Book recommendations thread!

[kutsuwamushi]

See if you can spot the pattern:

In Cameron's Avatar, Jake Sully, an outsider, becomes the champion of the Na'vi, and fights for them against his own people.

In Frank Herbert's Dune, Paul Atriedes, an outsider, joins the Fremen and becomes their tragic messianic figure.

In Robin Hobb's Shaman's Crossing trilogy, Nevare Burvelle, an outsider, becomes magically connected to the Specks, a people who are under attack by his government's attempt to build a road through their land.

In more Star Trek episodes than I can name, the crew of the Enterprise, outsiders, discover that their influence on cultures that they meet is doing them harm.

...

Okay, I'm sure you can spot more than one pattern here, but what I'm getting at is from whose perspective these stories are written. The protagonists are all part of the dominant culture in their universes, and the story of the marginalized culture whose struggle they join is told through their eyes.

Even when the setting is totally invented, when authors have the most freedom, this pattern is still everywhere. I know I'm not pointing out anything new.

Summer is coming up soon, which means that I have time to read books. But instead of reading more of the same, I'd like to read science fiction or fantasy stories where the other viewpoint is the neutral one.

So, does anyone have recommendations? I'm especially interested in stories where both cultures are invented.

[I erased and rewrote several times a tangent about how this is a subset of outsider stories, which don't always involve a conflict with the outsider's culture. Harry Potter would be a different story if the protagonist was a member of Wizarding culture to begin with; Harry's outsider perspective introduces Muggle readers to the Wizarding world with a sense of wonder.

But it's worth asking why one culture is viewed from the outside and the other from the inside so frequently when that conflict does exist. The benefits of an "outsider perspective" can carry their own assumptions, including that the marginalized culture, often "inspired by" real-world cultures, is the one that is the most exotic and most needing to be explained from the outside.]

Comments

[marina]

Ursula LeGuin's "Four Ways to Forgiveness" is a collection of 4 short stories set in the same universe that deals precisely with things like this. She comes from an anthropological perspective and so each of her stories is subverting the powerful culture/powerless culture and the outsider privileged narrator. One story is told by a former slavegirl, one by a guy from a tiny, bizarro-to-the-reader culture who spends most of his life in cultures that are extremely similar to ours today, one has a POV switch between a privileged outsider and a not-so-privileged local telling the same story... and I love the book besides, because I just find it's exceptionally well written. :)

[meej]

^ Yes. LeGuin can do whatever she wants because her background is anthropology, so she takes an especial interest in cultural ... wossname, not speciation but the other thing.

Also, her writing is exquisite - concise without being terse, evocative without being purple. She is my hero.

My own recommendation is K.J. Parker's Devices and Desires, the first part of a trilogy where both (... all, actually) cultures get upwhopped by the outsider, and then inverted from another character. Parker intentionally sets up characters as mirrors for each other. I wish I'd invented Valens.

[skyknyt]

goddamnit, way to beat me to KJ Parker.

[meej]

I WIN AGAIN!

Have you read The Folding Knife yet? Parker wrote that one just for me. "I haven't written a novel using Roman naming patterns and banking laws and a completely unlikeable main character who does everything for love. I should do that, meej is counting on me."

[whizzy]

CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series is sort of the anti-thesis of this trope. The lone outsider comes from the "weaker" culture, which only exists by the mercy of the dominant alien culture on the planet. Fun times.

[lady_ganesh]

I don't know if you've read the Xenogenesis/Lilith series by Octavia Butler, but the first book is written from the perspective of the invaded-- Lilith is a human in a world that's been taken over by aliens. So it's a little bit outsider, but also a bit of 'from the perspective of the invaded.'

[meej]

Oh, good CALL!

I wouuld actually recommend everything by Octavia Butler, as it touches on this topic at least tangentially.