Just finished the latest novel by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame, "Differently Morphous", a London-based sort-of urban fantasy book about a secret ancient government agency protecting the world from monsters, who suddenly become public and now have to deal with… political correctness!
If you're anything like me, then your first reaction to that description was probably something along the lines of, "Oh my!". Novelist Yahtzee is nowhere near as much of an asshole as Zero Punctuation Yahtzee. Still, when the box blurb ends with "having to face their greatest threat: Political Correctness", you get a certain feeling of dread, as that phrase has never once been used in any nuanced discussion of this, or indeed any, topic. Here, it's not as bad as I feared, but it doesn't win any points for being woke either. It does make for an interesting case study overall. This includes minor spoilers.
The general setting is that an ancient ministry of occultism is tasked with keeping the UK safe from extra dimensional monsters, magic and such, and as part of that they used to regularly kill slime monsters whenever they appeared. But at the start of the book, the creatures (known as fluidics) have managed to learn english and to find someone more sympathetic, and are revealed to actually be fugitives instead of monsters. Everybody loves them, and the resulting outcry leads to the ministry being shoehorned into a modern form and getting a cultural awareness advisor. The actual plot involves people from this ministry trying to catch someone who murders these fluidics.
Like any Yahtzee book, it's well written and engaging, and it has some interesting ideas for things to do with this (admittedly not that original) setting. But this being Tumblr and all, I want to talk about the "political correctness" angle here. This angle is ultimately not integral to the plot at all, and just here to provide jokes, as the advisor declares "demonic possession" to be a slur within five minutes of first hearing that it exists, or shouts "consider the socioeconomic context of your actions!" right before the final battle.
That said, it's actually way more sympathetic to equality causes than it seems at first glance. Our protagonist is a young woman who constantly has to deal with men underestimating her and condescending to her. The fluidic creatures actually are nice, and not killing them is very explicitly not political correctness gone mad. There are a number of other times where the "politically correct" attitude, despite being constantly mocked, is eventually proven correct, including some that appear very late in the book so I won't spoil them.
Where the book ultimately fails, though, is that it is all about fundamentally reasonable people from the majority side discussing how to best treat the minority. Throughout it all, we get a lot of people talking about the politically correct way to address fluidics, but we never really get their perspective on anything. They are rather cartoonishly portrayed: They speak with funny accents, are incredibly polite, and their primary objective is to not cause a fuss. Oh, and they're super-useful, in that they happily eat nothing but garbage.
What's more, the book doesn't really have any racists in it. There's the murderer, obviously, but what with this being a crime mystery, their motivations remain entirely obscure until the end and they don't really interact with people. Discussing political correctness without mentioning racists is, of course, a lot like a book about parachutes that ignores the existence of airplanes: Yeah, it is easy to make fun of them that way, but you're entirely missing the point.
The lack of racism goes to absurd extremes at times, for example when the book includes supposed Youtube comments that are full of support for the weird-looking immigrants. It feels like the entire book was published about five years too late, really: At the tail end of the Obama years, when we got the social justice movement on the internet, but the idea that the racists would win the next US election seemed silly, this might have been more appropriate. Hell, this book starts with a bunch of refugees appearing in the middle of Europe, and literally everybody is happy about that.
Overall, this isn't bad, but Mogworld is still better.
