5 ms·

> I quickly tire of being hit on the head over and over with an author's novel-length not-so-thinly-veiled self-help message that perhaps should have been an op

by csours 3y ago

> I quickly tire of being hit on the head over and over with an author's novel-length not-so-thinly-veiled self-help message that perhaps should have been an opinion piece or short article. Would you like a cup of tea and a chat?

stevenAthompson 3y ago
I liked the vibe, but I felt like it was either poorly written or my reading skills need help. The pronouns were very confusing. The author used "they" to replace he/she, and I often couldn't tell if a sentence referred to the main character or a group. I became frustrated and put the book down.
- csours 3y ago
  I had a similar experience when writers started using 'she' as a default pronoun. It would catch in my brain and I'd have to think about it, because it was different. I think it's fine to feel that way. I feel like it's very easy on the internet to misunderstand discomfort and misattribute feelings.
  - zellyn 3y ago
    Same here. As someone who went through every available golden-age SciFi book in any library near me as a kid, I think the modern crop of diversity in Science Fiction is a welcome relief. It's not all good, naturally, and it's hard to compete with that early profusion of new ideas, but it sure feels less barren.
  - margalabargala 3y ago
    The very real ambiguity of using singular-vs-plural "they" is something that can be commented on and discussed, and is a linguistic weakness of that pronoun's increasing popularity. The english language already has that ambiguity surrounding "you", but since the reader/listener is included in a plural "you" it's easier for them to discern singular/plural. It's not quite the same as the catch in one's brain of encountering something that is unusual but information-complete; there can be truly ambiguous situations where the meaning of a sentence is fully changed depending on whether the author intends a singular or plural "they". Thus its use is a valid criticism one can have of a book, where understanding the author's meaning is kind of the point. Of course, introducing that ambiguity intentionally, or getting people used to the use of singular-they and getting better at distinguishing singular-vs-plural through practice and context can itself be part of the author's point :) It's still probably the best non-gendered singular pronoun we have in english.
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  The reason you were confused is that pronouns, correctly used, can somewhat help de-obfuscate which person is the subject, which is the object, and so on. Imagine you have a man, another man, and a woman. "He hit her" tells you the subject and helps narrow down who was doing the hitting, and that there was one witness. "She hit him" tells you who did the hitting and narrows down who was hit, and that there was one witness. "It hit it" (using "it" as a pronoun, Blindsight-style, as well as others) only lets you know that hitting has happened and that one person was a witness. "They hit them" tells you that hitting has occurred. No indication if it was a group thing or not, if there was an uninvolved witness.
- ksenzee 3y ago
  The author isn’t doing anything systematic with “they” replacing he/she everywhere; it’s just that the main character uses “they” pronouns. For people who don’t know anyone using “they” pronouns, a book like this can be a helpful way to get used to it—much easier than encountering it for the first time in the workplace. It’s true that when there’s singular/plural ambiguity, you do have to find strategies to resolve it. Luckily they’re similar strategies to how we resolve singular/plural ambiguity when using “you.” (It would be nice if English had kept “thou” around. Alas.)
- SamWhited 3y ago
  I don't really understand the confusion, a good writer (and Chambers is one) will make it clear from context whether the "they" is plural or not, but if you're confused you might enjoy her other works which use xe/xem so "they" is always plural and you don't have to sort it out.
  - stevenAthompson 3y ago
    It wasn't clear to me, but that could be unique to me. I would have greatly preferred xe/xem or some other alternative, and I really did love the overall style of the book. I think I'll give the other books a shot. Do you have any particular recommendation?
    - SamWhited 3y ago
      I really liked "Record of a Spaceborn Few", but the entire Wayfarer series is pretty good. I think technically it's a sequel to the first one, but IIRC it doesn't really matter which order you read them in, you may just not be sure once or twice when they mention one of the main characters from the original book.
      - stevenAthompson 3y ago
        Thanks for taking the time to make a suggestion! I just bought "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" as I don't like to read series out of sequence and Kindle noted it as the first of that series.
- KittenInABox 3y ago
  Do you also get confused when more than one male character exists in a scene and the pronoun "he" exists? Genuinely curious because I didn't notice the Psalm Of The Wild-Built used any different techniques to disambiguate singular and plural they vs when there are two men. Usually, it goes "name did x. afterwards, they did y", so even if something like "joseph punched james in the mouth. he felt the crunching of teeth against his fist" makes sense to me!
  - stevenAthompson 3y ago
    It often did not disambiguate, or did so in a way that was subtle and required effort on the readers part. To reuse your example, sentences like this seemed to be common: "Joseph, James, and Joe were in the store. They punched James and could feel the crunching of teeth against their fist." Who did the punching in that sentence? My first thought is that both Joseph and James punched Joe, because "they" is usually plural when you have a group present. A reader might be able to determine it from further context, but it takes more effort and pulls them out of the otherwise excellent story. It probably didn't help matters that the protagonist (Dex?) did not explain they were without gender until somewhere around the 3rd chapter. By that point I just thought the authors native language wasn't English.
    - KittenInABox 3y ago
      > "Joseph, James, and Joe were in the store. They punched James and could feel the crunching of teeth against their fist." I don't find this confusing in this context because, presumably, you know only one of those three use they/them pronouns (probably joe, because I called james and joseph men earlier), and only one fist is being used. Maybe I'm weird but I immediately knew from chapter 1 that Dex was a they/them. Like page 1. Here's an excerpt from the beginning: https://www.tor.com/2021/06/22/excerpts-becky-chambers-a-psalm-for-the-wild-built/ https://www.tor.com/2021/06/22/excerpts-becky-chambers-a-psa... Dex couldn’t pinpoint where the affinity had come from. [...]They’d never lived anywhere with cricket song, yet once they registered its absence in the City’s soundscape, it couldn’t be ignored. They noted it while they tended the Meadow Den Monastery’s rooftop garden, as was their vocation. [...] Oh, there were plenty of bugs—butterflies and spiders and beetles galore, all happy little synanthropes whose ancestors had decided the City was preferable to the chaotic fields beyond its border walls. But none of these creatures chirped. None of them sang. They were city bugs and therefore, by Dex’s estimation, inadequate. This paragraph uses 'they' to refer to Dex, and also 'they' to refer to insects. But it's very clear to me that the first several "they" refers to Dex, because Dex is the only subject before this. The sole "they" that doesn't refer to Dex explicitly uses "Dex" separately, so you know there isn't ambiguity there. Genuinely asking... what's confusing about this? Chambers is using literally what people use when there's more than one guy in a scene- one pronoun usually referring to the subject just spoken about, and if two subjects exist with the same pronoun then the most recently spoken subject gets the pronoun and the other is explicitly named. Later on... “Okay,” Sister Mara said, for her duties as Keeper were simply to oversee, not to dictate. [...] If Sister Mara knew what was up with the monks under their shared roof, her job was satisfied. “Do you want an apprenticeship?” “No,” Dex said. Formal study had its place, but they’d done that before, and learning by doing was an equally valid path. “I want to self-teach.” The "they" that doesn't refer to Dex is literally called a shared roof. It obviously doesn't refer to Dex as an individual. This isn't ambiguous.

by csours 3y ago

stevenAthompson 3y ago

I liked the vibe, but I felt like it was either poorly written or my reading skills need help. The pronouns were very confusing. The author used "they" to replace he/she, and I often couldn't tell if a sentence referred to the main character or a group. I became frustrated and put the book down.

csours 3y ago
I had a similar experience when writers started using 'she' as a default pronoun. It would catch in my brain and I'd have to think about it, because it was different. I think it's fine to feel that way. I feel like it's very easy on the internet to misunderstand discomfort and misattribute feelings.
- zellyn 3y ago
  Same here. As someone who went through every available golden-age SciFi book in any library near me as a kid, I think the modern crop of diversity in Science Fiction is a welcome relief. It's not all good, naturally, and it's hard to compete with that early profusion of new ideas, but it sure feels less barren.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  The very real ambiguity of using singular-vs-plural "they" is something that can be commented on and discussed, and is a linguistic weakness of that pronoun's increasing popularity. The english language already has that ambiguity surrounding "you", but since the reader/listener is included in a plural "you" it's easier for them to discern singular/plural. It's not quite the same as the catch in one's brain of encountering something that is unusual but information-complete; there can be truly ambiguous situations where the meaning of a sentence is fully changed depending on whether the author intends a singular or plural "they". Thus its use is a valid criticism one can have of a book, where understanding the author's meaning is kind of the point. Of course, introducing that ambiguity intentionally, or getting people used to the use of singular-they and getting better at distinguishing singular-vs-plural through practice and context can itself be part of the author's point :) It's still probably the best non-gendered singular pronoun we have in english.
at_a_remove 3y ago
The reason you were confused is that pronouns, correctly used, can somewhat help de-obfuscate which person is the subject, which is the object, and so on. Imagine you have a man, another man, and a woman. "He hit her" tells you the subject and helps narrow down who was doing the hitting, and that there was one witness. "She hit him" tells you who did the hitting and narrows down who was hit, and that there was one witness. "It hit it" (using "it" as a pronoun, Blindsight-style, as well as others) only lets you know that hitting has happened and that one person was a witness. "They hit them" tells you that hitting has occurred. No indication if it was a group thing or not, if there was an uninvolved witness.
ksenzee 3y ago
The author isn’t doing anything systematic with “they” replacing he/she everywhere; it’s just that the main character uses “they” pronouns. For people who don’t know anyone using “they” pronouns, a book like this can be a helpful way to get used to it—much easier than encountering it for the first time in the workplace. It’s true that when there’s singular/plural ambiguity, you do have to find strategies to resolve it. Luckily they’re similar strategies to how we resolve singular/plural ambiguity when using “you.” (It would be nice if English had kept “thou” around. Alas.)
SamWhited 3y ago
I don't really understand the confusion, a good writer (and Chambers is one) will make it clear from context whether the "they" is plural or not, but if you're confused you might enjoy her other works which use xe/xem so "they" is always plural and you don't have to sort it out.
- stevenAthompson 3y ago
  It wasn't clear to me, but that could be unique to me. I would have greatly preferred xe/xem or some other alternative, and I really did love the overall style of the book. I think I'll give the other books a shot. Do you have any particular recommendation?
  - SamWhited 3y ago
    I really liked "Record of a Spaceborn Few", but the entire Wayfarer series is pretty good. I think technically it's a sequel to the first one, but IIRC it doesn't really matter which order you read them in, you may just not be sure once or twice when they mention one of the main characters from the original book.
    - stevenAthompson 3y ago
      Thanks for taking the time to make a suggestion! I just bought "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" as I don't like to read series out of sequence and Kindle noted it as the first of that series.
KittenInABox 3y ago
Do you also get confused when more than one male character exists in a scene and the pronoun "he" exists? Genuinely curious because I didn't notice the Psalm Of The Wild-Built used any different techniques to disambiguate singular and plural they vs when there are two men. Usually, it goes "name did x. afterwards, they did y", so even if something like "joseph punched james in the mouth. he felt the crunching of teeth against his fist" makes sense to me!
- stevenAthompson 3y ago
  It often did not disambiguate, or did so in a way that was subtle and required effort on the readers part. To reuse your example, sentences like this seemed to be common: "Joseph, James, and Joe were in the store. They punched James and could feel the crunching of teeth against their fist." Who did the punching in that sentence? My first thought is that both Joseph and James punched Joe, because "they" is usually plural when you have a group present. A reader might be able to determine it from further context, but it takes more effort and pulls them out of the otherwise excellent story. It probably didn't help matters that the protagonist (Dex?) did not explain they were without gender until somewhere around the 3rd chapter. By that point I just thought the authors native language wasn't English.
  - KittenInABox 3y ago
    > "Joseph, James, and Joe were in the store. They punched James and could feel the crunching of teeth against their fist." I don't find this confusing in this context because, presumably, you know only one of those three use they/them pronouns (probably joe, because I called james and joseph men earlier), and only one fist is being used. Maybe I'm weird but I immediately knew from chapter 1 that Dex was a they/them. Like page 1. Here's an excerpt from the beginning: https://www.tor.com/2021/06/22/excerpts-becky-chambers-a-psalm-for-the-wild-built/ https://www.tor.com/2021/06/22/excerpts-becky-chambers-a-psa... Dex couldn’t pinpoint where the affinity had come from. [...]They’d never lived anywhere with cricket song, yet once they registered its absence in the City’s soundscape, it couldn’t be ignored. They noted it while they tended the Meadow Den Monastery’s rooftop garden, as was their vocation. [...] Oh, there were plenty of bugs—butterflies and spiders and beetles galore, all happy little synanthropes whose ancestors had decided the City was preferable to the chaotic fields beyond its border walls. But none of these creatures chirped. None of them sang. They were city bugs and therefore, by Dex’s estimation, inadequate. This paragraph uses 'they' to refer to Dex, and also 'they' to refer to insects. But it's very clear to me that the first several "they" refers to Dex, because Dex is the only subject before this. The sole "they" that doesn't refer to Dex explicitly uses "Dex" separately, so you know there isn't ambiguity there. Genuinely asking... what's confusing about this? Chambers is using literally what people use when there's more than one guy in a scene- one pronoun usually referring to the subject just spoken about, and if two subjects exist with the same pronoun then the most recently spoken subject gets the pronoun and the other is explicitly named. Later on... “Okay,” Sister Mara said, for her duties as Keeper were simply to oversee, not to dictate. [...] If Sister Mara knew what was up with the monks under their shared roof, her job was satisfied. “Do you want an apprenticeship?” “No,” Dex said. Formal study had its place, but they’d done that before, and learning by doing was an equally valid path. “I want to self-teach.” The "they" that doesn't refer to Dex is literally called a shared roof. It obviously doesn't refer to Dex as an individual. This isn't ambiguous.