Also known as Terra Australis Incognita

[alias_sqbr]

I was surfing my network this morning and came across The Dead Isle, a steampunk book by popular fic writer Sam Starbuck/copperbadge. I found myself rather bemused by the premise: "the heavily-guarded coast of Australia, the “Dead Isle” which has no Creation, and which sealed itself off from the outside world more than twenty years before. Rumors abound that Australia is building a war fleet, intent on conquest".

Australia didn't even exist as a single country back in 1860, and even now our international ambitions tend to stop at "push around the local smaller countries" and "hope the US notices how much we like them". So I'm wondering if his Australia bears any resemblance to the real one, beyond being full of robber barons (obviously).

And then I watched Total Recall. Nobody told me it was set in Australia! An Australia with no Australian accents whatsoever, and not even a hint of Australian architecture/landmarks etc under all the post apocalyptic urbanisation, but I like to think they were in there(*). Somewhere.

Overall it's actually a pretty fun movie. Not deep, but fast paced and entertaining, and much less cheesy/dated than the original. There was even some mildly interesting scifi world building (with a few massive holes in it, heh) and what could almost be read as an anti-colonialist message. Sure, the major characters are all white and the setting is more Bladerunner-crossed-with-Firefly than an attempt at a realistic multicultural society, but "the Colony" is actually fairly brown, and there are actual (minor) Asian characters with names and (minimal) personality!

And as much as I think Dichen Lachman would have been cooler as the female lead from a setting POV, I have no complaints about watching Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel bash the crap out of each other and a bunch of robots :D

(*)No Indigenous Australians either, of course. Not sure they'd be super happy with the idea of Australia being a "dead island with no magic", either.

Comments

[aris_tgd]

Yeah, I've had Sam on my DRoll for a while, but I didn't realize Dead Isle had that particular conceit until just today. It made me kind of oogy and remember Skud's criticisms of the latest Temeraire book. He's got the last version of it posted on his editing LJ, and I thought I'd give it a skim to see if it's as immediately offputting as the "North Portland (Oregon) Doesn't Have Magic, Does Have Black People" urban fantasy book I picked up a year or so ago. I mean, I don't really have a grasp of Australian politics, but I can recognize that any fantasy series set there without a healthy respect for Aboriginal traditional magic is screwed up.

[sqbr]

I'd be curious to hear any thoughts if you do have a skim!

I'm embarrassingly ignorant about Aboriginal Australian religion, but I do know that places and land are HUGELY important, so yeah.

[aris_tgd]

Okay, I'm about two-thirds of the way through it, and I have to say it's nowhere near what I'd feared, though I remain slightly irked at the way Creation is portrayed universally. (I mean, it makes sense to have the same laws of nature across the whole planet, obviously, but see my response to lilacsigil on magical-system colonization.) The Aboriginal characters are vitally important to the plot and there's a great deal of discussion of how the local government happened and what it's doing, and the reason for nobody on the continent having the power is well-explained and not sketchy. IMHO, anyway. It's very, very white-POV, and I couldn't say at all if he got the tenor of the locale, but I certainly don't anti-rec it based on those misgivings.

[alias_sqbr]

Thanks!

[lilacsigil]

Not just traditional indigenous magic, but indigenous technology. "Creation" in the blurb of that book is magic/technology combined and there's that genocidal theory that Aboriginal people had no technology and no settlemenst never made anything so they're basically not a civilisation. Even if they didn't have technology or settlements that would be wrong, but in fact they had both.

[alias_sqbr]

D:

Oh dear.

Ironic technomage icon is ironic

[aris_tgd]

Have you read it? Did he actually pull that utter shite?

I know that's a pernicious attitude that comes across in a lot of white-authored fiction. In fantasy and some kinds of steampunk it comes across in the flavor of, "Well, obviously you people don't have $MAGIC here, so obviously you can't have as much power, just your little trinkets" (where magic is always built on a Western idea of how magic works.) I mentioned indigenous magic because that seems to me to be the first thing that white fantasy authors forget, that not every civilization in the world uses magic the same way, and in forcing all magic in the world to work along their lines it's a re-colonization of that space. Even if they go the route of "Oh, they're indigenous people, so obviously they're soooooo connected to the maaaagic of the plaaaaaace" and I want to punch them again.

Re: Ironic technomage icon is ironic

[lilacsigil]

The author had the whole thing up on his LJ during the critique stage and I read a few chapters then, but I can't say that it doesn't suddenly turn around and Australia has ALL the Creation or something. I very much agree about the colonisation of magic systems, though, and it's often a masculinisation, too.

Re: Ironic technomage icon is ironic

[aris_tgd]

I mean, I guess I want to skim through it before I give it a complete condemnation; like it could just be that none of the colonizers have working Creation or something. But I am not holding out too much hope.

I'm just thinking about the weird way that, say, Mercedes Lackey's modern fantasy elves-in-fast-cars novels talked about Native Americans, which is to say, briefly and not very well. At least when fantasy authors make up entire new worlds they have the excuse of making magical rules that work the same everywhere.

[lizbee]

What the fuck is it with American fantasy authors with fandom connections and the erasure of Indigenous Australia?

[alias_sqbr]

I think copperbadge is from the UK?

But...yeah. I have yet to see a white non-Australian author depict Indigenous Australians in a way that didn't make white Australian depictions look accurate and nuanced.

[lizbee]

Copperbadge is from the American Midwest, I believe. Somewhere in the US.

[alias_sqbr]

Huh! Sorry, I could have sworn he was from the UK. Must have got him mixed up with someone else with a similar icon or something, I'm always doing that.

[yiduiqie]

They totally buy into the concept of Terra Nullius as a thing because it means they get to explore their jerk-ass attitudes in an exotic! foreign! country! with no backlash!

>o(

>o(

[yiduiqie]

WHOOPS THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A REPLY TO MS LIZ

[alias_sqbr]

Yes, Australia is a big empty exotic desert nobody knows or cares anything about, so they can make up whatever they want!

Why not set things on mars or Antarctica or the moon or something, if you MUST have an empty Frontier.

[livewareissue]

Okay, I'm not touching the Sam Starbuck thing, but I did watch Total Recall - I don't feel up to reading such a potentially problematic book, sorry.

Still, Total Recall! I kept thinking that it didn't feel like Australia as much as a Hong Kong filtered through Blade Runner. Which then led me to have all these feeling about how P.K. Dick is really badly adapted to take out the plot and replace it with action sequences while all the backgrounds are injected with heavy doses of Noir.

But that's probably another train of thought.

Kate Beckinsale is very pretty though. Just saying.

[alias_sqbr]

*nods* Definitely more Hong KLong than Melbourne.

In their defence the original plot of the short story is really silly. This was very much a remake of the original movie.

But yes, I think we can all agree that Kate Beckinsale is very pretty :D

[hebethen]

I've read Dead Isle, but I can't talk about it without major spoilers.

Do you give enough fucks about it to desire (or, conversely, object to) spoilers?

SPOILERS AHOY!

[alias_sqbr]

No objections to spoilers whatsoever, and very curious!

Re: SPOILERS AHOY!

[hebethen]

Basically, there is nothing Dead about Australia and the indigenous Australians (who have a beta plot about revolutionizing the government, and negotiate with the protagonists to sound out their intentions and create an alliance). They'd always had Creative ability which doesn't necessarily follow the rules (implied to be originally self-imposed) that the protagonists think are universal. However, early colonizers/prisoners had psyched themselves into thinking it really was a Dead Isle, and Created a virus that killed their own creative ability -- and also infected many of the indigenous people, barring the few resistant ones. As time went on, the colonists/prisoners formed their own government and grew very isolationist, to the point of exiling any infants born resistant to the virus. One of the protagonists was actually such an infant, disguising themself as white/anglo to avoid attention.

I was and am leery of it when any white writer tries to tackle things like indigenous rights, in /any/ kind of universe -- and I still can't say how well Dead Isle handled it -- but it wasn't that the author flat-out ignored that history in this case :'D

Re: SPOILERS AHOY!

[alias_sqbr]

Huh! Fair enough, thanks.