Does my novel have to be diverse?

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Chandelle

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The genre is science fiction, although it's all humans in a different galaxy somewhere in the future. My issue is, when I think of the characters, I always think of them as a bunch of white men (besides my main character and a few the minor characters, I think of as white women). I was going over a friend's fantasy storyboard on Pinterest and his characters are all different races, genders, etc.

How much does this really matter? I know I've fallen into a trap of having a mostly mono-cultural main planet, but since diversity is not a theme of the story, I feel like making it an issue would take away from the actual characters and plot. For what it's worth, their races and physical hair-eye descriptions are never mentioned, with one exception.
 

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Does diversity have to be a theme of the story for everyone to not be a white man? Is it making it an issue to have humans on another planet who look like humans on this one? Also your planet isn't going to survive long with a bunch of men.
 

Chandelle

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I said in my post that there are a lot of women. They just aren't major characters except for the protagonist.

My question was, do I have to specifically say they are diverse? I assume things about them based on my background, will everyone else do that as well? I never actually say they are human either, for whatever that's worth.
 

Twick

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I said in my post that there are a lot of women. They just aren't major characters except for the protagonist.

My question was, do I have to specifically say they are diverse? I assume things about them based on my background, will everyone else do that as well? I never actually say they are human either, for whatever that's worth.

I suppose if you don't identify them specifically by race, your readers can assign them any race they want. Your vision would not necessarily control their vision, if you have truly been as scrupulous as you claim in not giving any physical description whatsoever.

But honestly, I think you should ask yourself why you prefer to see your team as non-diverse. Diversity isn't a "theme," it's existence. If you really think visualizing your characters as anything other than white males is "taking away from the story," I suspect this is going to come out in your writing whether you intend to or not.
 

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Have to? Of course not. Should? Perhaps so. If all your characters, major and minor, are white people in a distant galaxy in the future, does that not suggest that only white people were chosen/were able/could afford/were smart enough to leave Earth to come there? Does this say something negative?

To me, it does.

Not that you have to make diversity an element of your story. If you opted to have a more diverse cast, it doesn't even have to be an element. Mere existence would be sufficient, the same way an author might place a gay or disabled character in a work of fiction that's got nothing to do with anybody's sexual orientation or physical ability.

Consider the probable ways other-world colonists are likely to be selected. I would think either race would not be a factor, or that diversity would be deliberate. Of course, in successive generations the diverse races and their original cultures taken off-planet would blend, perhaps into a single culture, but it won't be that of white men and women.

You are, of course, free to write this as you choose. If it were my work, I'd mention appearance in ways that suggest not everybody is a direct descendant of a Caucasian line, without making it at all a big deal.
 

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If the race of the characters is never mentioned, and there are no physical descriptions (which, btw, would kind of drive me crazy as a reader, but that's just me), then your readers (readers not like me) can imagine any physical characteristics they like. IOW, in a case like that, the diversity is up to the reader to supply.
 

Myrealana

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In my first book, my MC was a woman, and every other character was a man. One of them was Black, but all men.

A friend suggested I look at each character and ask myself "why does he have to be a man?" If the answer was "because the first thing I think of when I say 'emergency room doctor' (or whatever) is a man," try changing half of those to women.

I did.

You know what? Not only did it not make my story worse, it made it so much better. Maybe it was because I had to stop and think about each of those side characters for just that extra minute, or maybe it was because once the character stopped being "generic white man placeholder" they came into their own, but my book is better because I took the time to do that.

So, does your spaceship have to be diverse? Nothing *has* to be anything. But, if a character has any screen time, try asking yourself "why does this character have to be male?" If the only answer is because that's your default, think about changing some of them. It might be really good for you, and your story.
 

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If you think about it humans do evolve over time in response to the environment. Expose them to a lot of sunlight and warm temps and they eventually darken up. The opposite is also true. Clad them in clothing to keep them warm and reduce the sun exposure and they lighten up. Thank about the environment their ancestors came from and extrapolate from there what their physical characteristics are. Think Gravity, atmosphere, what they eat, etc.... In the Star Wars Universe Grand Admiral Thrawn is a member of the Chiss. They were humans who settled on a world where the minerals in the water turned them blue.

So with that in mind, are your characters really "white" as we define them now?
 

Simpson17866

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As a white man:

Keeping in mind that white men are a 5-10% minority in the world, I would think that making a leading cast of all white men would be more of a political statement than the inverse.
 

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I really challenge you to think of it this way: the world is not made up of primarily white men. What in-story justification do you have for treating white men as the default? Does it add anything, or is it just lazy?

I encourage you not to tack on race and sex and disability status as an afterthought. That has its own problems if you don't know how to navigate them (although I actually think it worked well in Alien, where everyone was originally written as white and male). But push yourself in future writing to do better. If you accidentally write a universe where the only people doing anything interesting are all white dudes, that's a quality problem.
 

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A good story stands on the story and how it is told. Diversity is a sidetrack issue.
 

Mrs-Q

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A good story stands on the story and how it is told. Diversity is a sidetrack issue.
A novel that is solely about white men because the author can't imagine anyone else doing anything interesting is probably poorly told for a number of reasons.
 

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Not that you have to make diversity an element of your story. If you opted to have a more diverse cast, it doesn't even have to be an element. Mere existence would be sufficient, the same way an author might place a gay or disabled character in a work of fiction that's got nothing to do with anybody's sexual orientation or physical ability.

A good example of this done well is in The Expanse series by James SA Corey (both books and TV). OTOH, I think The Martian doesn't have any physical descriptions so the reader is free to decide what the characters look like and the film did include Chiwetel Ejiofor and Benedict Wong.

If your novel was set in, say Medieval England or contemporary rural Iceland, you might have a good reason for the cast to be monochrome. But if it's set in a future galaxy made up of descendants from Earth, the reasoning will be different.


Nothing good ever comes out of a discussion concerning race, ever. Welcome to the internet.

I don't know; this has been a fairly polite and productive post. So far :scared:
 

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I think a good question to ask yourself is why in this futuristic universe, are the people of your world all white? Is that a realistic expectation based on the history of getting humans to this planet? Was it a choice made by the people who left Earth and colonized this particular planet? Was there a scientific or cultural reason that would have led to this particular make-up of races (or lack thereof)? It's a sci-fi. You don't have to know all the science or even the history, but when the questions come up, you should be able to come up with an answer or change it.

Does your novel have to be diverse? No it doesn't. But when your setting is important, it's worth examining whether the make-up of the characters is realistic for that setting. That goes for speculative fiction, contemporary fiction, historical fiction, etc.

Just because in your futuristic setting you have characters of different races doesn't mean that race will be an issue. That far into the future, you get to make up how much of an issue it will be. You look at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and having a black captain wasn't a big deal for anyone of the time period...but when they had to deal with Earth's history (holodecks, time travel, dreams, whatever), they addressed the issue because it was one for those time periods. Sisko was aware of the history, but it didn't affect how he interacted with his crew or how they interacted with him.

IMO, having no diversity within a futuristic cast makes race more of an issue than making it diverse without the modern tensions. It means that at some point you will have to address why all the characters are all white (straight, cis, abled, etc.).

You can always take the route of shrugging and claiming that you never assigned race so it's the reader's fault that they read them as white, but just like you have defaulted to white, so will many of your readers, because it is the "default" if there are no descriptions to draw from. And we know from this thread that it's backpedaling.

I'm not a physical description person, but I do like occasional features assigned to characters. It's surprising if your POV character never notices what anybody looks like, unless they're blind or have prosopagnosia.
 

EMaree

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Honestly, consider you're writing science fiction I find it super weird that you wouldn't take real-life demographics into account. I'm sure your world uses science and technology, so why wouldn't you use our current level of demographic knowledge? In the US census, non-white births overtook white births in 2012, and they projected a non-Hispanic white minority by 2044 (but the study is flawed, says the NY Times with lots of further reading).

If you're writing an all-white future, the reader in me wants to know what happened to our presently diverse world. Where are all the PoC? Are your white main characters a racial minority bound by common interest?

If you can't answer this, consider that a massive worldbuilding issue.
 

Brightdreamer

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A good example of this done well is in The Expanse series by James SA Corey (both books and TV). OTOH, I think The Martian doesn't have any physical descriptions so the reader is free to decide what the characters look like and the film did include Chiwetel Ejiofor and Benedict Wong.

Been a while since I read it, but not only were there women, but I believe some of the characters were described as non-white, and others had names that pointed to a non-"stereotypical white American" background. And, of course, the Chinese who were instrumental in helping the rescue mission weren't white in either book or film.

I'd add that, in addition to what others have pointed out (putting more thought into your world/characters often improves the tale, asking yourself why it's the default - especially if you're projecting far into the future, etc.), the scope of your novel might also affect diversity. If, say, you have three people stranded on an isolated derelict, I probably wouldn't notice a less-diverse cast as much as I would in a sprawling space epic.

This is one of those things that too many of us just don't think about... until we do. And the forward-looking sci-fi genre is at least as guilty of this as other genres, especially when you look back at the classics. (There's a short story anthology edited by Asimov where even he remarks that he never noted the racism in older SF tales until he re-read them for the anthology, and it leapt out how the yellow aliens were always evil and clever, the blacks brutish thugs, the whites invariably good and enlightened... Then you look at Asimov's Foundation, where apparently white men are the only humans of consequence even in the vast, remote, galaxy-spanning human future, while women are housewives or mistresses of little note,or Bradbury's idealized and whitewashed mid-century America projected to interplanetary colonization. It doesn't diminish the Ideas explored, but boy does it stand out as a blind spot, this unconscious assumption that "human" means "white.")
 

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To what extent do you need to describe the characters at all, or assign any particular race to them?

The readers will imagine the characters in any guise that the readers need them to be.
 

Chandelle

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Ok, then. I frankly hate novels with token characters of each race - especially science fiction, and I personally don't care to read about race and gender and sexuality as a theme, but it appears I'm alone in that.

I am not a white male, by the way.
 

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Nobody's asking you to make it a theme, nor to make a token character of each race. What I see people asking is to address your question from a world-building standpoint. You see this cast as white. Is that realistic for the world you're building and why?
 

Simpson17866

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Ok, then. I frankly hate novels with token characters of each race - especially science fiction, and I personally don't care to read about race and gender and sexuality as a theme, but it appears I'm alone in that.

I am not a white male, by the way.
Not a fan of "token minority" characters either, but it seems easy enough to make a minority character non-token. One of my own favorite characters started out as a Token Non-Human: I then developed him the same way I'd already been developing my human charcaters, and he ended up being one of my favorites.
 

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Nobody's asking you to make it a theme, nor to make a token character of each race. What I see people asking is to address your question from a world-building standpoint. You see this cast as white. Is that realistic for the world you're building and why?

This is really beautifully expressed. It's about world-building.
 

Once!

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For what it's worth, their races and physical hair-eye descriptions are never mentioned, with one exception.

You've already made the point that I was going to make,and which I see that Jim has made. If you never mention skin colour, how are your readers going to know that you picture your characters as white? They will use their imaginations in ways that we can't begin to foresee.

Unless your characters somehow act white. But I am struggling to see how that might work.
 

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Ok, then. I frankly hate novels with token characters of each race - especially science fiction, and I personally don't care to read about race and gender and sexuality as a theme, but it appears I'm alone in that.

I am not a white male, by the way.
Nobody has said to use token characters (in fact, I think I advised against tokenism) or said you must address race as a theme. But I worry that you see including non-white and women characters at all as tokenism.

It is part of our jobs as authors to say what we mean, but also not to say things we don't mean. By portraying only white men (when white men are a global minority), you don't avoid race and gender. You include it front and center, but not in an intentional or skillful way. I do challenge you to do better than that.
 
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