: Hello, gentlebeings, and welcome to this week’s Force Visions, wherein we meet… a visionary. The Force isn’t involved, but that isn’t a lack.
: Another Hell Week here, so I’ll be light on the commentary, but I’m still here and listening, never fear.
: We’re going to do something a little different this week. This story, “Drawing the Maps of Peace: The Moisture Farmer’s Tale,” by M. Shayne Bell, is relatively long compared to the median of the anthology. It’s a fine story, with only a few problematic aspects to it, but both Will and I are a little tired of this book (the last story I’d unreservedly call “good,” “The Devaronian’s Tale,” feels like a long time ago) and would like to speed up our commentary from here to the end of the book a little bit. So I won’t be doing the usual blow-by-blow recapping, instead adopting more of a summary style.
: And that. Look, folks, this has been mostly a slog. I wish I’d remembered, I wouldn’t have suggested this one next…
: The story is split into sections with subtitles that count days. The first is “Day 1: A New Calendar.” Here we meet our protagonist and point-of-view character, who remains unnamed for now since the story is in first person PoV. We learn, however, that he is a moisture farmer, and one of his ten far-flung evaporators, the one right on the border of his land, is malfunctioning. By himself, he takes a speeder out there to fix it, but when he comes within sight, he sees that there are Sand People clustered around. He’s worried about them attacking but he’s more worried about the vaporator being too badly damaged, since he “needs the output:” He needs every vaporator to work at maximum capacity or he could lose the farm. So he plows on ahead, and they scatter.
: The economics of moisture farming have never…quite worked for me structurally, but the idea that this is a subsistence-level existence feels appropriate. “Losing the farm” is an element of this story.
(At the same time, the Lars homestead feels less subsistence-level, given the conversations about hiring “more hands.” I suppose that even among farmers there is a degree of stratification.)
: He evaluates the damage, which is minimal, but realizes that the Sand People are still close by, surrounding him, and that they really want the water. Which is a problem, since once they realize these hold water, they will want it; his farm is right on the boundary of the Dune Sea; and he cannot guard all of his vaporators.
Then he realizes that the Sand People have a perfect right to the water, since if the vaporators weren’t set up, the water would condense as the morning dew, which they could have found some way of gathering, but now the vaporators are literally sucking the air dry. And given that Sand People–at least according to Mr Nameless Protagonist–are afraid of human technology, they must have been desperate to come up and fiddle with the vaporator.
So he seals and pulls out the water pouch from the vaporator’s reservoir, sets it by the side of the vaporator, gets into his speeder and goes to the top of a nearby dune. He isn’t certain at this point if by giving them water, he could win his life, their trust, and thereby his farm. A while later, the Sand People slowly approach. They transfer the water to a pouch of their own. Then they stand there looking at him, then the one who’d been the first to approach raises an arm with a clenched fist. He returns the gesture. They stand there staring at each other for a bit, then the Sand People disappear. Seeing that they hadn’t killed him or attached the vaporator after he had given them water, he decides that he’ll from there on give the water from that vaporator to the Sand People. In the short term, that means loss, but he’ll buy two of “Eyvind’s”–his nearest neighbor–old vaporators to fix and set them up, bringing his output back to the minimum level he needs to survive. Thriving doesn’t seem to be a concern at this point. He thinks this is the only way he can live so close to the Sand People in peace.
And this is Day 1, because “I counted the days of my farm from that day.”
: Yeah, as we said, this story is Not Like the Others. Which definitely isn’t a complaint, but we don’t know if it’s a compliment, really.
: In “Day 2: A Farm on the Edge,” we get the background and our protagonist’s name, Ariq Joanson. He’s got the farthest-out moisture farmland on the borders of the Dune Sea. He did quite a bit of on-the-ground research and fieldwork to justify setting up a farm there, and got a loan based on his surveying results. It’s really romantically-written frontier tale: “I knew since that morning I woke up with dew in my hair that I would set my farm up there,” etc. We also learn that there was a lot of Imperial bureucracy (and something called the Homestead Act) for getting the land grant; we learn, in fact, that land grant is A Thing. And at that point, I start feeling really uneasy about which way we’re likely to go from here.
: Notably, the Homestead Act in the US was a way to encourage western migration and settlement during the Civil War, so. Yeah, the “frontier tale” aspect is strong in this.
: He remembers all of that lying in his bed after giving the Sand People the water he’d pledged, for what we presume is the second time, and thinks “Not once had I thought about who might already be out here, depending on this land I called my farm.”
…yep. We’re going there. We’re already there. But there may be different ways of handling that, some less problematic than others, so let’s see.
: Hell, I’m willing to give this story credit for having the guts to Go There at all.
(As you’ll see, Z less so.)
: He’s done some detailed surveyor work over the land, and he asks the computer to display these maps, which, for some reason, are under strongly hidden and protected by encryption. Almost as if, going by the descriptions, it’s illegal to have maps at all. All right, then. There’s a Jawa fortress northeast of his farm in “Bildor’s Canyon.” He asks the computer to draw a boundary line going along the canyon walls between the northeast border of his farm and a point up the canyon one km away from the Jawa fortress, and label it “Jawa Preserve.”
wait wait wait what r u doin–okay, I’m still going to reserve judgment.
A moment later, he decides that “Preserve” doesn’t sound right–thank you–and rejects other words such as “Reservation” as well–thank you–and leaves the marking as “Jawa.” Similarly, he makes a boundary for an area labeled “Sand People” as well. The computer, for whatever reason a computer would have to ask such a thing I don’t know, asks if the Jawas and the Sand People have requested rights to that land. He says no, asks the computer to erase the lines, but then gets to thinking.
: I have my guesses why the computer would ask that, and by the end of the story, I suspect Z will too.
: He had asked two successive Imperial governors to commission a mapping project of the region, but was told that there was no money for such a thing, but he had mentally translated that as “too many people don’t want maps made of areas beyond the farms so quit asking.” Why wouldn’t they? Joanson thinks because there are criminals who would like to hide their activities out there, but criminals aren’t threatening his farm, instead it’s–
–oh for the love of little Chadra-Fans–
It was Sand People violence and Jawa dishonesty and manipulation–all caused in part, I was coming to realize, by constant encroachments into what had no doubt been traditional Jawa and Sand People territories.
I swear, if this story, this thirty-page story, ends up by positing a solution to the cataclysmic ills of colonization, and does so in a tone of “see how easy it would be if we all were just nice,” I’m going to throw… well, not my tablet, but something against a wall. But I may be jumping all sorts of guns, so let’s move on.
: I do remember how this one ends, for the record.
: But not before I question a little why that specific phrasing bothered me so much. There’s this implication that “They, you know All Those People, are perfidious, but it’s not their fault, they are driven to it” with the addendum that this is somehow better than “They, you know All Those People, are perfidious.”
: Yeah. It’s steps in the right direction, which is not the same thing as real progress.
: It really isn’t any better. If you’re going to be nuanced, and if there’s any subject on Earth or in the GFFA that needs nuance it’s this one, then you need to be actually nuanced. I don’t know how much of this is “Well, by the standards of the 90s, Bell was trying.” At least some, I suspect.
: Agreed.
: Okay, now moving on.
Joanson decides that a map is needed, because now farmers don’t know if they are “encroaching” and it’s getting them killed–
–okay really don’t tell me that no one who sets up farms in Sand People territory knows that it is Sand People territory–
: And here the Homestead Act comparison comes back, because…yeah, I can absolutely believe that the humans setting up farms there know, in a vague undefined way, that “there are Sand People there,” but realizing that “this is Sand People land” requires a degree of…empathy? Awareness?
Non-Imperial mindset?
: …non-Imperialist mindset, definitely…
…yeah, now we went there.
: We went where we were going.
: Anyway, all that means they need a map and the government won’t draw it, so Joanson did. Well, at least that explains the secrecy. And he decides to redraw the map and take it to the Jawas and Sand People and discuss, having a dream that if they come to an agreement, maybe one day the government will agree, as well.
Oh, my sweet summer child to end all summer childs. Even Luke at his most wide-eyed farmboy would stare at this incredulously.
This brings us up to Day 3 and a good stopping point. Looking up through Will’s comments, it’s not that I’m not willing to give the story credit for trying to Go There. I guess I am being a bit too strident, because I don’t have a high level of belief that the story, in this setting, can handle Going There delicately enough. I may be being unfair, which I freely admit; the jury is still out. In the meantime, I am also exhausted from staying at work late most of this week, so I will bow out at this point. Will?
: We’re going to have some interesting commentary when this one ends, never you fear. And some interesting commentary on the writer, too.
For the moment, well. Peak ’90s. I’m reminded of Lindsay Ellis’s comparison of the 2017 IT to Stranger Things, in how they depict the ’80s–especially that the characters don’t sound like they’re from the ’80s, they sound modern. Because if they sounded ’80s they would be…horrifyingly racist, among other things.
How far we’ve come is only disappointing by how far we have to go.
Next week, we continue going.
But until then, may the Force be with you.
Force Visions 