Review: Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell

I'd been excited to read Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain for a while, for several reasons: 1) It's got a pretty bitchin' cover, with a dark-skinned man with a hook for a left hand and a flying ship; 2) it's a POC-centric novel, and I was curious to see how it worked out; 3) Tobias Buckell identifies strongly as POC, as Caribbean, despite passing as a generic white American dude.

I did not get around to reading Crystal Rain for several reasons: 1) grad school; 2) I somehow couldn't find a way to get my mitts on it on Amazon (Buckell's store only offers a hardcover); and 3) grad school (seriously, moving to a new city and getting used to grad school sucks up your time. Things nobody tells you). Also, priorities and all that meant that I had to pick other texts to read that more strongly coded as steampunk, and I wasn't sure whether Crystal Rain did.

Well, it kinda does and doesn't.

Things This Blog Doesn't Cover (But Wishes It Could)

So I was saying to Adrienne Kress the other day while hanging around the autograph table at SFContario, that there have been three separate incidents throughout this year, at three separate cons (that'd be Nova Albion, CNSE, and SteamCon), that have something in common: at each con, someone has asked me, if I knew anything about Jewish steampunk. 

My first reaction is always an awkward, "well, um." The first time, I spouted Ted Chiang's story in the first Vandermeer Steampunk anthology. The second time, I listened to a woman tell me about the difficulty of researching Yiddishness, particularly from Eastern Europe where her family is from. The third time, was during a SATW presentation and all I could say was, "there is some."

I write a lot about literature and analysing it, as well as analysing practices in the steampunk subculture, mostly focusing on the rhetoric people spout in defense of racist practices like cultural appropriation. I write about tropes and common ideas that are harmful. 

I think a lot about decolonizing the mind, which tends to be a deeply personal thing for me. It's tied to my history as a Malaysian, in which I have to question what it means to be a product of colonialism. I have to ask myself what is racist about my upbringing and what I was surrounded with and how to combat that in a productive manner that promotes dialog between the races living in my country. I have to criticize the people I was brought up to respect and obey. I think about the colonization of my people and how it has continued, even after we were "independent." Because, make no mistake, our independence is relatively modern, and although the economic neocolonialism of our wealth and resources come from other sources beyond the traditional British, the reasons why my people often uncritically and unwittingly embrace these memes that deprecate and demean us, that tell us that we are lesser (because we are not rich enough, according to white standards, because we are not pretty enough, according to white standards, because we are not cultured or civilized enough, according to white standards) are rooted in hundred of years of a foreign presence that persisted in maintaining a military and a culture war against us as national, political, tribal and ethnic entities.

But there are other stories to talk about, too.

Decolonizing Geography, Starting with Names

"What's in a name?" as Shakespeare wrote, and then he goes on with some claptrap of how roses smell the same. Except, of course, that's not how communication works: the essence of a thing is always communicated through a lens, and the lens will be affected by a lot of other things, including but not limited to, what any given thing is called.

Names are important.

This is a post brought to you by this excellent list of names of the Caribbean islands as called by the natives before the colonizers popularized the names used today. So if you don't want to read what's under the cut, you should at least go have a look at that.