Assorted notes
The red hair didn't thrill my co-workers either. I may resort to dyeing it brown. But I'll leave it alone for the rest of the week, at least.
Kam's back from Europe! Yay!
I was feeling more or less okay this morning, so I went to work, but by midafternoon I was headachey and nauseous (I know, I know, it's supposed to be nauseated, just another one of those language peeves I somehow failed to pick up), so I came home. Napped for an hour or so, which helped. Feeling okay this evening. Hope will feel better in morning. Must sleep soon.
Keep running into notions relating to cultural misunderstandings in sf, from a variety of directions. Last night was working on the collaboration story, where culture clash figures prominently; someone was talking about this stuff in an online journal lately, but I'm completely blanking on who it was, sorry; then tonight while looking for something unrelated I stumbled on Mary Doria Russell's Sparrow FAQ, in which she notes (sort-of spoilers here) that she wanted to write
...a story that would take modern, well-educated, culturally sensitive, ... well-meaning ... people and drop them into a state of radical ignorance [of another culture]. ... It seemed to me that the situation was almost inherently tragic, simply because you can't know that you've misunderstood something until after the misunderstanding has taken place.
Which makes a lot of sense to me, and she talks about it articulately and well in that FAQ. But the thing that I keep seeing in various places is the suggestion that this is a new idea, that the notion of sf about how badly two cultures can misunderstand each other is something unusual. Which surprises me, because I've lost count of the number of stories I've seen (published and unpublished) in which the entire point of the story is that the ambassador from one culture has a (usually fatal) misunderstanding of some essential point of another culture (often due to ignoring the official guidebook and/or the advice of the linguist and/or sociologist who does understand the local customs). It's something of a subgenre, and there's even a fairly well-defined set of things that one can misunderstand: food customs (often resulting in the ambassador being eaten), sexual customs, language issues ("Ambassador, wait! The phrase that we couldn't translate—it means 'We eat people!'"), gift-giving customs (it turns out that red gifts are mortal insults), and so on and so on.
I hope it's not giving away too much of The Sparrow for me to say that the notion that first contact is likely to go horribly awry due to cultural misunderstanding was not what I liked best about the book. (I did like quite a lot about the book; but that aspect was not the main appeal for me.)
I guess it just seems to me that in a true first-contact situation, one of the first things you should do is say to the aliens something like, look, our culture is different from yours, and we're bound to make some mistakes along the way. Please cut us some slack, and we'll do the same for you. Also, it would be great if you could make a list of the things likely to cause mortal offense, and we'll try real hard not to do those things. But even if we do, please remember that it's probably because our culture is different from yours, so if it happens, please don't launch a war against us 'til we've had a chance to sit down and talk through it. Oh, and here's our list of things that will probably upset us if you do them, so be careful around these twitchy subjects. 'Kay?
(Yeah, yeah, this doesn't work when it turns out that their custom of roasting and eating babies is so abhorrent to us that the two cultures could never be friends. But that's not the kind of misunderstanding that I usually see in these stories.)
It would probably fail anyway; the ways misunderstandings can arise are legendarily multitudinous. But at least it would be more likely to fail in an obscure and interesting way.
Enough. Must sleep.
