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A review by ohnoflora
Copperhead Volume 1: A New Sheriff in Town by Jay Faerber
2.0
Read for the Excelsior Award.
On the surface, a pretty enjoyable space western. It includes a lot of the usual tropes - a new Sheriff with a secret to hide, the tycoon who has the town officials in his pocket, the mysterious hard-bitten loner with a heart of gold + replicants ("arties"), aliens, spaceships etc. It handles these pretty competently and tells a decent enough story.
I do have a problem with these sci-fi stories that riff on established genres with loaded racial dynamics (particularly Westerns) and yet include no actual people of colour. E.g. the native - hostile, violent, murderous and with a fondness for gambling - alien race are called "Natives". (I mean...)
It's also not difficult to read the "Arties" (artificially intelligent androids, created to fight for the humans in the war with the "Natives", now viewed with suspicion) as an allusion to e.g Buffalo Soldiers in the American Indian Wars or Black regiments in the Civil War or freed slaves in the post Civil War era - you get the idea. The Sheriff's attitude towards them is racism by any other name.
It feels really gross. I'm sure it wasn't meant to; in fact in the notes the creators say explicitly that they wanted to avoid these kinds of allusions. Well, I'm sorry, in a story as genre-reliant as this, you cannot avoid them.
On the surface, a pretty enjoyable space western. It includes a lot of the usual tropes - a new Sheriff with a secret to hide, the tycoon who has the town officials in his pocket, the mysterious hard-bitten loner with a heart of gold + replicants ("arties"), aliens, spaceships etc. It handles these pretty competently and tells a decent enough story.
I do have a problem with these sci-fi stories that riff on established genres with loaded racial dynamics (particularly Westerns) and yet include no actual people of colour. E.g. the native - hostile, violent, murderous and with a fondness for gambling - alien race are called "Natives". (I mean...)
It's also not difficult to read the "Arties" (artificially intelligent androids, created to fight for the humans in the war with the "Natives", now viewed with suspicion) as an allusion to e.g Buffalo Soldiers in the American Indian Wars or Black regiments in the Civil War or freed slaves in the post Civil War era - you get the idea. The Sheriff's attitude towards them is racism by any other name.
It feels really gross. I'm sure it wasn't meant to; in fact in the notes the creators say explicitly that they wanted to avoid these kinds of allusions. Well, I'm sorry, in a story as genre-reliant as this, you cannot avoid them.