Okay, one more thread about the problems of “solving colonialism” et cetera in historical fiction, because this is something I grappled with for a long time, and I’m not sure if my thoughts on this will be useful to anyone else writing & thinking about this, but here they are.
The way I thought my way through this is by analogy, because I’d already grappled with this problem in a different -ism when I set out to write the Suffragette Scandal, which I wrote at a point when it was painfully obvious that 19th century feminism hadn’t solved all sexism.
The way story works is that you need to set the scope of the problem you want to address.

If you can‘t solve colonialism, you need to adjust the scope of your problem so it’s not...colonialism.
It is *hard* to solve -isms in the course of your story.

But it is *not* hard to make local landscapes better.
You may not be able to solve *all* domestic violence, but you *can* make one person safer. You may not be able to solve *all* of colonialism, but you *can* exhibit behavior that will save communities.
The issue arises when there’s a mismatch between the scope of your story and the scope of your solution, and your story is too big for your solution.

As an author, you either need to make your solution bigger or your scope smaller.
This is, it turns out, true in real life too.

The difference between hope and despair is the scope you’re willing to let yourself consider.
No matter how much despair your feel at the global level, you can always, always find hope at a smaller scope.

As an author of books with happy endings, the trick is to find the place to set that scope.
But as an author, if you raise a story question, you have to address it.

I think that learning to do that deftly and intelligently as we increasingly touch on subjects that haven’t been touched on is a work in progress, and we’re not always going to get it right.
For the record, it’s still not necessarily *easy* but nobody ever said writing would be easy.
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