/lit/ - Literature

>don't like/disagree with award statue
>accept it anyway

Is she retarded?

Lovecraft was right.

why would china need a solution when he's a cracker?

>Who Fears Death
>The novel takes place in a fictionalized post-apocalyptic future version of the Sudan, where the light-skinned Nuru oppress the dark-skinned Okeke

Subtle.

>blacks in charge of writing about anything other than racism

>>4548190
>wanting subtlety in literature let alone scifi
kek

>>4548180

No- just a greedy attention whore with loose sense of pride.

Still the really stupid thing is how many people still can't reconcile the fact that so many great people in the world throughout history held views which conflict with our current 'moral' standards yet contributed greatly at the same time.

>>4548190
That is pretty sad.

I sincerely doubt she deserved the World Fantasy Award for it.

>>4548175

>Trying to punish a dead person

Good job lol.

>Blaming people born before 1900 for being racist

Come on..

The most fucked up thing about liberal pandering and white guilt is that white people still have a majority of their time, the part not spent on cringing and apologising for a past they had nothing to do with, to actually do things, be human beings, be part of the Same. Black people and women and everyone else who identifies as a "minority", and thus blasts themselves into the Other in their own subconscious, see everything through the lens of the Same, instead of just being part of it, so they're going to spend another 850 years bitterly commenting on how everything whitey does is racist or misogynistic. There was only one thing worse than overt racism, and it's the combination guilt complexes for whites/patriarchs + victim complexes for minorities.

It's like looking at a radical Zionist and a normal Jew's reaction to a Shakespeare bust as a reward for their wicked good poetry:
>Normal Jew: I sure am glad I won that award! Time to write more, and buy some ice cream with the prize money.
>Radical Zionist: DON'T YOU KNOW SHAKESPEARE WAS AN ANTISEMITE YOU VILE ANTISEMITES ANTISEMITISM EVERYWHERE I MUST IT DOWN ALL OF HISTORY IS A HISTORY OF ANTISEMITISM ANTISEMITISM RULES MY LIFE

>>4548180

No genre author can afford to turn down an award, no matter what scruples they pretend to possess. That shit guarantees you will continue to get published as long as you live. It's important to remember that in fantasy/sci-fi, the only people who are really sincere about their writings' ideology are true crazies like HPL himself. Everyone else may like fantasy/sci-fi, but at the end of the day, unlike HPL, they feel obliged to have food on the table. So you get hilarious shit like black women turning Lovecraft away like cheating Japanese husbands laying their wife's picture face down on their desktop before they fingerbang their secretaries.

Meanwhile, Lovecraft is dead because he was too poor to buy food or medicine.

>>4548199
This.

People had no qualms about killing the disabled at birth less than 200 years ago, including the famous and beloved.

Should we hate them all for it?

>>4548199

whenever they do respect someone with conflicting views they always have to make historically revisionist excuses (it was just the way people were then, nobody can have free will without being directly influenced by the customs of their time!)

>>4548190
>The novel includes a graphic scene in which Onyesonwu is subjected to female genital mutilation, which significantly impairs her ability to use her magical powers.

Definitely very suble

Christ, she's ugly.

it's so nauseating to see people rail against both tradition AND moral nihilism

like, jesus, that's not right, how demented can you be

>>4548217
>>4548190
How the fuck did this win?

Do we have affirmative action awards now?

>>4548226

I'm going to actually read this book and figure out, since nobody else in the thread seems to have any idea.

>>4548229

epigraph from Lumumba, kek

What the FUCK does Bob Marley have to do with any of this?

>>4548178
What the fuck? is that a necklace?

oh golly, all these ellipses.

>That was four years ago. Now see me. People here know that I caused it all. They want to see my blood, they want to make me suffer, and then they want to kill me. Whatever happens after this . . . let me stop.
>Tonight, you want to know how I came to be what I am. You want to know how I got here . . . It’s a long story. But I’ll tell you . . . I’ll tell you. You’re a fool if you believe what others say about me. I tell you my story to avert all those lies. Thankfully, even my long story will fit on that laptop of yours.
>I have two days. I hope it’s enough time. It will all catch up to me soon.
>My mother named me Onyesonwu. It means “Who fears death?” She named me well. I was born twenty years ago, during troubled times. Ironically I grew up far from all the killing . . .

How would Lovecraft react if he knew a negro would own a statue of him some day?

>>4548256
The statue was originally smiling.

>>4548226

If your novel touches on some important political issue, you're bound to get some notice whether or not the actual book itself is any good.

>>4548190
>where the light-skinned

>>4548256

He probably wouldn't care. If Lovecraft were alive today he would be a huge Sinophobe. Shit, when Lovecraft was a Sinophobe, China wasn't even shit. Today he would be urging nuclear strikes on Peking.

>>4548226
>How the fuck did this win?
>Minority
Check
>Woman
Check
>Story/Thematic concern congruent to accepted multicultural narrative i.e. whitey bad
Check

>>4548251
This is atrocious.

>>4548271
Racist detected.

Clearly this was deserving of international praise.

Your white supremacist mind just can't comprehend it.

>JUST BY LOOKING AT ME, everyone can see that I am a child of rape.

Promising start to a chapter.

>>4548271

Believe it or not I actually liked it up till that point. The writing style was nothing special but not too amateurish, and I like non-fishbelly fantasy when it's well done. There's a lot of cool fantastic bullshit people have made up in Africa.

>>4548276

Yeah I bet most of the books he reads are by dead white guys.

How's her taste /lit/?

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1431828?page=1&shelf=read&sort=rating

>>4548190
I wonder if Infinite Jest is her favorite book

>>4548178
That bust looks like shit

>>4548175
Oh god I can't believe she won an award for that. I enjoyed the world and the ideas presented in it but the delivery was so filled with yay black people that it was all just ruined.

>>4548175
Ba ba ba ba baby
Don't forget my number
Love is stronger than thunder

>>4548317
>only 298 total books read since she became a member in 2008
>half are comics

lel

And that's assuming she doesn't list every book she's ever read on her goodreads profile, in which case she would be truly pathetic.

>>4548317

>Lean In and Wise Man's Fear both given a 5

also a bunch of cruddy comics by BKV, Morrison etc. Octavia Butler should have been a given. Achebe, Poisonwood Bible, Ayaan Hirsi Ali too. Lot of Moomins and Clive Barker. Mouse Guard and Barefoot Gen were a bit of a surprise.

I'm three chapters deep in this and so far the glaringest flaw I can see is why the narrator speaks like a college-educated African American trying to "get back to her roots" when she appears to live in a brutal militaristic race-state not significantly more technologically advanced than the modern Sudan and in fact kind of less so. Granted she might get around to it eventually but you'd kind of expect a Riddley Walker level of diction from this setting.

>>4548355

This isn't the impression I get from the book so far at all. The Nuru are unsubtly Arabs and the Okeke unsubtly black Africans, but the Okeke are portrayed little more positively than the Nuru: just as less powerful. Remember the author proceeds from a "fuck patriarchy" point of view just as much as a "kill whitey" point of view and in fact probably more so - black Africans are not going to buy her books after all - but at any rate the former attitude leads to a lot of demonization of cultures of black Africans because it is founded in notions like "clit cutting and arranged marriage is bad mkay" which are not necessarily acknowledged by cultures that actually do things instead of writing science fiction.

>If she stood up, all the semen that had been pumped into her would splash out.

Good golly, this book.

>>4548317
>mfw she rates her own books 5 stars

>>4548341
She probably dropped it when she got to that first ebonics section with Poor Tony and all that talk about doping up in the library and eating cheese.

>repeating the initial letter of a word to suggest stress or trepidation

Why does anyone do this?

who gives a shit

>>4548412
w-why does it b-bother you, anon-kun? <3~~uguuu

>>4548175
It's like books awards are just as biased as the Academy Awards. For years now, an award winning movie, for me, has meant "don't see this; it's not that good."

Haven't read the book, but I imagine a Brokeback Mountain thing with it. I watched BBM when it gained ardor, and shit if it didn't win awards purely for being about a couple of gays then I have no idea what for

Who the hell conceived the idea for book trailers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBYIUJQTXk

>>4548434
They are truly absurd. I have no idea why the concept is still clinging tenaciously to life.

>>4548175

Are black people this insecure?

If I was awarded a Japanese award named after an author who thought white people were inferior, I'd forgive him for his ignorance and wouldn't be angry at him. I'd be proud.

I guess truth hurts.

>>4548434
Pynchon does an okay one.

Those are people that forget that he was a man of his time and fail to see the work that he did.

Anybody notice the growing number of nigger poets gaining awards?

I mean what the hell is the world coming too??

Im not the type to moan incessantly about the world but this truly saddens me.

>>4548443
Should post link I guess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjWKPdDk0_U

>>4548441
That's your privilege for not having been historically oppressed. Check it, shitlord.

>>4548447
Does it really matter? Most awards have always been awarded to shit anyway.

>>4548447
>oh no! black people wins prizes!

>>4548458
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Fantasy_Award

So, is there actually a good book that has been awarded this?

>Lovecraft
>Malevolent
For as much of a bigot that he was Lovecraft was also inspiringly fair for his time he did not believe that his hatred of other races excused violence of any sort and was a major supporter of the new deal.

Why is shit always so black and white with these sjw fuckers?

>>4548462
No, it doesn't matter though, why would anybody sane suggest there's something fishy about black people winning prizes? It's the work that's important, not the color of the author.

>>4548462
>>4548470

Not really. Awards are not an indicator of quality but of how good your connections are. The year before this crap won, it was Mieville's "The City & The City", even more atrocious than this and by someone far whiter.

>>4548469
It's an inability to realize that other times had different norms or ways of thinking, instead expecting all of history to conform to a modern set of ideas from one current culture.

>>4548470
Sorry, i didn't mean to reply to you, i was just talking generally.

>all these mad crackers itt
kek

>>4548472
>implying oscars are not objective

>>4548478

They're objective in the sense that those who have more friends in Hollywood win more Oscars.

>>4548477
>implying i'm not a black man who hates that this kind of shit writing getting wards, furthering the stereotype that black people can't write/can't write about anything other than race.

>>4548458
If a black person ever deserved an award I wouldn't be mad. Awards today are politicized to the point that a fourth-rate minority or woman will be awarded over a first-rate white male.

The Nobel Prize is a prime example of this.

>>4548485
>implying white people want to read anything else from a black man and the publishers doesn't know this.

It's all about the money.

>>4548492
Nobel prizes have always politicized as far. Heck, didn't they award the prize to a person who was only the bloody panel at one point?

>>4548497
>See, it's actually white people's fault!

Kill self

that quote makes mieville look like such a fucking retard, I guess he is but damn, like straight up 8th grade girl's blog type retarded

>>4548485

>implying black people can write literature

>>4548522
It is, who selects what to publish? You're a dense one aren't you?

>>4548547
>there are no black people in publishing

>>4548492
>If a black person ever deserved an award I wouldn't be mad
Okay, I had to think hard about a black author I had even read, but I think Adichies "Half of a Yellow Sun" was amazing. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction.

>>4548552
Maybe as janitors or cleaners at the offices.

>>4548547
4/10

The biggest problem I have with this book is that the protagonist is exactly ideologically sympathetic to the cultural biases of a western feminist without there being any convincing reason in the book's setting why this should be so. The book isn't "yay black people" at all, on the page I'm reading right now there is a case of a ten-year-old black girl being systematically raped by her father. This fact is construed as bad by the senior women of the village but:

>In fact, this group of women had known of Binta’s father’s behavior for a while. They were powerless to intervene until Binta went through her Eleventh Rite.

which Eleventh Rite is clitoridectomy. Yay black people though, am I right?

But let me tell you about our protagonist. As a half-Arabic rapebaby raised alone in the desert by her mother for the first six years of her life (!) she thinks this custom is "primitive and useless" and that "no one really remembers *why* it was done". Primitive compared to what alternative, dipshit? I realize the AUTHOR thinks it's primitive, but why should a person who grew up in this culture feel the same way without any exposure to anything else? And why would nobody have ANY reason why it's done, when modern studies on female genital mutilation show that the people who practice and even undergo it have plenty of reasons for doing so beyond "it's traditional"? Most obviously, it's fucking hard for women to sleep around if they're vagina is cut up and fused shut. Did she not think about this for even a second?

It's just so god damn lazy and insults the intelligence of absolutely anyone who reads the book.

>>4548412
It makes sense if done with dialogue. If she does it just all around, then that's fucking stupid

>>4548567

It doesn't make sense if done with dialogue either. It just is not a way that anyone speaks outside of a Hardy Boys book and I don't understand why anyone would ever write it without immediately thinking "nah, that's retarded" and deleting it. Be honest, have you ever met anyone who responded to seeing a woman's pubes with "C-c-cover yourself, o!"? Because that's something that happens in this book.

>>4548572
>It doesn't make sense if done with dialogue either
What if the character is intoxicated? Or has a natural stammer? Or they're young and nervous around a pretty girl that they like?

>>4548577

Intoxicated people slur words and say things they shouldn't, they don't say "c-c-cover". Stammerers also don't do this, if a character stammers they might say something like "cuh cuh cover" but this isn't at all what is conveyed by repeating the initial letter. Young nervous boys who want to fuck don't do this either, they look at the ground and ignore her and then go post about bitches and whores on reddits or whatever.

Seriously, who originated this cancerous nonsense and why is it in any book, let alone books that are singled out as praiseworthy and remarkable?

>>4548226
Uh, sorry if I'm interrupting your resentful white boy /pol/ rage here for a second, but since when have sci-fi and fantasy in general been worthy of any acclaim? Way to get your panties in a knot over a mud kingdom.

>>4548407
The characters in the "ebonics" section were all white actually.

>>4548588
>complain about him getting mad of nothing
>proceed yourself to get mad about a 4chan post

>>4548588

Since you yourself don't like science-fiction or fantasy, what gives you the impression that your opinion on them will be valued by anyone that does? Or really do you think someone in this thread will stand up and say "haha yeah man, fuck this genre bullshit lets go read DFW together" or something? Go post somewhere else.

>>4548565
This is the only good post in this entire thread.

>>4548604
I'm just saying that anyone who gets mad over this isn't much better than the people they're angry with.

>>4548598
I'm not mad at a 4chan post, I'm amused that anyone cares about genre fiction this much.

>>4548239
>Lumumba
What? I'm confused

>>4548617

You care enough to troll about it.

>>4548609
What a surprise that only a small minority of posts on 4chan are good

>>4548583
>>c-c-cover
That is stupid. Repeating the first letter once is not that stupid. Why does it bother you so much? Never stammered before? Young kids do it, especially when crying.

>>4548531
>Chinua Achebe
>Derek Walcott
>Steve McQueen

>Implying you'll ever write novels, poetry or drama a fraction as a good as what they produce

Back to the containment board, faggot.

>>4548644
>Chinua Achebe
Never heard of him.
>Derek Walcott
Never heard of him.
>Steve McQueen
Overrated hack that makes shallow, myopic films that are carried only by Michael Fassbender. Shame was garbage.

>>4548653
>Never heard of Walcott or Achebe
/pol/ confirmed for total, utter pleb.

>>4548656
Sorry for not being familiar with every middling negro.

>>4548644
>reading black people
c-c-c-c-c-c-cover

>>4548175

>letting a dead guy get to you
>judging a historical figure by modern values

retards

>>4548661
>Chinua Achebe
He wrote, among many other novels, Things Fall Apart, one of the best and most widely studied books of the second half of the twentieth century. He's also had quite an influence on modern literary theory.

>Derek Walcott
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature and just about every other award for poetry going.

>Steve McQueen
>Overrated hack that makes shallow, myopic films that are carried only by Michael Fassbender. Shame was garbage.
Implying your experience of his films extends beyond reading reviews for 12 Years A Slave.

Go back to /pol/ and your genre fiction. This is not the board for you.

>>4548668

Oh, fuck off. You are twice as much of a faggot as the guy who is trolling you, and belong on /pol/ just as much. You aren't discussing literature, you are attempting to look more righteous than someone else. The only people who have posted in this thread about the book that is the subject of this thread are people who read genre fiction. You and the race-baiting wankers you are bitching about can both go hang.

I'm just tired of this affirmative action bullshit. If s/he wrote a good book fine, here's your award, be a "witty" jackass about it if you want, congratulations you really showed him.

But when you write shitty books whose only merit is that they reinforce popular narratives, you don't deserve an award and you definitely don't get to act like you're better than a much more well-known and impactful author. Lovecraft's work is massively popular and part of popular culture, but it has longevity; a book where lighter people oppress darker people and mutilate each other's genitals is going to be out of vogue shortly, I fear.

>>4548677
on the day of the rope

I don't get it.
Why is repeating over and over again "racism is bad, so is slavery mmkay" a thing?
It's fucking obvious that they are bad, why keep on repeating that shit?

I'm not even white btw.

Other works by the author:
>Zahrah the Windseeker:
>In the northern Ooni Kingdom, fear of the unknown runs deep, and children born dada are rumored to have special powers. Thirteen-year-old Zahrah Tsami feels like a normal girl, she grows her own flora computer, has mirrors sewn onto her clothes, and stays clear of the Forbidden Greeny Jungle. But unlike other children in the village of Kirki, Zahrah was born with the telling dadalocks. Only her best friend, Dari, isn't afraid of her, even when something unusual begins happening—something that definitely makes Zahrah different. The two friends determine to investigate, edging closer and closer to danger. When Dari's life is threatened, Zahrah must face her worst fears alone, including the very thing that makes her different.

>The Shadow Speaker
>Ejimafor "Ejii" Ugabe is a fourteen year-old Muslim half Wodaabe half Igbo girl. She lives in the Nigerian village of Kwàmfa. Her father was once the hated dictator-like chief. She lives in the year 2070. The whole world is falling apart after a nuclear fall out in, quote, “the early twenty-first century".

And her thoughts on Nigerian culture:
>"Culture is alive and it is fluid. It is not made of stone nor is it absolute. Some traditions/practices will be discarded and some will be added, but the culture still remains what it is. It is like a shape-shifting octopus that can lose a tentacle but still remain a shape-shifting octopus (yes, that image is meant to be complicated). Just because I believe that aspects of my culture are problematic does not mean I am “betraying” my people by pointing out those problems."

A++ would award again

>>4548677
>race-baiting

stop trying to pass yourself off as some moderate and get back to /pol/ where you belong

>>4548719
Shut up please.

>>4548700

The amusing part is that the attitudes expressed in this book are unabashedly racist, and belittle the time-honored custom of female genital mutilation as something done by black Africans because they are too stupid and "traditionalist" to do anything else. Think about that for a second. This book actually alleges that when black Africans practice female genital mutilation, they have no idea why they are doing it and can offer no justification for it beyond tradition. What the fuck?

>>4548719

How is it not race-baiting to call Chinua Achebe a "middling negro"? Go pursue ideological purity somewhere else.

>>4548723
> the time-honored custom of female genital mutilation

pic is mfw

>as something done by black Africans because they are too stupid and "traditionalist" to do anything else

This is true though.

>>4548732

forgot muh pic

>>4548190
I don't have the book anymore, but this was a passage from it. I just couldn't help but take a pic due to how fucking weird it was.

>>4548709
Ugh.

Also, when is the unrest over male circumcision going to happen? I know it's not as bad as cutting a girl's clit off and sewing her shut, but that' doesn't mean it isn't bad.

Oh, never? Okay...

I bet a book about a boy who loses his magic powers after a male circumcision would be laughed at; why isn't this?

>>4548751
Germany tried to ban circumcision just a couple years ago and was attacked as "antisemitic" so it will never happen. However, I think it will become less and less popular for American whites as it is with European whites, it just won't be codified into law. I know I'd never ever let my kid be circumcised, I really wish I hadn't been, it's kind of fucked up.

>>4548741
>...tears of an infant, menstrual blood, the milk of a man...

What in the fuck is going on here?

>>4548774
Why, award-winning fantasy writing, of course.

>>4548732

>This is true though.

A deeply racist view, though not wholly in error from my point of view. But far more important to the book, black Africans themselves do not have no reason for doing this better than "it's traditional". Hygiene, social acceptance/marriageability/beauty, insurance of chastity, and greater pleasure from sex for men (tighter hole, get it) are all reasons commonly advanced for female genital mutilation to be practiced.

>>4548201
>absolving people of blame because "it was common at the time"

>>4548700
Because repeating values that will be well received is easy and doesn't take much effort.

Ching Chong is just mad he will never have a fraction of the impact Lovecraft did.

>>4548830
>pissing on the graves of your ancestors because the Jew media told you to

>>4548583
Are you reading "c-c-cover" as "see see cover", perchance? Because that's dumb. Although it does irk me when people say "t-thanks", because a stutterer wouldn't say "tuh-thanks", they'd say "thuh-thanks".

>Getting pissed that a black woman gets a well deserved award

What happened?

>>4548844
I'm not pissing on anyone's grave, just saying that people are responsible for their own thoughts and actions regardless of the thoughts and actions of others in their time and place.

>>4548190
>okeke
>kek

Subtle, very subtle.

>>4548401
That's kind of in poor taste.

>>4548858
>Well-deserved
Doubtful. Regardless, genre fiction is 99% garbage so discussion of quality is irrelevant. But individuals winning awards solely because they fit some dominant cultural narrative (feminism, multiculturalism, and so on) or belong to some group that is foolishly believed to be in need of extra favor to encourage some arbitrary notion of parity (women, minorities) sets a dangerous precedent for literature and beyond.

>>4548893
Niggers are kind of in poor taste, honestly.

>>4548875

How can an adult really think that people are responsible for their own thoughts, that people will what they think? Moreover, how can an adult really think that people should be held morally culpable for their failure of their thoughts to correspond to the thoughts of the majority?

Lovecraft thought black people were subhumans and that the Chinese would someday kill us all. And these aren't premises with which I agree. But what about these thoughts of Lovecraft's makes him worthy of blame? Blame for what? He never raped any blacks that he thought were subhuman, he never murdered any Chinese that he thought were about to jump him. He simply thought these things and wrote what he thought. Where is the blameworthy act?

>>4548911
I'm not saying that Lovecraft himself is some kind of racist villain. For all we know, he never acted on his thoughts beyond including them in his work. It's likely that his opinions influenced his daily interaction but we don't know that. It doesn't matter, anyway, since it's not what I was getting at. I was just protesting against this absolution of fault based on the time and place.

>How can an adult really think that people are responsible for their own thoughts, that people will what they think?
I don't know what you're saying here. Sure, people experience intrusive thoughts and sometimes it may seem like your thoughts come from somewhere (or someone) else, but, assuming you don't suffer from some kind of depersonalising disorder, you must know that your thoughts come from you. That's not to say that you should be thought evil for thinking evil things, but that, as an adult, you ought to have the ability to critically evaluate your thoughts and feelings, and have executive veto of your impulses. The thoughts of the herd don't excuse the thoughts of its members.

>>4548979
Just get over that he was product of his time and was hold up in his mothers house for years and his only human contact was when he would write letters.

>>4548987
Calling him a "product of his time" absolves him of all responsibility for his beliefs and his choice to act on them through writing. Furthermore, excusing on account of his having had little human contact only weakens your point, because it means that he had no experiences with black or Chinese people that would colour his perception of them, and implies that he concluded that his race was superior based on nothing but mainstream opinion. This is supposed to have been an intelligent man, and intelligence implies an ability to evaluate mainstream opinion and escape herd thought. He, apparently, didn't do that. He may have been a "product of his time", but if he was, that's his own fault: he accepted the status quo without evaluating it for himself. He allowed his mind to be made up for him. That makes him, at the very least, intellectually lazy.

>>4549005
To be fair, Lovecraft was right about race.

>>4549008
I'd ask you why and go down that road with you, but it's past 1 in the morning here, so I'm just gonna read and go to bed.

>>4549005
>and intelligence implies an ability to evaluate mainstream opinion and escape herd thought
Does this mean that a person in the 21st century is more intelligent if they are a virulent racist as opposed to the more accepted multiculturalist standpoint?

>>4548987

Your thoughts don't come from you. What an absurd proposal. There isn't any such thing as a "you" independent of your thoughts. The thoughts are generated by a brain that you affiliate with yourself, indeed that you can't extricate yourself from, but you don't have any will to exert power over that brain. On the contrary, that brain and the body that powers it are one of many forces exerting power over the "you", the self viewed as detached from this brain and body (which is not, itself, an existent thing).

>The thoughts of the herd don't excuse the thoughts of its members.

Why don't they? Who was there in Lovecraft's life to tell him that black and Chinese people are actually great? What evidence was there, in his life, to support it? The breadth of stimulus determines the breadth of response, doesn't it?

What makes this particular question so silly is that this whole argument about whether people can be sensibly judged by the standards of times and places they did not themselves inhabit has already been rehashed for literally centuries in the case of Christian salvation. How can we expect a just God to damn to eternal torment those who never even knew he existed? Surely we can't, some figured, while others contrived loopholes explain why such people weren't in fact damned (harrowing of Hell, "righteous pagans" etc.).

In light of this I'm glad you chose to backpedal and state that really you can't find moral fault with him but only an ignorance. Is it reasonable to have expected him to escape that ignorance? Really it isn't, because of the things I pointed out in my first paragraph. You are not in control of your self, neither am I, neither is anyone else, and I seriously hope you don't continue to deny it because it's AD 2014. Good night, sleep tight.

>>4549014

lol'd irl

>>4549005
>weakens your point, because it means that he had no experiences with black or Chinese people that would colour his perception of them, and implies that he concluded that his race was superior based on nothing but mainstream opinion.

Basing your opinions on race on human interaction is idiotic. Unless you can personally interact with all of the hundreds of millions of members of that race, you cannot form an accurate impression of the aggregate, and to think otherwise is fallacious.

The only valid opinions on race are formed from statistical analysis and examination of broad cultural outcomes.

And Lovecraft was right.

>he accepted the status quo without evaluating it for himself

Because it's impossible to evaluate the status quo for yourself and find it good. Right. This is the virus of progressivism speaking, but of course as an enlightened modern you have no doubt spent a lot of time evaluating your basic progressivist cultural assumptions.

>notorious racist

I can't stop laughing.

>>4548709
those sound like some uninspired as fuck fantasy stories

>>4549042
das raciss mane

>>4548251
what the fuck i could win these awards

oh wait im a white dude

>>4549042

The first two are YA if I recall the wiki article. This frankly explains a lot about this Who Fears Death, it's astoundingly banal teenie fantasy U CAN SHAPESHIFT shit for about eight chapters out of ten with the remaining two chapters telling of rape and genital mutilation.

>>4549047

To be fair, this is easily the worst passage I could find in the book before I gave up. Parts of it were pretty okay and the majority was more bland and unremarkable than it was fanfiction-tier. The thing that really turned me off about the book was the huge unexplained philosophical gap between the protagonist and her world, which I complained about in >>4548565.

>>4549017
>How can we expect a just God to damn to eternal torment those who never even knew he existed?
Acts of God are Just by virtue of being acts of God. If God deigns that condemning people to eternal suffering for ignorance is Just, then it is Just. Lacking the perfect judgement of a perfect being, where our sense of Justice contradicts that of God, we must defer to Him. The pious is pious because it is loved by God.

Now I really am going to bed.

And in case you were wondering, I'm an atheist. The above is what I would believe if I believed in any God.

>>4548583
>a-and
>a-and
>a-and

Oh, but it's okay when whitey does it?

>>4548838
And then they wonder why people call black writers hacks.
Surrell is the only contemporary black author that's worth reading.

>>4548399
What's wrong with Moomin?

>>4549128
It's great but for children.

>>4548184
>>4548349
why is lovecraft so dreamy~

>>4549062

A well-supported view from Biblical evidence. But it helps to illustrate my point. These people who asked this question -- "how can God do this when we have established that it cannot be moral?" did not, apparently, themselves intuit that they had fallen into a hole by judging God according to the standards of their own time - standards derived from God at many removes - rather than judging their own time according to the standard of God. But what alternative did they have? how could they judge by the standard of God when God was not present in their daily lives? This incidentally is where the doctrine of prayer stems from, the desire to bring back the presence of God to the mundane world - see the practice of hesychasm in Orthodoxy, secluded meditation combined with the almost mantra-like repetition of the Jesus Prayer. The goal is to overcome acedia - spiritual depression - the sloth or apathy of the presence of God (and unstated, but inescapable, reversion to the moral standards of the world which does not give a damn about God or his Law).

This illustrates a flaw in the idea of holding all of history to an absolute moral standard. Where the Lawgiver is not, the Law begins to look shabbier and shabbier in every application. That we should all be able to sit down on the red hills of Georgia at the table of brotherhood sounds wonderful when it is preached to us, but is not in itself a praxis for reconciliation.

To bring all of this back around to Lovecraft, it seems on the surface to be right to say that Lovecraft can't be excused for being a racist just because everyone was racist then. After all, if all your friends pushed a black man off a bridge, would you push him off too? But then, you have been raised with the conviction that black men are equal to white men. This conviction is not an eternal one. It was brought to you by teachers, parents, someone somewhere - the exact identity doesn't matter - but brought to you by the hands of a movement in the middle of the last century in America which taught with a religious fervor (and indeed its language was commingled with the language of religion, and some of its strongest exponents were religious leaders) that black men were the equals of white men and should not be treated as if they were less.

And Lovecraft died twenty years before any white man in America had ever heard a word of it. How then can he be expected to have obeyed it? This movement was not God. We do not derive goodness from it and accept unquestioningly that what it and its leaders did was good - MLK cheated on his wife after all. We trust that it was good, presumably because we've been swayed by the merit of its arguments.

Why then is it justifiable to act as if Lovecraft committed a moral failing by never hearing those arguments or deriving them independently?

>>4549132
>>4549128

I actually don't have a problem with it. Moomin books are great, they are much less kiddie bullshit than a great many books for adults. It surprised me to see it on there, is all.

>>4548226
Yes, the contemporary literature awards and "media" surrounding it are very affirmative action.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Resentment

>>4548565
you are wrong here, people, especially younger ones, always rebel against traditions regardless if they were exposed to another culture or not, especially when they see those traditions as useless or harmful (also it's kind of stupid to think that a woman would find her mutilation which has the main goal to make sex painful for her as something reasonable)

actually i can even give you an authentic example, sun yat sen (the leader of 1912 chinese revolution) when he (see, he was male) was a child he saw his mother binding feet of his sister (lotus feet practice) and asked her to stop because his sister suffered, regardless that it was a 1000 years old tradition btw aimed to pleasure men like he was and to give women a chance for a better marriage. of course he couldn't persuade his mother to stop, but he banned foot binding as soon as he took the power. from your point of view it should be an impossible story since he should be exposed to western feminism before growing to hate some of his country's traditions that makes women suffer

>>4549147
You know who's behind it all, right?

>Read Perdido Street Station
>It's bretty good
>Get to the ending
Never was my privilege checked so hard

>>4549191
I'm sorry, I haven't read through the thread yet, but is this a thread full of /paul/?

>>4549206
Just for you Sarah.

>>4549191
>yfw the biggest critic of it is a jew himself
>people still call him a big ol' racist white man despite him being a jewish minority
oh well, poor Bloom. Still, I'm glad he's around and I'm not sure what will happen when he's gone. There's not really any other popular classicists, are there?

>>4549219
Kind of like how Tim Wise is Jewish but pretends to be White when he writes his polemicals calling for the extermination of white people.

>>4549201
oh, come on, you think of rape as of your privilege?

That's right, she's a black woman who wrote a book about racism and it's all the Jew's fault. Or something? Fuck it, I can't even keep up with all the retarded /pol/-style reasoning or even tell it apart from the ironic posting anymore.

Anyway:

All she's really done here is echo the statements made by China Miéville, and I can't help but feel a double standard here as he was never the target of a massive thread take-down. The bombastic, ridiculous quote in the OP is even verbatim from him - Okorafor just re-blogged it. So... what then? Is it okay to make comical, over-the-top statements about dead, extremely talented racist authors if you're a white dude, but not a black chick?

You can't tell me it's okay for Miéville and not Okorafor because the former is a higher-quality author than the latter either. Remember we're talking about the World Fantasy Award here, which isn't exactly a marker of quality.

Also, why is this suddenly an issue now? All of this happened a few years ago - this feels a bit late to the party.

>>4549252
That ending was horrible. It was just an extremely stupid 180

>>4549005
lol libtards are delusional. I forgive you though, because you're a product of your time.

>>4549254
OP presented the quote as if it were hers. I assume many people responded under that assumption.

>>4549264
kinda weak but not 180
the main hero's gf was just recently kidnapped, tortured, possibly raped and lost her mind so he was disgusted when he realized that he actually helped a rapist all this time. still it was a weak ending since those bird people shown as extremely vindictive to the point of non plausibility and that the main hero couldn't forgive that bird guy

also as for myself i find the whole moth line kind of weak, next book, "the scar" is so much better

>>4549254

It's not an "issue" now, this thread was a troll thread from the beginning. I mean come on, the OP literally contains "LOL, you mad". This signals that it is open season for cultural warriors to bitch and moan but complaining that the entire thread is therefore of no substance is just lame, come on. Topic quickly turned to the award-winning book itself and not Mieville, which is good because there's absolutely nothing to say about Mieville except that it is baffling that he is read. There is more than one post in this thread detailing why the book being discussed is not good. You're not helping by coming in, accusing the entire thread of being retarded, and then making points that have already been made in the thread. That will just stir up hurt butts and political shitflinging.

>>4549283

Except he didn't at all. Maybe everyone really is retarded.

also i personally dislike main hero for another reason, that he kidnapped and killed that prof of biomagic

>>4549283
>>4549290
>Except he didn't at all. Maybe everyone really is retarded.

This. Not surprising to find /lit/ has terrible reading comprehension.

>>4549254
Black woman writes shitty YA novel and wins supposedly prestigious award just for being a black woman with enough firing braincells to publish a novel. It's hilarious. I can't believe negroids really expect to be taken seriously by anyone.

>>4549296

>supposedly prestigious

Oh come on, there's nothing prestigious about this shit. This thread stated its case on synthetic outrage, it was calculated to troll white men.

>>4549290
>which is good because there's absolutely nothing to say about Mieville except that it is baffling that he is read.

I try so hard to like the guy's books, but what I've read of his have been meandering, plodding messes.

>>4549301
It's prestigious in the world of genre fiction.

>>4549287
Yes the Scar was really good. The ending was anticlimatic without being stupid. Too bad Iron Council went back to retarded SJW Liberalism

>>4549310

Uh, not really. Hugo and Nebula are the big two SF awards. Apart from that I can't think of many that are even very reputable. Locus I guess. I had never ever heard of the World Fantasy Award before this thread and I read plenty of SF.

>>4548276
Ooga booga ba blip blap doop muhfuggah a sho do luvs me dat fried chikunz bix nood

>>4549319
I read of plenty of SF too, and I read plenty of SF blogs. The World Fantasy Award is a pretty big deal in those circles.

>>4549302

i dropped the third book of new corbuzon series due to fucking gay theme. china mieville writes an amazing (despite kind of illogical) steampunk, he can create the air but he is trying to get popularity adding the modern liberal crap, at least it seems so. i don't mind when half of protagonists are gays but why he should remind it on every page? two previous corbuzon books had some mentions about sex but the third one has them like on every page. may be it should symbolize the well-known gay promiscuity, i dunno

>>4549323

Of course it's a big deal in the circles of the writers, because getting awards is one of the two ways for a genre writer to avoid ending up broke and dead in a ditch, the other being to get a real job. But the Hugo and Nebula awards are about the only ones which anyone who is not on the inside of the SF world should care about.

>>4549316
i don't really see any liberalism in the first book
somebody who refused to help a rapist it is not liberalism
if anything, the strong woman who ain't need no men in the second book is more liberal-themed

>>4549319
check nebula award for the best short story for 2010

i mean i like little ponies too but seriosly

>>4549332

Naw, Mieville's a true believer and was an SWP member until he got kicked out (or jumped) over the rape allegations thing last year.

>>4549353
>rape allegations thing last year.
wut

>>4549352

I don't say they always, or even frequently, pick good stories. I say they are prestigious. The Oscars are rigged and what they reward is often total trash, but they are also prestigious. "Ponies" isn't great art but it's pretty funny, I'm not really sure why you singled it out as bad. Piers Anthony, Vonda McIntyre and Marion Zimmer Bradley have won Nebulas. L. Ron Hubbard and Charles Stross have won Hugos. It doesn't mean they are any good but they are not wholly sf-authorial circlejerks, they're circlejerks for other people as well.

>>4549362

Some SWP higher-up raped some SWP lower-down. Allegations were made, Mieville and some others sided with the woman, the powers that were sided with the man. Mieville's side lost, people got called rape apologists, Mieville walked out. Socialism is fun, kids.

>>4549367
some of those who you listed write good books -_-

>I'm not really sure why you singled it out as bad.

because it's basically a fanfic. i never ever thought that fanfics could win a prestigious award before. it's not especially bad, some of other award winning stuff which i read is more cringe worthy, like (since we discuss rape here) 'nebula' for the best novellette of the same 2010 when some mormon teaches sapient plasma clouds that rape is bad while they didn't even have the conception of rape before

>>4549404

I don't know that I would call it fanfic really, it is a story about the commodification of the young girl's experience hence the constant brand name dropping and hence the appeal to MUH PONYS. But it doesn't have anything to say about MLP specifically, much less is it supposed to tell a story set within the universe of MLP (I have not seen any MLP so I don't know if she is writing about the ponies from that show specifically but I strongly doubt it, just from a legal standpoint). Rather the ponies are a setting element that serves to 1) refer to the existing pony craze that is pushed among young girls by Lisa Frank, My Little Pony, etc., and 2) add some pathos to the depicted situation of social exclusion.

>some of other award winning stuff which i read is more cringe worthy

I'm sure. Lot of bad genre fiction out there and that will never change. After all there's a lot of awards to ensure that it doesn't.

>>4548175
>being mad at a man of his time being a man of his time

Retards

Like they wouldn't be happy slave owners if they where born white in a time where owning slaves was okay

>>4549446

>Like they wouldn't be happy slave owners if they where born white in a time where owning slaves was okay

This post more than anything else illustrates the absurdity of trying to apply ethical standards from one time and place to people from another time and place, and I'm pretty sure that was the opposite of your intent so give yourself a pat on the back from me. What the fuck?

>>4549452
That was exactly my intention?

>>4549446
You're so mad you're incoherent. Get a hold of yourself, cracker.

>>4549452
>and I'm pretty sure that was the opposite of your intent

Different anon, but how in the world did you get that idea?

>>4549430
>1) refer to the existing pony craze that is pushed among young girls by Lisa Frank
Lisa Frank was big during the 90's, but hasn't been popular for the past 10-20 years or so. Even then she was more than just "ponies", it was just tons of cutesy stuff and neon colors.

I didn't really disagree with anything else you posted, just wanted to point that out.

>>4549474

His post appreciates the effect of time, but not the effect of place (not just in the sense of spatial, but also of social, psychological location). People who are mad at Lovecraft can't do other than be mad at Lovecraft, and people who aren't mad at Lovecraft can't do other than not be mad at Lovecraft - and the same goes for Lovecraft's own cognitive bias or, if you prefer, racism.

>>4549491

Well yeah, I must be getting old. But you get my point. Horse fetishism among young girls is easily one of the weirdest things that happens in modern western culture. I am sure I'm totally incapable of appreciating why it is so widespread. But it's a great signifier of how owned young women or loveless neckbeards experiencing the futile longing for a state of fatherhood that their minds, oversexed and choked with frustration, conflate with feelings of bestial lust are in our culture, wouldn't you think?

>>4549446
>Like they wouldn't be happy slave owners if they where born white in a time where owning slaves was okay
If they were born on the dominant africans tribes of old, I doubt they had been opposed to owning slaves.

>>4548594

There were two such sections, the "Wardine" section and the "yrstruly" section.

The narrator of the Wardine section is definitely black; yrstruly is never positively identified elsewhere in the book but is probably Emil Minty, also black.

>>4549383
Isn't it stranger how many Socialist organizations are basically cults designed to procure brainwashed females for the upper bureaucracy?

Good to know /pol/ will never ever leave and mods/jans aren't doing their jobs cleaning shit up.

>>4549493
Determinist retard please leave.

Even in the era of black slavery there were always opponents. Amongst their number were such founding fathers as Franklin, Adams, and Paine, amongst others.

In fact to facilitate the union, the founders passed a law that would end the Atlantic slave trade in a certain number of years, hoping that slavery would taper off on its own (of course it didn't).

There have also always been those who argued for civil rights and equality. Certainly so in Lovecraft's time and in Lovecraft's part of the country. And since Lovecraft was a man of learning, there is truly no excuse. The truth was available to him and it is his own failing for not reaching for it or acknowledging it.

Should we not judge our contemporaries who watch reality television, who believe Iraq had something to do with 9/11, who support massive government spying, and so on, just because this is the dominant tendency in our culture? Preposterous.

99% of people are shit. Lovecraft was one of them.

His writing isn't that good either.

>>4549525
i think you overthink the whole phenomenon
>Horse fetishism among young girls is easily one of the weirdest things that happens in modern western culture

horses are cute and women always loved them. equestrian clubs are filled with women

popular shows always had and have a lot of fans of all ages

'ponies' isn't in any way a protest against hasbro production, it uses the pony motif to describe a scene of bullying and social adapting

i personally think of it as of fanfic since ponies there are one-to-one as mlp ponies with the same styled names, wings, horns and weird colors

>>4548653
Shame was very good, if a bit too heavy on the long silences where Fassbender gazed at things. Also, Hunger is amazing, and Twelve Years a Slave was good even without Fassbender as the lead.

>>4549645
Yawn. Shouldn't you be attending a Campus Socialists meeting or something?

>>4549679
shouldn't you be attending the third reich apologetics meeting

>>4548604

I loved this post. thx m8e.

>>4549682
I'd love to, but universities don't actually allow that kind of crimethink on campus.

Isn't it a little odd that the oppressive capitalist establishment you despise tolerates and even fetes your ideological leanings, while actively working to quash those of fascists and other far right-wingers? Perhaps you should consider the possibility that you have been tricked :)

>>4549689

You sure are making a lot of baseless logical leaps, guy.

You know, I have nothing at all against black authors. I just have no patience or tolerance for the patronizing liberals who pretend that the "work speaks for itself", when that's definitely not the case.

>>4549689
what the fuck are you on about

>>4549695
>>4549702
>liberals

>>4549710
>retards

>>4549689
>I'd love to

Unless you're a German living in Germany, this makes no sense. Do you honestly believe the Reich would have room for granting positions of prestige to a bunch of yanks?

All that talk of racial brotherhood goes right out the window when the realities of ruling a colonial empire set in. The Germans would have found some justification for keeping Americans as second-class citizens.

Getting tricked is one thing, but getting tricked by the propaganda of a regime that's been dead for 70 years is a whole new level. Besides, being a quisling is so 1942.

>>4549710

The belief that racism is wrong has nothing to do with socialism. You're talking nonsense and throwing up smokescreens to circumvent rational discussion.

>>4549716
I'd love to because I am sympathetic to fascism and Nazi Germany. My actual ideological leanings tend more to the archeofuturist.

Also
>implying Germany would have tried to conquer America, or even rule the rest of Europe as a colonial power

lel no


>>4549725
It has everything to do with the American Puritan progressivism which has conquered the world, though, and let's face it: most anti-racists are at least sympathetic to socalism.

>The American-born daughter of Igbo Nigerian parents

Stopped reading there.

Igbos are the Jews of Nigeria. They will lie, cheat and steal to make it to the top. Down on your luck and need to borrow money from your Igbo friend of ten years? He'll lend you money, but you have to pay it back with interest. Do you have more money than him? You are now his favorite friend on earth. Fucking scum.


Trust me I have over twenty years of experience with these parasites.

>>4549733
>implying Germany would have tried to conquer America, or even rule the rest of Europe as a colonial power

This is exactly what they were trying to do.

>>4549738
Tell us more about your experience anon.

>>4549741
No they weren't.

>>4549645
>And since Lovecraft was a man of learning, there is truly no excuse. The truth was available to him and it is his own failing for not reaching for it or acknowledging it.

It's true. I'm tired of a lot of people in this thread going "lol it was the early 20th century of course everyone was racist." No, fuck off.

>>4549733
>let's face it: most anti-racists are at least sympathetic to socalism.

Even granting this premise, which I don't because it's stupid, it has nothing to do with the discussion. Most anti-racists eat bread, too. But if you tried to turn this discussion to the ethics of eating bread, you'd receive the same drumming. It's irrelevant.

You are completely illogical, incapable of following even a simple conversation. How sad it is you manage to delude yourself into believing you're the more rational party here.

>>4549645
Who gives a fuck if he was racist, he was a writer. Judge his writing for his writing, not for social justice nonsense.

>>4549750
There's noting wrong with being racist. In fact, racists are objectively correct in their claims, though perhaps sometimes inflammatory. Belief in racial egalitarianism rhetoric requires pseudo-religious dogmatic conviction and Creationist-tier science denial.

The only crime of racists is that their beliefs do not square with the current idiosyncratic religious convulsions of our ridiculous society.

>>4549759

Yeah, whatever. The scientific establishment supports the notion of racial equality from a biological perspective.

>b-but that's all part of the conspiracy! mainstream science has been infiltrated by libruls!!

What was that about religious-style magical thinking and denial of established science, again?

>>4549755
>look mom I posted it again!

Try presenting a real argument, son. Maybe then someone will take you seriously.

>>4549763
> The scientific establishment supports the notion of racial equality from a biological perspective.

Could you provide some evidence for that, or is this just something the media taught you?

The biggest open secret in fields like evolutionary biology is that we are not, in fact, all equal. Basic evolutionary theory predicts that this is impossible, actual genetic testing proves that we can be genetically subdivided into racial groupings, and worldwide IQ testing goes so far as explicitly quantifying differences in intelligence.

You are full of shit.

>>4549757
honestly i can see how some of his stories are unpleasant to read for people who belong to those nations which lovecraft described as degraded and degenerate. no wonder that a black person may dislike lovecraft, would like to read a book which despise your nation and portray it in a derogatory and pejorative way? probably no unless you dislike your nationality too and have some kind of self-hate

>>4549775
>would you

>>4549773

>actual genetic testing proves that we can be genetically subdivided into racial groupings
The genetic haplogroups used by evolutionary biologists are vastly different from the folk conception of "race" and if anything go to prove that broad racial distinctions are mostly a cultural artifact.

>and worldwide IQ testing goes so far as explicitly quantifying differences in intelligence.
No reputable scientist has taken IQ tests seriously for decades.

>>4549765

Bizarre and nakedly desperate.

Mockery and faux superiority won't make observers think you've won.

>>4549786
>The genetic haplogroups used by evolutionary biologists are vastly different from the folk conception of "race"

No they are not. Haplogroup clusters correspond approximately to the actual spiritual conception of. What a ludicrous claim for you to make when the research is literally online for anyone to see.

> prove that broad racial distinctions are mostly a cultural artifact.

That's NOT the same as all racial groups being equal from a biological perspective.

>No reputable scientist has taken IQ tests seriously for decades.

An utterly baseless and blatantly false claim. I challenge you to produce a single piece of evidence supporting it.

>>4549746

So I guess Vichy France, the collaborationist regimes in Norway etc., the occupation of Poland, invasion of Russia, and so forth -- were all, what, made up?

>>4549801
Uh, hello? Military occupation during wartime is not the same as the colonial vision you are claiming Germany had for Europe.

>>4549319
Arthur C. Clarke award

She sounds cool.

>>4549828
You sound like a race-traitor.

>>4548513
You mean in literature, peace/activism and such.
Science nobels are good.

>>4549834
and a proud one

>>4550100
You people always are.

What's with the amount of /pol/ blaming going on ITT?

It's pathetic.

>>4548469
Well said, anon. HPL's racism was only when he was young. He learned and grew. His wife, a working woman, paid the bills. Jews and Women were among his friends, and he helped both get published. Probably black writers too, though i haven't checked. If Mieville really said that he's a stooge. OK a black writer can make up their own mind, but come on, without HPL China's better work would not exist.

>>4550356
As a racist, I can vouch for the attractiveness of jewesses.

They're simply irresistable.

>>4550356
lovecraft often described asian and african people as completely degenerate followers of, ahem, degenerate cults. if you meet anybody asian or african in his works you may be almost 100% sure they will be described in some derogatory terms

>without HPL China's better work would not exist

if you read the quote he admits that he writes behind lovecrafts' back

>>4550363
JIDF pls go

>>4550356
HPL was also racist later in life. Jews are still white, and I don't see why he would have had a problem with assimilated Jews or women. There's a gigantic leap between hating some groups of white people and hating negroids and mongoloids.

>>4551230
why don't you use caucasoid?

>>4550363
Yeah I'm a pretty radical anti-Zionist, edging into anti-Semitism sometimes, and a National Socialist, and I'm still dating a Jew.

It just can't be helped.

>>4551230
'white' as skin color only came about in the 20th century. Jews Italians etc where considered non white by anglos

>>4551231
To emphasize the gap between whites and other groups from the perspective of HPL.

Also because I'm hugely racist.

>>4551242
Well, yes, applying the term "white" backwards through history is a bit presentist. However, I think it gets the point across. Italians and others weren't considered different in the same way that a black was considered different.