I was looking at a photo gallery from the recent Nebula awards, and the appearance of Eugie Foster, an Asian-American, suddenly threw the utter whiteness of everyone else into sharp relief. Wow.

I’ve read before that scifi is generally considered a white man’s genre, and while I won’t speculate on why that is, because I’m busy, dammit, the numbers certainly bear it out. A clear majority of the authors in these photos are white men and women, with two non-whites: Eugie Foster and Saladin Ahmed. (Unless I missed anyone.) This isn’t remotely representative of America’s population.

Let’s see. Part of the under-representation of minorities might be merely ignorance on my part. I can name two African-American authors - Samuel R. Delaney and Octavia Butler - one Asian-American - Eugie Foster - and absolutely zero Latino-Americans.

(Fortunately, women have made significant headway in the genre - the pictures of this year’s Nebulas have many more females than they would have thirty, forty years ago.)

Like pretty much everything else, science fiction would benefit from diversity. We need more kinds of stories told. More experiences. More variety.

It may not be as bad as all that. A quick google search might help me discover more authors of various races. But my internet connection is shit. So I’ll do that later. I did buy a paperback containing three Octavia Butler novels, and I look forward to reading it. I also bought Delaney’s The Einstein Intersection; here’s hoping it’s readable. I wanted to like Stars in My Pocket so much…

Expansion: Of course this is a well known problem in genre literature. I’m only noting it today because I was looking at the Nebula pictures this morning and it came to mind. The problem has been well discussed before.

Kind of tangentially, Kim Stanley Robinson in an interview once said that “science fiction is the appropriate genre for the US”. He also mentions that Latin America and Asia do magic realism much better than North America, postulating that magic realism is a “way to speak about Latin America”. Scifi is appropriate for the US, magic realism for Latin America, high fantasy for mid-war Britannia. Okay. Why is scifi appropriate for North America? It’s progressive, it’s rational, it’s in love with the future and the same attitude of inevitable human progress that has defined America since World War II. One could note that this defines White America; unfortunately, many of the minorities in America have been historically left out of that grand futurism of the fifties to seventies that we used to think would lead inevitably to Star Trek fantasies. The experience of Asian, African, and Latin Americans in those decades was quite different.

This doesn’t mean that there’s not room for those cultures to participate in science fiction, only that it needs to grow away from its middle class white male roots. Maybe the growing dominance of Asian Americans in our technical fields will lead to more authors from those genres. But then you can view it as a microcosm, that the problem with diversity in scifi is a problem with diversity in America overall.

Expanded expansion: Alex wondered in the comments if there’s much pressure on minority writers to write “minority” fiction, even when it’s genre fiction; whether they’re pressured to “represent” their minority, or if the publishers may try to market their books accordingly. I don’t know. Might be able to find out by poking around on the internet or, you know, talking to some minority writers. I know I’m always under pressure to chronicle the novelty of the white male experience.

But seriously. I find myself taking pains to include in my books female characters and characters of multiple races. This is not some kind of tokenism or because I’m bored of imagining white guys all the time, but an effort to bring diverse points of view into the narrative. Of course we must remember that it is not only our cultural backgrounds that make us diverse, but also our individuality, viz., we are much more than our race. China Mieville, who is good at so many things, is quite good at representing diverse cultures in a fantasy world, with such depth that it reflects our integration of multiple cultures in our own world.

Expanded expansion of the expansion: Alex, like KSR, mentions magical realism by way of Sherman Alexie. I love magical realism - though I’ve only read Jorge Luis Borges and Salman Rushdie - and while on its own, in its native context, it is an original creation, I view its acceptance by the academia and mainstream of North America as the final triumph of speculative fiction over people who have no more ideas. It is one thing to originate magical realism or be part of a culture that does so, and consider it on its own terms; however, when you turn up your nose at comic books or fantasy or science fiction as being “unreal”, and then embrace a book where, say, a British Indian actor becomes the avatar of the devil on Earth, and a woman psychically/mystically commands butterflies, then you, sir, are an ass. I am delighted to see Borges and Garcia Marquez taught in the universities, and can’t wait for them to be supplemented by Gene Wolfe and Harlan Ellison and Lois McMaster Bujold.

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