I have to rant about Tidhar's tweet before I can listen to the story. Right now I'm too mad. This is a shame, because I love the Gorel stories and others by Lavie Tidhar. We'll see if this can get me to the point where I can listen.
I have absolutely no patience for dismissing huge swaths of history as too bad to write about. There are no heroes in human history, at least not on the ethnonational scale. Rome and London and Washington take a lot of the blame for running roughshod over the rights and identities of others, but nobody comes out smelling like roses. South America's tribes were sacrificing and enslaving each other before Western imperialists gave them smallpox. China's emperors were doing their best - with the limited technologies of their time - to enforce totalitarian regimes before Britian even existed, let alone used opium to break the back of the Chinese resistance to their imperialism. I'm not trying to make the West out to be heroes - remember, THERE ARE NO HEROES - I'm just saying that humans have been cr@ppy to each other since time immemorial. Picking and choosing this time as too bad to write about is completely arbitrary nonsense!
What? Are we now limited to writing about the Inuits - one of the only human tribes in history to have a territory so sh*tty that they never even had to fight a war to defend it because nobody wanted it? Oh, no, wait, we can't do that either, because their culture is just as sexist, theocratic, and xenophobic as every other freaking human culture to come before and after it! Maybe we can write about those guys who welcomed Columbus. The were peaceful, and not xenophobic (much to their eventual regret). They were probably sexist, though. Practically everyone was.
It's just infuriating. Humans suck. We're getting better - extremely slowly, in patches, with great difficulty - but if you leave us alone we get up to all sorts of atrocious stuff. If you are going to disqualify time periods from being written about because the people in it were jerks, then congratulations: you have just disqualified all of human history from becoming the basis of speculative fiction subgenres.
I challenge you to come up with a single human tribe that hasn't sucked. Go ahead, find me a single victim that hasn't at some point victimized someone else.
I bet you can't do it.
I furthermore bet that even if you can do it, it's not a long list.
This is absolute bullsh*t, and Tidhar should be ashamed. Thanks for the takedown in the intro, MK.
Now, the question is... am I sufficiently unmad to listen to the episode yet? Hm... nope, still mad. Damnit! Hopefully it'll fade.