though the legal age to leave was 14 in Australia at the time) and he started farmwork in earnest, all day, every day of the week, every week of the year. No holidays. Cows and harvests and farmers don’t take holidays. That was the 20th century — and he was my dad.

Back to medieval times. A woman became marriageable the moment she had her menses. And once married, there was no question of EVER legally refusing her husband his conjugal rights. Of course, one hopes most men are a lot nicer than that, even back in 1135, but legally? He had the right. And this is still so in many societies today. You can close your eyes to it, if you like, but don’t tell a writer s/he’s being crappy to write those sort of things into his/her story. They are real.

Fifthly, don’t think that if a writer portrays a dark skinned people as having a different culture from that of white Westerners, they are portraying them as barbaric. In actual fact, the commentator is identifying themselves as an arrogant Westerner who believes that any culture — other than their own, of course — is barbaric.

I’ve got news for that kind of reader too. Every culture is barbaric. In the wonderful enlightened West, we hound gay kids to suicide, murder transwomen, sell our teenagers drugs that will kill them, and drop bombs on civilians and call it collateral damage, refuse medical treatment to the poor because they can’t afford to pay.

So dark-skinned “barbarian” metes out some horrible punishment to another he perceives as a threat. No lawyer, no trial, no regular sentence, no chance of appeal. And in the West we stick them in Guantanamo. No lawyer, no trial, no regular sentence, no chance of appeal.

Many of George R.R. Martin’s main characters are white-skinned and sort of Western in a Middle Ages sort of way. They are also — by our present Western standards — brutal, undemocratic, living in a world lacking any legal recourse for the wronged (especially if they are poor or don’t have a sword).

In Martin’s world, the dark-skinned are … brutal, undemocratic, living in a world lacking any legal recourse for the wronged.  So tell me, just which were the barbarians again?

My point?
If you don’t like a book, any book, then criticise the writing or simply say, it’s not my kind of story. Don’t attack it by attacking the author because s/he must be like the characters. Don’t attack it because the world doesn’t match up to the one you think it ought to be (unless it’s supposed to be a historical novel). If you think a book promotes sexism/racism/monarchism/homophobia or whatever then be careful of how you illustrate your case.

Otherwise you end up saying more about yourself, than about the book and the writer you wanted to condemn.

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*I think decent men have a hard time understanding how prevalent it is. I’ve never been raped, but I have been physically assaulted in a sexual way, twice, by complete strangers. Once when I was fifteen, once after I was married. Both times I immediately launched an attack on the attacker, they skedadled and nothing much really happened. (The second time, I clobbered the guy with a heavy pair of Zeiss binoculars … threaten a birder when they are biridng, and that’s what happens!)

Talking about world-building – Today: how my travelling life has impacted my storytelling.

Here.

One of the nice things Orbit UK did when they published Song of the Shiver Barrens was to include an interview with me at the back. (The other nice thing for you readers – they included the first chapter of Karen Miller’s new book in the UK “Empress”!)

Here’s the first part of that interview:

Can you tell us a bit about your background? How did you get into writing fantasy?

I grew up on a small farm in Western Australia. Playmates were few and far between, which is probably why I developed both an excessively inventive imagination and a love of all things outdoors. As a child, I read everything I could lay my hands on, including old National Geographics, and for as long as I can remember I wanted to write and to travel. I was writing fully fledged stories by the time I was eight, and as soon as I was old enough to work in my school holidays, I was saving money to travel.

I’ve been writing and travelling ever since. As well as Australia, I have lived in North Africa, continental Europe and Asia – both on the mainland and the island of Borneo. My first published works were non-fiction travel articles!

You were a teacher for many years. How do you think that affects your approach to storytelling?

Well, I was telling tales long before I was a teacher. I seem to remember enthralling my classmates back in the playground of a country elementary school on a regular basis by reading my stories to them. Perhaps the teaching that helped me most as a writer was when I taught English as a foreign language (in Malaysia, Austria and Tunisia) and gained a depth of understanding about the structure of my own language as a result.

A bit of a logistical question, but just how do you find the time to write with another career and family to visit all around the world?

I can – and do – write anywhere. Without that ability, I would never be able to submit a book on time to meet a deadline.

I now work as an environmentalist, not a teacher, and much of my work takes me into the field. I have read first proofs in a tent in the middle of the rainforest. I have dealt with copy edits while sweltering by a roadside waiting for transport. I have plugged my computer into the wall in airports, coffee shops and waiting rooms, or I’ve hooked it up to generators in muddy logging huts or rainforest research camps. I’ve used my laptop as long as the battery would last on buses and beaches and coral atolls, in peat swamps and on fishing boats chugging through mangrove inlets. I’ve typed while perched on gunny sacks full of coffee beans on a wharf, or on tree stumps and fallen logs in the forest, or crammed into an airplane seat for a twelve hour international flight. I’ve written by candlelight, lamplight, moonlight, torchlight, firelight, streetlights, and even headlights (waiting to be rescued from a bogged car in the middle of nowhere.) The most challenging of all, though, is to find time to write while looking after a three-year-old grandson…

How much of an influence has being a conservationist and studying the natural world been on your writing and your world building? Do you often draw inspiration from your experiences or does it make it much harder to create something new and different?

An understanding of the natural world includes seeing how everything fits together, the larger picture. A logging operation means more exposed soil upstream. Run-off means the river is brown with mud. How does a riverine kingfisher see the fish it must catch to live? It’s all about connections. What happens in a neighbouring country can affect what happens to the birds in your own.

World building is like that. You don’t create just a house and a street. You are creating a world, and it is all interconnected. You can’t have your pre-industrial townsfolk eating fresh tuna if your town is miles from the ocean. Your musician needs strings for his lute (what are they made of?), your swordsman won’t be an expert if he never practises. In a desert, no one burns firewood in their fireplaces. Of course, you don’t put everything you know about your world into your book! But you have to know it and understand how it all fits together. Only if you do, will your reader feel that when he has opened the page, he has stepped into another real place.

Because I have lived as a local within a number of different societies, I know more than the average traveller about what goes into making a culture. That gives me an edge, I feel, in creating the people and the social rules they live by within their imaginary world.