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MONGOL_SPACE

                                                  March 23, 2022

Continuing on from:

  FTL_ATTACK

In a footnote Virgina Kidd continues, free-associating
into a different attack on Gregory Benford:

  "Benford’s Mongol Empire appears to be simultaneously
  steppe nomad and Japanese, which is not a historical
  impossibility. Kublai Khan might have managed to invade
  Japan... However, Benford's conception of the Mongol
  Empire IN SPACE seems to owe more to ignorance of the
  differences between quite dissimilar groups of
  Asians. Which is a bit odd since he actually lived in
  Japan when he was younger."

These "Mongol Empire in Space" stories are not ones I'm
familiar with, though I'll take it as a given (for now)
that they involve FTL travel.

I can't quite make sense of Kidd's attack here, though--
she conceeds that as an alternate history it would be
valid to write about a blend of Japanese and Mongolian
culture, but it's off the table as a premise for far
future SF because... ?

But it could be Kidd just didn't express the point very
well here: she doesn't at all explain what she meant by
the "differences between quite dissimilar groups".


I gather that Kidd is referring to some of Benford's
earliest fiction, "Deeper Than The Darkness" from
1969/1970, which was later re-written as "The Stars
in Shroud" in 1978.

I've heard of these stories, but never got around to
reading them-- looking at some miscellaneous reviews
on line, it's difficult to get a strong sense of
what they're really about.  They strike some people
as racist, but I have a feeling that's a shallow
reading, conflating things people say in the story
with the Author's Message-- someone complains about
the lack of female characters in a position of
authority, which might indeed be a sexist screw-up
on Benford's part, but then it might also be taken
as a problem with the culture he's writing about--
not all Science Fiction is Utopian fiction, and not
every protagonist is a heroic role model...

The dominant human society here calls itself the "Mongol",
but I can't imagine any reason to assume they have much
to do with the historical Mongolian Empire, or that
Benford could possibly think that they did.

All we know is that at some point, these people thought
it was cool to claim an association with the Mongols.


   I note that back in the 1990s, a country in
   Asia decided to call itself Macedonia.  And
   back in the 1940s a country was created that
   was called Israel.

   People are sometimes inspired to claim
   a connection with history without any
   thing like continuity.


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