I was astonished recently by what I think of as a misstep by a well-loved SFF author team. It was a trivial matter, but I couldn’t ignore it since I found it such a surprise that such an accomplished and productive pair of writers would fall into this trap. Was it deliberate? An oversight?
Let me set the groundwork right at the start. The varied Liaden Universe series (and several other series) by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are well loved by me, and I’ve read them many many times, in their entirety, over my own long reading career. The recent release of books 27 (Diviner’s Bow) and 29 (Ribbon Dance), and the sad announcement of Steve Miller’s death sent me out immediately to read them (where I discovered that they seem to have been mis-numbered in their series’ numbers — not the misstep I’m referring to), and I devoured them non-stop. (If you want to dip a toe in the water, I recommend beginning with book 3 — “Balance of Trade“).
For those who do not know, the Liaden Universe world is a gigantic creation. It is populated by humans of various flavors, as well as many alien groups, including non-humanoids. It has a extraordinarily deep history. It’s about as broad an imagined SFF stage as can be readily conceived. In the face of all this complexity, the authors have done a exemplary dance of carrying multiple sub-universe and story lines along coherently. I recommend it wholeheartedly — go read them all, paying special attention to series order.
And now the reason I brought this up… I’ve never met the authors and never spoken to anyone about them. It seems clear to me from the books and from occasional remarks of theirs that I have come across that we would be unlikely to be on the same ends of the political/social spectrum, but so what? I have enjoyed a great many books by people who would hate me politically — that doesn’t matter to me. The various Liaden societies are often constructed to compare and contrast different cultures, a common theme in SFF and often used to implicitly (if silently) comment on the actual real culture of the probable readers. No problem, as far as I’m concerned.
So, what is all of this preamble in service of? In the two most recently released books, there is a romantic relationship between two characters, a regular female character already known in the series, and a new character whose gender is never explicitly stated (she presents to me as female). I don’t care about that, either. What do I care about? The pronoun used for the second character is “them”. That’s the problem I want to talk about.
It is perfectly alright by me for such a situation to be presented (in a universe full of actual aliens, what can it possibly matter?) But the nonce word of our current day, apparently used as a shorthand to escape needing to explain the situation in any more explicit detail, rings to me as absolutely false. It gives to that nonce word a weight it is unable to support.
To start with, it is impossible to picture that recently-created term surviving its birth. Pronouns do not just get called into existence and then survive for centuries by simple decree. It took a very long time for spoken English to lose the distinctive 2nd person formal singular Thee/Thy/Thine in favor of the one-time plural forms You/Your/Yours. While contemporary English is indeed in the gradual process of jettisoning the gender distinction in the 3rd person singular in the vernacular by using the plural form in a case of ambiguity (“If anyone comes early, give them a drink.” is now an unexceptional casual usage), it implies an unknown singular gender (in the mind of the speaker), not an ambiguous gender (in the mind of the object).
So, when “them” turns up in the usage of these books, it’s a constant slap in the face to me. It speaks to, perhaps, wishful thinking or actual endorsement of a local-to-the-reader quotidian social issue. After all, there’s an immense universe in the background of these books, and none of its denizens have decided they needed this pronomial usage until now, so it can’t help but draw attention to itself.
If it were me… I would have perhaps described the preferences, and then used a biological gender. If I thought it was important to world or story building to create an explicit term to stand in for “them”, then I would have created one (with perhaps a background cultural explanation).
But what I can’t endorse is this borrowing of a nonce term to do heavy lifting it isn’t qualified for. It is a little thing, I agree, but we shouldn’t slap readers in the face this way, unless we want it to be deliberate and polemical. Every time I stumbled across it in these two books I growled.
Give thought to things like this — if you have views you’d like to make a case for in your fiction, be sure you give them a foundation and explanation. Otherwise you risk having them overtake the whole point of the story itself, for the sake of a shortcut that isn’t solidly based.
Keep the reader’s POV in mind — shortcuts have a way of backfiring if not adequately engineered.
Mad Genius Club 
19 responses to “Assuming current cultural tics out of context”
First thought “Oooo! I’ve missed two new books!!!!!”
Second thought, yeah, the current issue is currently annoying. And probably will get more so, not less. Makes me wonder how some of my early stuff has aged.
This happens quite a bit in Martha Wells’ “Murderbot Diaries” series as well. Not only is the pronoun “they” used a fair amount, but in one case Wells uses a new gender (for humans), “tercera” with pronouns te/ter/ters. The only explanation given in that case is that it is a gender recognized in a certain star system, without further details.
In the Murderbot series, though I’m not fond of pronoun games myself, I find this is easily ignored for a couple of reasons. The books are first person narration by a character who has no gender (it’s a robot construct, and refers to itself as “it”) and doesn’t really care what gender humans are, for one thing. Also, the books are mostly quite brief – novellas rather than novels – and action focused, which makes it easy to ignore the pronoun stuff; it comes off more as shorthand to indicate “far distant future with Societal Changes” rather than anything else. I can see, however, that it would hit very differently in an extended series with lots of worldbuilding such as you are describing here. (And for the record, I agree with your point. I kind of think Wells is trying too hard.)
According to some historians, English lost the second person singular because it got politicized. In a time when religious conformity and political loyalty were still seen as linked, the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers) were a very divisive group of religious dissidents, particularly for their radical (for their time) notions of equality. They were going around thee-ing and thou-ing everyone, without regard for relative social status — which led people to avoid the second person singular even among equals or to subordinates, lest they be mistaken for Quakers, leading the plural to become the only productive form and people encountering the singular only in the Bible, Shakespeare, etc.
Could English go through a similar event with the third person singular sometime in the future? Maybe — but I’d expect the result to be “they/them” becoming the default for all singulars. And I wouldn’t be surprised if, a few hundred years later, a new third person plural develops, parallel to y’all and youse in American dialects.
Interesting. One book I read about the creation of the King James (Authorized) translation said that “thee/thine” was fading from use in the early 1600s, so it was an archaism, one of several, the translators used to mark the timelessness of the text. I don’t know, so *shrugs*
German has kept the “du/dein” as an informal second person, with singular and plural forms.
Almost all the languages of the Continent have preserved the second person singular and the use of the plural as a polite form as well as for addressing a group.
This can cause difficulty for English speakers learning those languages as an adult — because using the wrong form can have serious consequences. Most language courses teach the plural/polite form first, and only as the students progress introduce the singular/familiar form and its sociolinguistic implications.
Even when an English speaker has achieved an excellent conversational grasp of the pragmatics of the t/v distinction in a second language, its inappropriate use by another speaker still isn’t likely to have the same emotional impact as it would to a native speaker. In one of my WIP’s I have a scene where a Russian character switches to the familiar form with the POV character, who’s American, and she knows intellectually that he’s crossing a boundary and she needs to put a stop to it, but she doesn’t feel it as an affront the way a native speaker would.
For my sins, I now teach German. *Droops auf Deutsch*
I’ve tangled with Spanish (not too bad after 4.5 years of Latin), Czech (um, challenging), Polish (I want to buy vowels, please), Russian (I quit!), Finnish (could you make it any more complicated for an outsider?), Estonian and Lithuanian (my brain’s breaking), French (survival level, and “why do you have all those letters if you don’t use them? Were they looted from Poland?”), and Hungarian (spell? yes. Grammar? Nope!)
Asian languages terrify me. I back away slowly, then run. 😀
Spanish is splitting. In Spain, the formal pronouns are rarely used, while in the Americas, the formal pronouns are still widely use and are probably becoming more common.
The “thou” usage was declining before the Quakers came along.
I’m pretty sure that Ribbon Dance comes before Diviner’s Bow.
Honestly, I hadn’t realized that Tequila (sorry, Tekelia) was a They. But once again, (common in the Liaden universe), you get one book with two or who are friends, and then in the next book, you’re hit with, oh, *that * kind of friendship.
I still have Diviner’s Bow from the library, and I just reread the first chapter. Tekelia is not mentioned by pronoun, which is rather skillfully done, since Padi is thus referenced constantly. The highly stylized language of the Liadens probably contributes to this being less noticeable.
Yes, I’m sure the books are numbered incorrectly (which was really irritating when I discovered I had read the later one first). One of them definitely had more “them” modern usage than the other.
Mind you, I’m not objecting to the relationships portrayed (author choice), just the pronoun reference.
I read Tekelia as male to be honest, but he is suis generis and an immensely powerful dramilz so many rules don’t apply
I see Tekelia as female. I hadn’t realized that this was in debate until this post. Now I’ll have to reread it slowly before I return the library book to see for myself.
I was more concerned about the apparent age difference between the characters. Padi is just barely an adult, while Tekelia seems to be quite mature.
Though if Tekelia is male that would make some of the clauses in the agreement to make more sense. I justified it in my head by remembering that to the Liad, even life mating doesn’t necessarily mean sexual monogamy.
Liaden culture seems to be quite relaxed about sex, enough that they have the ungendered term ‘cha’klet’ for intimate relationships, and there is a character on SureBleak described as a heterata who is by inference male. I’ve been reading Liad since the first book came out (and have a hardback of Plan B) so I’m pretty familiar with Steve and Sharon’s previous usage.
I wonder if this change in pronoun use is an echo of Steve’s death.
Their world building has always struck me as kind of self-indulgent (pizza dates, Planet Academia) even when I enjoyed it, so not terribly surprised at this development.
Rather like the homonym errors, I can’t unsee those. And I’m getting used to they instead of “he or she” or even he. But I don’t like it. I wish we could use Sie the way the Germans do.
The use of they/them drives me bonkers in some cases. Had a scene in which the main characters are pursuing a flying shapeshifter of unknown gender. In my draft, I referenced the shifter as “it.” My co-author INSISTED it had to be changed to “they,” because “that is correct modern English.” And every time I read over the passage, that “they” jolts me out of our own story.
PS: LOVE the Liaden series — have followed it since the 80s.
Your co-author is wrong. In the formal English of the moment, I would claim that “he or she” is correct (though clumsy, and it only fits some sentence syntax situations, not all). “It” is also acceptable until more is known (in the context of “any animal of unknown gender” which includes people).
The thing is, you don’t get to declare language usage by dictum — the language users decide, en masse. The formal written language of its time is not a living language (only the spoken language is) — it’s just a nonce body of practice for formal writing. One adheres to it for prestige (“see, I’m not ignorant, I know what the rules are supposed to be, I’m educated”), but that only applies to one particular status domain: formal writing. The spoken language will flow on regardless, aware of the formal written prescriptions in the mouths of some speakers, but not necessarily in agreement with them. Written fiction is about users of language — are they formal or colloquial?
As a writer, you have a choice about what language to use: the colloquial (spoken) or the formal (prescriptive). Different registers are appropriate for different purposes and different writers. I embrace the inexorable changes I see coming in the spoken language where appropriate (“if anyone comes early, give them a drink”), but never the prescriptive ones (the obsessions of the moment), because I am not concerned with displays of my personal status when writing fiction. Other writers have different concerns and different domains of writing.
We really have changed (in the spoken language) over time the use of “You”, etc. (originally plural) for “Thee”, etc., (originally singular). You are (linguistically) fortunate to be living in a period where you can witness the use of “Them”, etc., starting to substitute for unknown gender “He or She” in the spoken language. The spoken language is likely to win, eventually, not the shibboleths of the moment — that’s how living languages work.
Interesting, now I’ll have to go re-read the last few books with a bit more attention. I had not even considered that Tekelia was not male. So either the authors have done a good job of “let the readers notice and decide as their own bias proclaims” or a bad job of “the reader is supposed to notice a specific intention here.”
I did consider to myself as I was finishing Diviner’s Bow that it wasn’t really clear to me how old Tekelia is. I was generally assuming a young, but established adult, maybe 10 years older than Padi, which is unexceptional, especially when, as mentioned in Diviner’s Bow, people who have the means to support themselves easily, are thinking about retiring at 100.