Just finished reading Norman Spinrad's article on Asimov's on Third World on SF. Still not sure if I agree with everything (especially on the denomination Third World, but let's discuss it in another post).
What I caught myself agreeing wholeheartedly with him, however, is his opinion regarding Brazil in Paul McAuley's The Quiet War:
But there's something pro-forma about McAuley's Greater Brazil, or anyway the Brazilian identification of the very well rendered culture of his future terrestrial green feudal capitalist imperialist power, so that this doesn't really hurt the novel per se, but there seems to me to be nothing essentially Brazilian about it. Change some names, some locales, and so forth, and it would work just as well as "Greater Congo" or "Greater Indonesia."It's almost as if McAuley had good political reasons not to make it "Greater North America," let alone the "Greater United States," or even the European Union, which he mentions but doesn't visit or describe, and figured Greater Brazil was as good a "non-America" as any. And since the society he describes is just about entirely his own invention, it doesn't really affect the story one way or the other.
If there was a more specific reason for making "Greater Brazil" the terrestrial heavy, I don't get it, since the future updated feudal plutocracy doesn't seem to have much of a Brazilian flavor, especially to someone who has read Ian McDonald's Brasyl, which so thoroughly places the reader in such strongly and completely Brazilian futures.
That's my opinion as well, which I expressed briefly on my last post. But apparently that's where me and Mr. Spinrad stop agreeing with each other.
For starters, I personally couldn't care less about First, Second, and Third World denominations any longer. We are really in the same boat and it is sinking. This is not tree-hugger left-wing talk. We SF writers should have known that for a long time now.
That said, the dichotomy inside/outside a culture is still a valid point etnographically speaking, and I won't say I don't relate with him in that matter, especially when he refers to a kind of "Writing Method" in the Stanislavsky sense, since I'm also an actor and writer for the stage, so I'm well aware of the power of such system.
But is there really a need to bring forth the culture gap all over again? A writer should be judged for her/his level of immersion in the culture? I didn't like McAuley's novel because it failed to amaze me, and the "brazilianness" of it was one of the elements that certainly helped in the process, but I really don't think he had to come to Brazil and "live among the savages" (I'm not quoting Spinrad here, please, just making a joke without any fun at all) in order to gest the gist of it.
Because, let's face it: if you really want to write a novel as a Brazilian would, you must live at least a decade here, and what's the point? (I'm not saying you shouldn't - Brazil is a wonderful place, you'll love it) But we write space operas all the time and never had to live in outer space, alas - nor in New Crobuzon, Ambergris or any other city or time period.
We writers are always faced with the inevitable in the end -- there is no 100% granted formula for absolute success in what you write. You must brace yourself, apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair, give your imagination free rein and hope for the best.
