Re: Anyone read Stirling's latest?

On Jun 4, 1:34 am, Steve <joatsim...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Apr 24, 6:52=EF=BF=BDpm, prestorjon <prestor...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> >A similar thing pops up in Conquistador, where the surviving Indians of
=
California seem to live happily under the tutelage of the New Virginians.
>
> -- ah... no, actually.  As depicted, -some- of the Indians work for
> the New Virginians and suffer severe social dislocation.  A few were
> assimilated, more or less.
>
> The majority of surviving Indians are hostile to the New Virginians;
> note that their name for them is "deathwalkers".
>
> The division among the Indians is mostly between those who feel that
> the New Virginians are too strong to oppose openly, and those who want
> to attack them anyway.  There's a scene where the female p.o.v.
> character is ambushed by Indians in the Central Valley, for example.
>

Well of course we've got the wild Injuns who cause problems, but they
don't really count do they because they're not really people in
Conquistador.


>
> >These other subaltern characters exist merely as extensions of the will
=
of the
>
> white protagonists.
>
> -- if you're thinking of the Draka books, the "subaltern groups"
> mostly show _are_ white people.  Unless you don't count the French in
> that category?

Of course many of the subalterns in Draka are white, but that doesn't
negate the racial aspect here.  With the exception of the USCG
commander in ISOT, who notably rejects much of her racial
identification, there aren't any non-white leads that I can think of
in Stirling's works.  Those non-white characters who exist are mostly
cyphers.  They have no real personality of their own, concerns of
their own, goals of their own.  They just exist as extensions of the
white protagonists willpower and an example of the dominance of
western, mostly white, people over non-western non white peoples.