posted by
boundbooks at 12:49pm on 09/04/2010 under race
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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?
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?
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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.
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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.
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Via
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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.
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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.
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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.
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::cough::
;)
Word to the rest of your comment.
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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.
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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
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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!
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(Asimov's earlier work, by contrast, is mostly populated by characters who are implicitly or explicitly white, with no explanation for that phenomenon.)
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Thank you for the recommendations!