This article originally appeared on the Kickstarter page for People of Color Destroy Science Fiction!, a special issue of the Hugo-winning magazine Lightspeed, 100% written—and edited—by POC creators.
I’ve been a fan of science fiction since the age of ten. For years, I was relatively isolated in my passion. Multiple factors played into that: my gender, immigrant culture, and being an only child all contributed. My favorite books and movies were experiences for me alone. I knew that fans must exist. Star Wars, Dune, Lord of the Rings—fame doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but I had no idea how to connect with others who loved these strange and intricate worlds. One benefit of my isolation, however, was that no one said, “Science fiction isn’t for you, for someone who doesn’t look like the light-skinned, male authors of these stories.”
When I joined Caltech as an undergraduate, I found my people at last. Nerd nirvana: I had arrived! Many of my classmates loved genre fiction as much I did. They, too, had re-read the classics until the spines fell apart. They, too, had memorized every line of the movies. Where had they been all my life? Scattered around the USA and beyond, that’s where. We didn’t care where we came from or what we looked like. All that mattered was our shared passion.
Then came the internet. Starting with alt.fan.dune, moving on to the Tad Williams message board, and then to Boing Boing and io9, the world shrank. I discovered just how large this tribe was. The lovers of science fiction—the ones who had been ostracized and ridiculed by pop culture—were the foundation of the new technocracy. The geeks had inherited the earth, and we rejoiced that we no longer had to be ashamed of living in imaginary worlds.
But the internet is a fickle place. Trolls lurk under the bridges it’s built, and they recently vented some ugly thoughts about fandom.
For the first time in my experience, my sex and my brown skin meant—to some people—that I didn’t belong in the world of science fiction.
For the first time in all my decades of loving this genre, I heard that women don’t like hard science fiction; that non-white people shouldn’t be main characters; that gays don’t have a place in the wider universe.
Then I became an author, and I heard even worse: that the only reason to write characters who are Filipino or Ethiopian or Colombian is to satisfy some arbitrary liberal/politically correct standard of fiction. (It couldn’t possibly be because these are people who make up daily life in a metropolitan U.S. city.) I heard bitter rumors that editors were biased toward stories by authors who weren’t white American men. That writers like me were ruining the genre by shoving our unrelatable characters down fans’ throats. How could I parse these accusations?
Here’s the rub: I don’t experience science fiction through a lens colored by my physical appearance. I don’t need characters to resemble me in order to appreciate their struggles.
The great beauty of genre fiction is in how it pushes the boundaries of what’s possible, and that means getting into the minds of all kinds of life—elves, insects, robots, dragons, Wookiees. How anyone can say with a straight face that women, queers, and people of color don’t have a place in these stories is mind-boggling.
Hari Seldon has an Indian first name. Hiro Protagonist is part-Japanese and part-African. Pyanfar Chanur is an intelligent leonine starship captain. Stilgar and his Fremen tribes are derived from desert Arabs. Ged is a dark-skinned wizard. Are any of these characters less readable or relatable because of their phenotypes?
Science fiction is where we break new ground. This is where we push the boundaries of what is possible, stretch our imaginations to their limits. This is not a genre that belongs to any one subset of human beings. Let’s not forget our roots. Let’s not forget that even today, certain elements of the world look askance at our favorite books and movies. We don’t need petty in-fighting. Our tent is the multiverse, and it’s big enough for everyone.
S.B. Divya is a lover of science, math, fiction, and the Oxford comma. When she isn’t designing high-speed communications systems, raising her daughter, scratching the cats, or enjoying dinner with her husband, she writes. She also enjoys subverting expectations and breaking stereotypes whenever she can. In her past, she’s used a telescope to find Orion’s nebula, scuba dived with manta rays, and climbed to the top of a thousand-year-old stupa. She holds degrees in Computational Neuroscience and Signal Processing. Her stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction and Nature, and her near-future science fiction novella Runtime will be available in summer of 2016 from Tor.com Publishing.
Thanks for writing. I’ve met a lot of great people in ‘the tent’ :)
The problem is it became mainstream, as long as it was us powernerds, filkers, and people who enjoyed coding in FORTRAN as a hobby, fandom was welcoming. But we made it too welcoming. The FOXnewsers, hooligans, politicians, Michael Bayistans, and americommandos took over when we let them on our nice clean internet. We’ve been excluded from our own damn treehouse and we let it happen because we were too excited about getting to be in the mainstream for once.Once we reveled in our nerd status, but then we started cringing over it (around the same time The Dark Knight Returns was published) and wanting our lovely nerd hobbies to be seen as just as respectable and acceptable as the latest Jackie Collins book, and it was all downhill from there.
@2 Random22
It’s interesting to think that a lot of what drew geeks together was they found something to share in their exclusion from mainstream culture. The exclusion became a part of the identity for a portion of the community. And then, when what you like becomes the mainstream, it almost seems like some of us are pining for the exclusion again.
I can’t escape feeling that the mainstreaming of things I liked as a child has had a diluting effect. On the other hand, there are so many more people to share the things I like with. Friends and relatives who never would have read A Song of Ice and Fire before are open to getting the full story from the books now that it’s a pop culture phenomenon. There will probably always been deep and shallow ends of the fandom pool, with a continuum in between. I think we have to be OK with that, because it ultimately gives us more of what we enjoy.
When I was in high school I tended to be one of those obnoxious types that turned her nose up at the mainstream but I’m kind of in the same place. There are still pockets of ‘deep’ fandom, but it’s cool we can have lots more people to enjoy things with (although yes, occasionally that does mean things get a little dumbed down, and sometimes a current incarnation of a particular fandom tends to emphasize things that in my opinion aren’t what is key to the work but…at least it makes for good discussion).
I think my big moment came while watching some clip of the Colbert Report where James Franco was on and talking about reading the Quenta Silmarillion. He lost rather badly in a Tolkien Throwdown, but it was this truly surreal moment where I thought, ‘wait a sec, did an A-list movie star just say the words ‘Quenta Silmarillion’ on prime time TV? And the audience actually has a vague sense of what is going on?’ Because I can tell you that when I was reading that book in middle/high school, barely anybody knew what the heck it was; even Lord of the Rings itself was somewhat obscure (well, maybe not to the world at large but this was pre-widespread internet).
Great article! Your candidness and rationality are really refreshing to read. I think it’s awesome that people from every background are able to personally enjoy and experience sci-fi and fantasy like we do without getting hung up about the skintone, gender, or orientation of the characters.
Good point about Pyanfar, but the Atevi are very tall and have black skin. . . .
Remember, eventually the dinosaurs became extinct.
And the people said, “Amen.”
Great article. Thank you!
I can relate somewhat being female, and the only one of my friends who reads SciFi and Fantasy. They all look at me with a rather confused stare. Thankfully, the internet has brought some wonderful new people into my life that I can finally discuss the genre with! The trolls are there for sure, but then they were always around.
When asked Why I read Fantasy and SciFi, my standard reply is that it is a safe, fictional world in which to explore and discuss controversial topics….philosophy, politics, ecology, religion, science, and yes, race and ethnicity too. Yay for the Nerds and Geeks of the world, pushing the boundaries!
Wonderful article. I have also been addicted to science fiction since age 10 and in the last 10-15 years as the author demographic spectrum has vastly broadened, the quality and richness has increased exponentially.
If anyone questions your nerd-cred, just show them your Caltech degree.
I fit the stereotype of the old fan mentioned here – Caucasian, heterosexual, conservative over 60 male.
And I could not care less about whether fellow fans, or writers, fit my mold. And I’m not a particularly deep thinker; it’s the way an author puts his or her words together that draws me in and keeps me coming back. I’m just pleased the audience is growing, and thus the range of material is as well. Thanks to you all for keeping the genre I enjoy healthy.
This notion that people of color or women or anybody should have to submit justification for their existence just baffles me. White guy leads never have to explain why they’re present, even in situations where they don’t make any sense like Tarzan. The ‘box-ticking’ argument never held water either–editorial mandate requires all sorts of things like happy endings and inclusion of some kind of technological problem solved by forward thinking (aka ‘Campbellian SF’) so saying ‘maybe brighten up the cast a bit’ is hardly an imposition–and really, I’ve not heard of any instances of that ever actually happening. What usually happens is the reverse, like telling Sam Delany he can’t have a black lead in a novel, or Martha Wells having a gay character edited out of a book without telling her.
I love the big tent, and I am extremely happy with the place the genre is in now. There’s so much good material! I just keep wanting more, and the future itself keeps bringing more ways and more people to experience it with.
Thanks for the great article. Just here to tell you here is another female (Caucasian) that likes hardcore science fiction. So there.
If we, females, are capable of enjoying a mostly (white) male populated story, I cannot believe the reverse isn’t possible. And why would skin color or sexual preferences matter. The worst it can do, is broaden my views, yuk (:-)).
Most of the other things I would like to say, have been said by the others (thank you all).
Great article and thanks to you and Tor for hitting on this topic. The delight of our favorite genre is authors can create and readers experience worlds wildly different from our own, where human beings are yet still human, whether they’re zipping through a wormhole or fighting (or flying) dragons. I love the burgeoning of diversity in science fiction and fantasy, and I think in the print literature there are plenty of nonwhite, nonmale, nonhetero main characters, and the list is growing. I think we’re still short of nonwhite protagonists and antagonists (as opposed to best friends, pivotal characters, etc). It also troubles me to see novels set in the future where all the spacefarers are white because this, frankly, doesn’t seem very plausible. Right now, the minority of people living on earth have pale skin–in future centuries when space travel becomes routine (assuming we last long enough as a species), I would think that the majority of space farers would probably be some shade of brown, simply because that’s what the world’s population looks like on the whole.
Diversity is sadly still lacking on TV and film. Battlestar Galactica and especially The Expanse had pretty diverse casts (although still majority white), and kudos to them for having multiple main characters be women and/or people of color, but it’s still a pretty sad state of affairs. I’m glad the The Force Awakens features a black protagonist in Finn, but why is John Boyega the only dark face on screen? That isn’t much different from Billie Dee Williams and Samuel L Jackson being the only black faces in the previous Star Wars films, and the tokenism could so easily be eliminated by simply casting more people of color as extras and in supporting roles.
@15/amustice – “The Force Awakens features a black protagonist in Finn, but why is John Boyega the only dark face on screen?”
I agree. I was also disappointed the only other major black performer in the film, Lupita Nyong’o — and an Academy Award winner at that, for goodness’ sake! — was voicing a CGI character. What a missed opportunity. (Although perhaps having Maz be an alien avoids a hint of the old “magic negro” stereotype… what do you think?)
Still, I think Boyega’s status as Star Wars’ first black lead character (Billy Dee Williams’ Lando, while a fantastic character, remains a supporting one) is a significant step forward, as is Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron as the first Hispanic lead in the franchise. (He needs more screen time in Episode VIII — and, judging from fan reaction, I think he’s likely to get it).
I think The Expanse has a far more diverse cast of leads than BSG did. I’m rewatching BSG now for the first time since it went off the air, and am noting, from my own (white male) p.o.v., it feels far less diverse than it did at the time. But The Expanse has a wide variety of color, gender, and sexual orientation represented. I was especially impressed by Dominique Tipper as Naomi Nagata and Shohreh Aghdashloo as Chrisjen Avasarala (high-ranking UN official, no less). Nice to see women of color in powerful positions — and just as complicated and nuanced characters, with their good and bad traits, their strengths and weaknesses as everyone else on the show.
As a diehard Star Trek fan, I find The Expanse‘s take on the future not terribly inspiring, but I do hope the new series will take some cues from it in terms of showing diversity on the final frontier.
Well said! Not being white or male myself, I actually grew up so used to reading lead characters in fantasy novels who are male + white that when I met a few that weren’t (like Ged, everyone in Tooth & Claw etc) or I usually had to go back a chapter or two and read that again to register the difference fully. Thats how rare they were/are!
Hope to see a lot more variety in the lead characters in the books & years ahead.