Thoughts on Steve Stirling’s _The Stone Dogs_
This take is as hot as a sno-cone, insofar as the novel it is in reference to was written in 1990 (which is way longer ago than I’m prepared to acknowledge). But the Spirit moved me since I hate this book so got-damn much. So here we are.
Let me start by saying that I am certainly not averse to a work of art dealing with challenging subject-matter in and of itself. Some of my faves—The Bluest Eye and Invisible Man—are especially uncomfortable as narratives of life and family are concerned. I also read works that force me to take the point-of-view of the coloniser as well, and whilst I didn’t care for Kipling’s Kim and certainly didn’t like Konrad’s Heart of Darkness, they were simply bad books looking to ask questions about the human experience without trying to get out from under the then conventional wisdom and parochial epistemologies of the authors’ milieu.
The Stone Dogs is a novel that is—flatly—cynical, ugly, and repugnant on every conceivable dimension. In short: this is trash.
And let me be clear. It’s not just The Stone Dogs, here. It’s the entirety of the thought experiment that generated the alternate history of the Draka. I don’t have a problem with exploring histories where things turn out painfully or nightmarish in the way that systems of power operate; I quite enjoyed Harry Turtledove’s Timeline-191 books, up to and including the exceptionally bleak _The Victorious Opposition_. But that novel, whilst it proffered truly execrable characters, even in POV capacities, never shied away from painting their actions—and crucially, *them*—as wrong and people. Capable of being seduced by manifest evil. Even though we ride around in the mind of a Jake Featherston, the author is careful and deliberate enough to delineate that this is a truly godawful place to be. And the narrative never contorts itself to make him look in any way sympathetic.
The Stone Dogs is not nearly so sophisticated.
And I say this while, from a purely objective standpoint, Stirling’s prose is richer than Turtledove’s. There is a sense of aesthetic in his craft that is absent in The Master of Alternate History’s methodical, plot-focused genre stylings. It’s just that it lavishes this on the very very worst kind of people and circumstances.
It really does beg the question if Stirling has ever met a Black person in real life before. For several reasons, not least amongst them that a good Black friend would have told him that he was dead-wrong for exploring the idea of racist, super-Afrikaners taking over the world in his novel. But what do I know.
And it’s bad enough that the novel and the series it is a part of, so utterly bungle the experience by focusing nearly entirely on the perspectives and experiences of the enslavers. But what makes the matter even worse is that the series as a whole seems to only care about addressing the Draka’s expansion when it has them encountering and subjugating EuroAmerican people. The first book in the series, Marching through Georgia is—for all its signifying on the exploits of Sherman in the American CivilWar, primarily concerned with events long after the whole of the African continent has already been subjugated. So the ‘interesting part’ is when Stirling smashes his Draka action figures against Germans in a sick rendering of WWII in the case of what happens when Bad meets Evil (and the most disturbing thing is that it is really, really, REALLY hard to tell which is which).
The text is as graphic as it is cynical too. Depictions of pain and various sorts of violations are a regular occurrence in the text, and all of it feels immensely gratuitous. That the books have a 90s era sense of puerile ‘edge’ about them is fairly self-evident. And again, the cynicism is always there, too. Such that the text feels like something written by a talented but *deeply* disturbed Southern high school boy.
The books are racist in their exclusions of people of colour throughout, and racist in the scant few depictions that do occur as well (which may be worse). I nearly had to put the text down when Jolene, one of the only recurring Black characters in all of the Stone Dogs (and of course, a “serf”/slave), enthusiastically asks to be a “brooder” for the woman who presumes to “own” her, Yolanda Ingolffson. The sequence is disgusting enough in its abject dehumanisation of Jolene as a character, but all the more so in the context of the novel emerging from a real-world sociohistorical context that perpetuates a flawed historiography of Black experiences in bondage in the US at a very broad scale.
Finally, fatally, the book is audacious enough to be *boring* in the parts not actively intent on being offensive. There is no attempt at establishing a frame of reference for why we should care about the pulse-drive on a starship, and even if there were (and the novel goes on, and on, and on about that shit), I still would be hard-pressed to care because the whole book is about actual-ass racist super-Afrikaners who take over the whole world.
And I haven’t even addressed the fact that the racist super-Afrikaners *DO* take over the world. Because of course they do. The whole novel—and the larger series as well—pays lip service to how the Draka are bad, or whatever, but all that rings absolutely hollow in the face of the overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of time that the novel expends bending over backwards to position them as sympathetic in spite of that fact. There are no real repercussions for their evilness, and the novel, again, ultimately rewards them for doing so. Yes, Yolanda loses the love of her life, but that loss is only tenuously narratively linked to anything about who she was or what she was doing: going for a walk after selecting a serf to ravish as part of their spoils of war. But going for a walk in a war zone is not linked to the basic act of owning another human being in and of itself, and the story actually goes a step further to suggest that that claim was really only made as a rationalisation by Yolanda herself in the throes of her grief. So ultimately, there is never any punishment for any Draka character for the repugnant behaviour that they perpetrate, and I read that as the novel’s tacit acquiescence of the fact that, ‘welp, there really must not be anything that they *deserve* to be punished for, I guess’.
The only people who are punished are everybody who isn’t Draka for not taking the Draka threat seriously enough. Which seems to suggest that, if there are any moral failings to be found in this novel at all, that’s the only one there is: to not be just as depraved as the Draka, which would allow you to be able to anticipate the nature of just how awful they will be.
This book is bad, and I hate that I’m reading it, and subjecting myself to it. Like, it’s legitimately affecting my mental health, reading this hateful-ass, unconscionably long-ass book. It is a mean, ugly, bitter epic that presents no heroes and no sympathetic characters. Just a mass of abyss as cold as a serpent’s heart.
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