Add MemoryShare This Entry
posted by [personal profile] boundbooks at 12:49pm on 09/04/2010 under
Sci-fi discussions for breaking plausibility usually revolve around two things: technology and alien species. I’m thinking about discussions along the lines of ‘can we ever go faster than light’ and ‘what constitutes a truly alien species’? One plausibility breaker that doesn’t get brought up much is race. Basically, why do so many sci-fi novels break the expected distribution of race?

According to a 1999 UN Report, here’s the projected percentage breakdown:

2050
Africa 19.8%
Asia 59.1%
Europe 7%
Latin America and the Caribbean 9.1%
North America 4.4%
Oceania .5%

2100
Africa 23.7%
Asia 57.1%
Europe 5.3%
Latin America and the Caribbean 9.4%
North America 4.1%
Oceania .5%

Note: For the purposes of this discussion, I’m talking about sci-fi where the Earth is usually presented in a post-colonization state with many colonized worlds, interstellar travel, etc. We’re talking at least 100+ years out from present times, if not one of those scenarios where it’s been thousands of years and the Earth is a smoldering hunk of nuclear waste/pollution/giant ice ball or completely forgotten.

If this is the projection, then sci-fi should be filled with characters and protagonists from Africa and Asia. At least one of my favorite sci-fi series has this problem: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series accidentally implies that Asia and Africa are smoldering wrecks judging by the majority white people that her protagonist runs into.

How do some of the books that you’ve read handle this issue? Did they do it well (or offer a plausible explanation for breaking the expected distribution) or did they fumble it?
There are 68 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
trialia: Ziva David (Cote de Pablo), head down, hair wind-streamed, eyes almost closed. (Default)
posted by [personal profile] trialia at 05:14pm on 09/04/2010
On the Vorkosigan front - why don't you bring that up on the mailing list? Sounds like it would make an interesting discussion, and it might even affect whatever Lois comes out with after CryoBurn (since that one's already written).
feuervogel: photo of the statue of Victory and her chariot on the Brandenburg Gate (Default)
posted by [personal profile] feuervogel at 05:22pm on 09/04/2010
She's said she's done with Miles, and that CryoBurn only exists because she promised Jim Baen another one before he died. So I'm doubtful we'll get a more diverse Vorkosiverse in the future.
 
posted by [personal profile] boundbooks at 09:37pm on 09/04/2010
Huh, I had no idea there were active mailing lists. Is that were the majority of Vorkosigan fandom lurks? I really haven't seen them on LJ or Dreamwidth, perhaps owing to the fact that the series pre-dates The Internet. Or is there some Vorkosigan journaling community that I've missed?
holyschist: Image of a medieval crocodile from Herodotus, eating a person, with the caption "om nom nom" (Default)
posted by [personal profile] holyschist at 07:17pm on 09/04/2010
I think it doesn't happen much in English-language SF because so many many English-language SF writers are white and American or European. They just don't think about it. I wonder what the demographics look like in SF by Asian and African writers (much of which isn't available in English)?

Thomas Harlan wrote an 25th-century SF series positing an alternate history which led to a Japanese-Aztec alliance (so not really based on extrapolating from current demographics, since the history diverged much earlier), In the Time of the Sixth Sun. I don't know if it's any good--I flipped through the third book and it didn't look awful, but it didn't grab me right off--and I couldn't say how well it handles the concept.
 
posted by [personal profile] boundbooks at 09:55pm on 09/04/2010
The premise alone sounds like something worth chasing down. Have you read Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel by any chance?

It's about the impact of geography on why some civilizations rose and conquered and why some got left behind. There's an early thought-provoking question where Diamond asks why didn't the Aztecs cross the ocean and invade Europe, instead of the other way around? Diamond lays out a geography-centric argument, which leaves room for the idea that perhaps in another location/geographic formation, Aztec civilization might be a major political player.
sqbr: A happy dragon on a pile of books (bookdragon)
posted by [personal profile] sqbr at 10:42pm on 09/04/2010
Well, there's lots of sf manga/anime by Japanese writers available in English. The race issues in Japanese stuff can get a bit complicated but there's definitely lots of Japanese characters! (but also more white characters than there are Japanese or even generally POC/non-white characters in most sf by white authors)

Via [livejournal.com profile] 50books_poc and elsewhere I've read few American and Australian POC/non-white sf writers and they definitely tend to have a much wider racial mix amongst their characters than the white authors. Octavia Butler sticks out particularly (also she's just overall awesome)
nicki: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] nicki at 08:46pm on 09/04/2010
LE Modesitt tends to work with the current projected population demographics (he does tend toward broadish stereotypes in certain things though). His near future books are set in Nor-Am, so those are the demographics he deals with. His off world (often far-future) books are fairly full of diversity, but he main characters are almost always white males (though he did have a black male lead in one of his more recent books)
 
posted by [personal profile] boundbooks at 10:06pm on 09/04/2010
I'll check them out, I actually hadn't realized that he was a prolific sci-fi writer. I read about 1/4 of the Recluse series back when they first came out and I enjoyed the early books. I'm interested in seeing how he deals with near-future and far-future worlds, since the guy definitely has the tools for deep world-building under his belt.

ivoryandhorn: A black and white photo of a woman against a black background, wearing a black feathery cape. Her pale face and hands stand out starkly against the black. (Default)
posted by [personal profile] ivoryandhorn at 10:48pm on 09/04/2010
Just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing with you that sci-fi protagonists should be more diverse, but I am questioning one of the assumptions that underlies your post, which is that the distribution of races on Earth will necessarily be reflected by the distribution of the races of space travelers in future-Earth. Is it plausible to assume that humanity in the stars is more equal then humanity on their home planet(s)? (If humanity's off colonizing other planets, I would consider this doubtful, but that's sort of sideways to my point so I'm going to leave that alone.)

For example, countries that already have space programs are likelier to achieve interstellar flight before countries without them. Once that technology has been developed, what is the likelihood of those countries capable of interstellar travel deciding to share that tech with everyone else in the world who doesn't have access to the funds, materials, specialists, etc. needed to develop space programs and build space ships?

From a world-building perspective, depending on how Earth develops between the present and whenever humanity starts colonizing other planets, it could be that only countries/regions of the Earth end up with access to such technologies. Admittedly, there is nothing that says those nations/regions necessarily have to be North American or European, because one century leaves plenty of time for the current face of the Earth to be reshaped and for new distributions of power (if any) to arise. But I do think the question of what Earth looks like when interstellar travel becomes possible is still something that needs to be considered when considering the plausibility of the race breakdown of space travelers/explorers matching the breakdown of humanity itself.
holyschist: Image of a medieval crocodile from Herodotus, eating a person, with the caption "om nom nom" (Default)
posted by [personal profile] holyschist at 02:21am on 10/04/2010
Even assuming that, the U.S. is well on its way to becoming majority non-white, so while a far-future space colony might be most likely to be American or Chinese (or perhaps Russian, depending on what one thinks Russia's near-future trajectory is), it still has a good chance of not being dominated by white people of European descent.
 
posted by [personal profile] nojojojo at 03:19am on 12/04/2010
Here via [community profile] metafandom...

I think there's a fairly obvious reason for the non-attention given to implausible depictions of future race. It's because most English-language science fiction comes from a Western context, and therefore carries the usual Western baggage with regard to racism and white privilege. This baggage is what causes writers to ignore realities like your demographic breakdown. Many US writers aren't aware of the irony in terms like "minority", for example; they don't even question the Eurocentrism inherent in the term. The races they think of as "minorities" aren't, on the global stage, and won't be for much longer on the homefront -- but if they aren't used to interrogating their racial assumptions, they'll default to thinking all white people, all the time.

It's not just race, note. We see the same non-logic kicking in on nearly every demographic measure. The human race is roughly 50/50 male/female -- slightly more female than male in the US, where most SF is published -- and yet most characters in science fiction are male. Class does a little better; for whatever reason SF writers seem a bit more inclined to acknowledge the disparities between haves and have-nots. (Maybe because most writers live in poverty these days...) But on other measures -- religion (Christianity and atheism are overrepresented in future SF, IMO), education levels (even SF set in the modern day assumes most Americans have a college education, though most don't), rural vs. urban dwellers and the usual "flight" patterns, and so on -- none of it gets handled plausibly in SF, in my opinion.

I suspect that's also partly because SF writers scorn the "soft sciences" like sociology and psychology, which might help them realize how much they're getting wrong. But that's a whole other debate.
 
posted by [personal profile] boundbooks at 07:48pm on 12/04/2010
I agree with your point that writers working within a Western context is the driving factor. What's interesting about your comment that "SF writers scorn the "soft sciences" like sociology and psychology" is that I've noticed a similar trend within SF itself. Basically, 'hard SF' writers are usually rewarded with much more respect than 'soft SF' writers whose work might involve issues like gender, reproduction and sexuality.

Even though Lois McMaster Bujold's work is deeply problematic in terms of race, she's actually one of the few SF writers who has written a universe where the gender ration is apparently 50/50 instead of 80/20 (as it seems to be implied in a decent amount of other work). She also nicely explores the issue of how female reproductive control and safe birthing methods are key to breaking-down major gender-power issues. She's won two Hugos and one Nebula, but her double-win was for a fantasy novel.

In terms of non-literary SF, I was actually playing a SF video game set in the far future with a military force that represents Earth and all its colonies (Mass Effect 2 for reference), and while the main ship's crew is roughly 50/50, I think I saw one NPC crew member who was not white. I kind of wanted to break into Bioware's headquarters (the developers) and post the statistics from the original post.
 
posted by [personal profile] boundbooks at 09:12pm on 12/04/2010
Oh, and congratulations on the first novel! I read it a few weeks back and quite liked it.
Edited Date: 2010-04-12 09:12 pm (UTC)
dhobikikutti: earthen diya (Default)
posted by [personal profile] dhobikikutti at 02:06am on 13/04/2010
Class does a little better; for whatever reason SF writers seem a bit more inclined to acknowledge the disparities between haves and have-nots. (Maybe because most writers live in poverty these days...)

::cough::

;)

Word to the rest of your comment.
 
posted by [identity profile] zahrawithaz.livejournal.com at 02:20am on 13/04/2010
THIS.
tonko: (One Piece: Pennant!)
posted by [personal profile] tonko at 03:56am on 12/04/2010
The Honor Harrington series deals with this pretty well I think. There are a wide variety of worlds, some are diverse, and some aren't, specifically mentioning having been colonized by a particular ethnic group.

The main setting, the Manticore Star Kingdom, which is an callback to colonial England (Queen Elizabeth and everything) has a black royal family, and people of mixed race all over the place. As well as people with names and appearances that imply mixing in ancestry that isn't apparent on the surface (like a minor character technician named Harry Tschu, with red hair and green eyes). Plus there's more unconventinal things like the... what was it... the Anderman Empire, I think, which is a Chinese-German mixed society, due to some particular history that I can't recall now.

I remember thinking all that was pretty cool. Never mind the issues I had with the series.

As for the Vorkosigan universe, it is kind of weird that it's so whitewashed. I know that Barrayar and Komarr are supposed to have been settled primarily by... French, Russian and Greek people? I think--the names seem to imply that, but France is pretty diverse right now (I don't know about Russia and Greece at all) so... I dunno. Jackson's Whole has a faint nod towards people of Indian extraction (I think), with House Bharaputra, but that's all I can think of.

I used to read the Dragonriders of Pern... I think everyone was white there. I can't remember the diversity of the colonizing population from Dragonsdawn (there were two Chinese women... aside from that, though?) but two thousand years later I think everyone's just white.

 
posted by [personal profile] boundbooks at 07:58pm on 12/04/2010
I'll have to try the Honor Harrington series, I've actually read David Weber's War God series. My local library system has this unfortunate habit of having half the books in series that are over five novels long. Usually, the half that they have consists of every other book! I'll see if I can inter-library loan the Honor Harrington stuff, hopefully by casting a wider net I can pull together the chronological order.

There's actually a thread in the Hooked on Heroines community where I and a few other fans tried to think of any memorable non-white characters in the Vokosigan universe off the tops of our heads. I think we came up with one. It was pretty depressing.

http://hooked-on-heroines.dreamwidth.org/3878.html?thread=98342&format=light#cmt98342
krait: a sea snake (krait) swimming (Default)
posted by [personal profile] krait at 03:35am on 25/05/2011
Oh oh oh!

Please tell me about your issues with the Harrington series. :D I want to know if they could possibly be the same as my issues with the series, which I have sat upon because it seemed like NO ONE ELSE EVER had even considered having issues with it!
jain: Dragon (Kazul from the Enchanted Forest Chronicles) reading a book and eating chocolate mousse. (domestic dragon)
posted by [personal profile] jain at 04:36am on 12/04/2010
I remember a line in one of the later books in Asimov's Foundation series that addresses racial distribution directly: a very dark-skinned character speaking to a very light-skinned character says something like, "In ancient Earth, I imagine that your people and my people must have faced considerable social prejudice, since the majority of people are medium to light brown."

(Asimov's earlier work, by contrast, is mostly populated by characters who are implicitly or explicitly white, with no explanation for that phenomenon.)
 
posted by [personal profile] boundbooks at 08:05pm on 12/04/2010
Okay, that line is *totally awesome.* Regarding the change within his work, it's always neat to see an author's work evolve with the changes in their own perspective. There's a lot of historical context that I think can be really useful in unpacking how and why genre fiction evolves.
kangeiko: (geek)
posted by [personal profile] kangeiko at 12:11pm on 12/04/2010
Interesting point. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy played around with this a little, I think, by making his special-interest groups a wee bit more representative of the different nations, with the resultant culture-clashes. But really, that's the only place where I've seen even an attempt to envisage a future world that isn't all-white North American/European.
 
posted by [personal profile] boundbooks at 08:12pm on 12/04/2010
If you're interested, there have been some suggestions/examples in the earlier comments for SF series that aren't all-white North American/European.

Thomas Harlan's In the Time of the Sixth Sun
Octavia Butler's work
Various Japanese Manga/Anime
LE Modesitt's far-future SF series
David Weber's Honor Harrington series
Elizabeth Moon's space opera novels
Some of the later books in Asimov's Foundation series
(I have have missed one or two, in addition to this list)

The Mars trilogy sounds interesting, I'll add it to the 'suggested' pile in addition to the ones mentioned above!
ext_3485: (Default)
posted by [identity profile] cschick.livejournal.com at 02:06pm on 12/04/2010
I think the problem you run into here is that the majority of currently-writing SF authors are US/European in origin and it's both hard to theorize about the future of a culture that is not ours, and open to so much of a disaster if you do so.

A decade back, for a writing seminar I was participating in, I outlined a universe in which the two major space-faring countries were the US and China, with both conflicts and participation between the two. It was a disaster on so many levels. First, even despite an extensive amount of research, I didn't necessarily feel like I was getting the perspective right from the Chinese-future angle, and second, when I asked some people who might be able to help me to read/talk with me, major cross-cultural meltdown occurred. It was not a good experience.
 
posted by [personal profile] boundbooks at 08:36pm on 12/04/2010
Ouch, sorry to hear about that cross-cultural meltdown. I'm actually contemplating historical China, and I'm running into problems (expected, but still present) of finding English language Chinese history surveys that are written by people of Chinese descent or origin. I'm trying to circumvent cultural bias as best as I can.

With China's space program expanding, if you ever wanted to re-visit that universe, you might have a lot more sources to explore today! Their tech boom over the last decade has prompted a lot more writing, speculation and data.
briarwood: (Dollhouse Sierra Blue)
posted by [personal profile] briarwood at 05:30pm on 12/04/2010
Hm. I recall one novel I read many years ago - I think it was by Piers Anthony, though I could be misremembering that - in which a space traveller who is of "pure" African descent returns to Earth after a long (centuries-long) absence. He finds he faces extreme prejudice, not for his dark skin, but because he's "pure-bred", which has come to carry a negative connotation.

There's another novel - this one was Heinlein - in which the race of characters was almost never mentioned. I could infer it from some descriptions - e.g. red hair almost certainly means "white" skin - and from names, but mostly the reader was left to assume. In the last third of the book, a main character makes an offhand comment that makes it clear he's dark-skinned. It gave me quite a jolt, not because the character's race surprised me, but because it showed how many of the other characters could have been non-white - it was just never stated. I don't know if that's a good thing or not.

I think, for me, it's not about race so much as the culture represented by race. I like to see some diversity in my SF: it doesn't work for me if there's a cast of all races if they all think and behave like white, middle-class America.
 
posted by [personal profile] boundbooks at 08:39pm on 12/04/2010
"I like to see some diversity in my SF: it doesn't work for me if there's a cast of all races if they all think and behave like white, middle-class America."

I think the head-space is one of the hardest aspects to write. I recently read a book set in near-future India which did a good job with setting and an Indian cast, but I wasn't sure if it captured the thought-process. I'm not Indian, so I couldn't judge well, but it felt a little too much like an American cyberpunk/1950's noir detective novel on the part of character actions/thoughts.

http://boundbooks.dreamwidth.org/14977.html
 
posted by [identity profile] zahrawithaz.livejournal.com at 02:33am on 13/04/2010
When I think of SF writers who handle this well, I still think of Octavia Butler, especially her excellent Xenogenesis trilogy, which makes the point that the nuclear war that wiped out humanity had most of its targets in the Northern Hemisphere and white-majority nations. The survivors are extremely diverse racially and culturally (and about to get more so), and the North Americans and Europeans (who aren't all white) who survived did so because they were in the South Hemisphere when the bombs fell.

Ursula K. Le Guin, of course, has always chosen non-white characters as protagonists in her future-space stories, even going back to The Left Hand of Darkness, in which the only two humans are a black man and a woman of Chinese descent. I'm sometimes a bit doubtful of how well she represents cross-cultural differences, at least in novels (The Telling, one of her weakest books, is a case in point), but a lot of her short stories are particularly good at this.

I especially like the novella "Paradises Lost" (from The Birthday of the World), a generation ship story in which Chinese culture is especially strong (though lots of other "minorities" are also represented). And her story "Newton's Sleep" is an explicit critique on the dynamics of the all-white future; it's about a community that flees Earth, how it happens that they're all white, and what the implications of that are.

Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber is set on a planet (called Toussaint) colonized by people from the Caribbean, who are largely of black and South Asian descent. I'd also recommend that.
 
posted by [personal profile] boundbooks at 03:20am on 13/04/2010
I actually just read A Wizard of Earthsea and Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring. I wasn't aware that Hopkinson had written sci-fi, as I just found her at my local library few weeks ago. I'll have to make a point to track down her sci-fi and see how much le Guin and Butler my library system has available.

Thank you for the recommendations!

March

SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
            1
 
2
 
3 4
 
5
 
6
 
7
 
8
 
9
 
10
 
11
 
12
 
13
 
14
 
15
 
16
 
17
 
18
 
19
 
20
 
21
 
22
 
23
 
24
 
25
 
26
 
27
 
28
 
29
 
30
 
31