This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

David Stockhoff · 10 Apr 2012, 11:32 · from 2012-April.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2012 07:32:53 -0400
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires
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On 4/9/2012 11:21 PM, Matthew Knight wrote:
> Most of the reaction is overblown, as Nick has pointed out.
>
> However, I'm currently 100 pages into "Home Fires," and I must say 
> that the "sharia law--only in the EU" line punched me in the gut.  It 
> made me start asking myself which particular pundits Wolfe has been 
> reading.  As somebody who grew up in a very monoethnic fundamentalist 
> Christian milieu, who now has several Middle Eastern friends, I have 
> been finding myself forced into the role of the "defender of Islam" 
> all too often lately out of basic frustration over some of the 
> bald-faced generalizations and lies that get peddled as fact, and 
> Europe's Islamic future is a meme that keeps coming up in discussions. 
>  Maybe it's just personal experience making me oversensitive.

On the other hand, if a story featured people who befriend travelers on 
stormy nights, then sink their fangs into their necks, you wouldn't 
twitch. I had the same reaction initially. But a fundy-Muslim Europe 
sounds pretty "scary" to me. Boo!

It's easy to imagine a future Europe of declining native and growing 
immigrant populations.
>
> I don't want to inflame anything, as I recognize that Wolfe may indeed 
> have a larger proportion of right-leaning fans than, say, China 
> Mieville or Richard Morgan (or...Neil Gaiman?), and of course his 
> writings display enormous nuance.  I think Wolfe's writing is stellar 
> enough to appeal to readers of all political stances.  Still, I wonder 
> if any literary scholar has ever undertaken a Said-influenced 
> "Orientalist" critique of something like "Seven American Nights"?

I'd like to see that too, although I am not sure what it would produce 
that is not already clear. That story takes all the familiar features of 
Victorian gentleman-explorers and the Orient and flips them on an 
SF/horror template. The Americans are furtive, dishonest, addicted, 
childlike, innocent, perverse, seductive, and deformed. They seem an 
impossible contradiction, in fact, and that's one of the features of the 
Orientalist Orient.

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