Anyone who's been following books news this week will know that Weird Tales Magazine has just taken an almighty pasting: first for deciding to include an extract from Victoria Foyt's self-published YA dystopia, Revealing Eden: Save The Pearls, in its next issue, and then for reneging when the novel was castigated online as racist enough to appal Lovecraft himself. But publisher John Harlacher's statement made it clear that he hadn't read the book, electing to pull the plug on the basis of promotional video footage and Foyt's extract. This led some readers to worry that this was unjustifiable censorship – that Foyt's use of blackface and descriptions of black men as "beasts", might have been sited in a whole-book context which examined them, inverted them and, having revealed them as diseased faeces, flushed them away with the triumphant sluice of literary prowess. Foyt herself describes the book as ending with a "plea for tolerance". Did Harlacher miss an important trick? Was this just a victory for the professionally offended?
I dearly love a good YA dystopia, and am mixed race myself, so both the book and the brouhaha seemed relevant to me. I sat down to read the whole thing, to ascertain whether Weird Tales' readership was, in fact, short-changed. It was not.
The first section, set in an underground habitat in which humanity hides from the cancer-inducing sun, caused me to utter frequent little "what-? what-?" sounds, like a misfiring motorbike, throughout. From the first page, people of the ruling, dark-skinned race are "Coals", while the pallid underclass are "Pearls". A scrupulous blogger enquires whether, in an unfamiliar and carefully created dystopian context, "Coal" might imply greater value than "Pearl"? Nope. We are not invited to consider "Coals" in any other sense than as dirty, cheap, pollutant, plentiful, and fit only to burn. "Pearls" remain dainty, precious, lustrous, pure and rare. Asians are "Tiger's Eyes". Albinos – detested by all – are "Cottons". I could not find any logic to these names – which, in speculative fiction, I think are particularly important – beyond the writer's randomly snatching from the air the first word she thought of to associate with certain skin-colours. Plainly, she has no positive words to go with "black".
The rest of the book, set in an unlikely Aztec jungle, was mainly astonishing for repetitious misogyny, as the heroine, Eden, lusted brainlessly after her erstwhile boss, and half-mutated into a jaguar. (Save The Pearls is at least an equal opportunities offender.)
In the subcity, Coals – apart from villains, and the hero, who rejoices in the grouting-tool sobriquet Ronson Bramford – are not rendered with any positive attributes or specificity; they're drone-like, usually manifesting a sort of stupid, low-level malice (if female) or sexual aggression (if male). But this, to be fair, would be more self-evidently racist if the writer had any turn for creating character at all. In a somewhat surreal turn of events, Ronson goes from silently arrogant CEO to purring, mutated Jaguar-Man (his crossness and ripped trousers causing me to picture him not black but a fetching shade of green without ever uttering a memorable or coherent sentence. Eden combines the most irritating characteristics of Bella Swan and Anastasia Steele with a predilection for dropping the full Latin names of bird and animal species once every paragraph; informative, but not engaging. Other lamentable oddities include Foyt's adopting of Emily Dickinson as Eden's "Aunt Emily", and shoehorning in her poems willy nilly at emotional junctures, to bolster up the sadly sagging plot.
Minimal credit might be given Foyt for sinning in ignorance, and through lack of skill, rather than outright malice, but there's no detectable sign of an aesthetic plan to neutralise the racist stereotypes she peddles. In fact, there is barely a detectable sign of any plot; the whole thing is remarkable for repetition, incoherence, and prose which makes EL James look like Hector Hugh Munro ("Now that their location had been discovered, they needed to relocate"). If you want a proper YA dystopia about racist segregation – with the historical hierarchy inverted – read Noughts and Crosses and its sequels. But if that's the sort of bilge with which Weird Tales wants to spray its readers, I shan't ask for a subscription for Christmas.
