Characters of Color in Fantasy & SF

The culture in Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea novels is rather notably predominantly dark-skinned. Which is why so many people (including LeGuin herself) were up-in-arms over how they chose to 'whitewash' the characters in the miniseries.

I really like Rivers of London and Moon over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch which have a very racially diverse cast.

My SF novel has people of varied ethnic backgrounds. It's part of the story, i.e. the children of Earth colonizing a new world.

I also have AA characters and whites in a novella I submitted to a contest here on AW.

My only worry is to not write stereotypes, just real people.

It's an interesting question, specially when one is dealing with fantasy and science fiction. Color, at least in my opinion, has nothing to do with color. It's just one expression of othering, which is done through visual distinction, facial characteristics, language, accents...anything that makes someone different. Color, in our world, is a mixture of a visual difference (duh) and also a cultural difference.

But does that mean that ANY sci-fi that deals with othering, whether it's fantastic racism with orks in Shadowrun or Arcanum or the pervasive anti-transhumanist sentiment in Star Trek, deal with "color" as this thread is discussing it?

Kind of. A general exploration of othering is great, but can only go so far if you want people to really understand the nature of being a minority in today's society (or any society, really). For that you need a SPECIFIC exploration, either through allegory or extrapolation...which means thinking about how you can look at racism through the lens of the future or the fantastic.

Which is great fun and lets us see how things could be better, worse, or different.

Now, as for including characters of multiple race (which is a different question from exploring racism, as you can simply pull a 'we're past that BS' thing and that's fine) I think there is no reason not too...but there is also every reason to DO so.

If you're writing a steampunk about a future dominated by a puritanical confederacy of white supremacists, it really doesn't make much sense to have non-white main characters. Further, I don't believe that not having a character IS NOT THE SAME THING AS ERASING THEM. Why?

Because people and things can have an impact through their presence AND their absence. It's all about how you play it. For example, the previous book I linked, the lack of minority characters and the horrors inflicted on the nameless, faceless masses of Asians people is PART of the point of the book.

Contrast that with, say, the first (fourth) Star Wars, where black people are nowhere and their absence has no impact on the story. It's more than just not being there, it's about HOW they are not there. Star Wars was supposed to be a flashy space opera, where concepts of race and such are considered to be, for all intents and purposes, solved. But that does not work if you don't have an even cast of characters...cause that has unfortunate implications of how racism was 'solved', if you know what I mean.

My personal favorite example of racial diversity comes from my ALL TIME FAVORITE BOOK EVER OF ALL TIME, A Deepness In the Sky, WHICH YOU MUST BUY RIGHT NOW LIKE FIVE TIMES.

In it, character description is sparse, but the names tell all. The main characters almost to the last either have made up or Asian-ish last names (Diem, Wong, Bonsol - which I think is a spin on Bonsai). The trading culture they belong to is named Qeng Ho, a play on Zheng He (or Cheng Ho, depending on how you Romanticize it) a Chinese explorer.

The only real mention of skin color compares the main character's gray skin to another's pale white.

But, really, A Deepness in the Sky takes place THOUSANDS of years in the future, and has a serious amount of genetic drift, which makes issues of color and race a bit...distant at best. But, it's still amazing.

Now, as for my own books...hooo boy.

For my first character from a minority, I went for broke: I made her/him a biracial, bigendered, bisexual, AND polyamorous. Yeah, that book is never going to sell. But her name was Milo Valentine, with her mother being Filipino. So half white, half Filipino. But really, exploration of race didn't really crop up, as Milo is also a magical hermaphrodite and switches genders at will (and whenever she/he's startled/scared/aroused/what have you).

Funnily, being a M-herm gave her the ability to see human souls on the outside, rather than the inside, so everyone looked like a wild collage of visual metaphors for what their personality and spirit was like. Milo stopped classifying people by race and started just finding similarities in their soul expressions. (Protective people were usually covered with some kind of armor, sarcastic/picky people had lots of spiky bits, that kind of thing).

Another character I have is Drusilla Xao, who...I never actually say if she's fully Han-Chinese or half-white. Remember when I earlier said that issues of color and race are really a combination of culture and othering? Well, I did try to explore that with Drusilla's story, by depicting a society where there simply isn't room for racism.

Dru grows up in orbit around the Earth, and learns from a very young age that everyone has to work with everyone else or the systems on the habitation fail and everyone dies. So, it's really more of a cultural distinction between Spacer and Earther than Chinese and white.

Still, there is othering involved.

I include people of various ethnicity, in the same way I include people of various morality and personality. A story is richer when it's told from many perspectives and many views.

So...

That's my long, rambling post!

most of my characters are "of color" because it reflects the people i'm used to seeing and interacting with. I do worry my antagonist is a Dragon Lady.

I thought of the Klingons as black or people of color. I don't think Jordie and Warf felt that way but as a viewer I saw "my people" represented in a universe that needed to reflect not just race, but also religion, politics, and gender.

Sisko was the lead character in Star Trek: DS9, and one of my favorite Star Trek characters ever. I thought it was well-done -- racism usually wasn't an issue on the station, but he was still aware of history and what had happened in the past (though hostilities between two species was always present and explored in interesting ways). Also, Sisko was just awesome, period.

I recently read a YA called "Magic Under Glass" that had a protag from India, also pretty good.

I go with John Scalzi on this. He doesn't describe the color of his characters. He lets the reader decide what they want. I tend to agree with him.

Color in fantasy and sci-fi usually bugs me a lot. In sci-fi color often runs the risk of being inconsistent with the amount of time that has passed. People are moving around the globe now and having kids with different "races". Race is going away because of this. In a couple hundred years you might actually have a hard time tracking down a black person, or white person for that matter. And then there is the BSG model, where there are 13 colonies, one of which is all black people. That makes no sense. Humans evolved on the same planet, but then when they moved into space all the black people moved to the same world? and no white people so the population stayed black? That scenario breaks rules of genetics, evolution and logic.

In fantasy populations should be homogenous too. How many miles do you have to travel before you hit a different race? In some cases thousands. Even if you cross a significant natural barrier, that gives you two races to work with. I hate fantasy where there is one random black guy who is of the same culture as everyone else. How could he have gotten from a place that had black people but have the same culture as the people he now lives with? How come no one seems to notice hes black despite the fact he is the only one around? Why is there always a random black guy and not a random asian or hispanic guy? I don't recall reading any books with this but I have seen it in film and television where they can throw in some black guy.

I think the issue of hyperbole races like Ferengi is good, or species like elves in tokenism where you could use racial themes and be internally consistent. But within humans race make no sense in scifi or fantasy. Race should be ignored in sci-fi or fantasy when possible.

If race was used it should be to the point where people divide people in nonexistent races or basically race is just another way to divide people up. My grandmother told me in the town she grew up in an interracial marriage was between a swede and a Norwegian. They actually considered themselves enough different to think of it that way. Which I think by modern considerations is just absurd. That said, if there is no plot or thematic reason to have races, or anytype of prejudice or social subdivisions, race should be avoided completely.

I would also like to make the final point that biologically speaking there is only one human race. Race as I use it is used in the colloquial sense.

Octavia Butler, definitely, her characters were predominantly of color. I doubt anyone cared much although I remember at least one book had a terribly whitewashed cover.

I am writing a novel and it's sequel, in part one, the characters are mostly white or Mediterranean-looking, due to the fact that it takes place in a fictionalized setting based on western Europe. In part two, which takes place in a desert nation, most of the characters are much darker, naturally. In fact, the protagonist is really the only "white" character through most of the story, making her the outsider.

I never put much thought in it. Throwing in the token black dude just to have him in there seems disingenuous at best. I'd rather put such a character in a setting where their presence is logical.

Basically, I go with what feels right to the story at hand. Characters of any given race may be good or bad people, but it's all what works in context.

twm said:

I go with John Scalzi on this. He doesn't describe the color of his characters. He lets the reader decide what they want. I tend to agree with him.

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No, I remember John Perry being a distinct shade of green for most of his book

Stoneghost said:

Color in fantasy and sci-fi usually bugs me a lot. In sci-fi color often runs the risk of being inconsistent with the amount of time that has passed. People are moving around the globe now and having kids with different "races". Race is going away because of this. In a couple hundred years you might actually have a hard time tracking down a black person, or white person for that matter. And then there is the BSG model, where there are 13 colonies, one of which is all black people. That makes no sense. Humans evolved on the same planet, but then when they moved into space all the black people moved to the same world? and no white people so the population stayed black? That scenario breaks rules of genetics, evolution and logic.

In fantasy populations should be homogenous too. How many miles do you have to travel before you hit a different race? In some cases thousands. Even if you cross a significant natural barrier, that gives you two races to work with. I hate fantasy where there is one random black guy who is of the same culture as everyone else. How could he have gotten from a place that had black people but have the same culture as the people he now lives with? How come no one seems to notice hes black despite the fact he is the only one around? Why is there always a random black guy and not a random asian or hispanic guy? I don't recall reading any books with this but I have seen it in film and television where they can throw in some black guy.

I think the issue of hyperbole races like Ferengi is good, or species like elves in tokenism where you could use racial themes and be internally consistent. But within humans race make no sense in scifi or fantasy. Race should be ignored in sci-fi or fantasy when possible.

If race was used it should be to the point where people divide people in nonexistent races or basically race is just another way to divide people up. My grandmother told me in the town she grew up in an interracial marriage was between a swede and a Norwegian. They actually considered themselves enough different to think of it that way. Which I think by modern considerations is just absurd. That said, if there is no plot or thematic reason to have races, or anytype of prejudice or social subdivisions, race should be avoided completely.

I would also like to make the final point that biologically speaking there is only one human race. Race as I use it is used in the colloquial sense.

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In medieval and Europe of antiquity, there were the travellers and traders who went along the Silk Road, Ivory Road, Amber Road and the Spice Road as well as the capture from pirates and Crusades. The only continents that were untouched in terms of race was Australia and South America.

Stoneghost said:

In fantasy populations should be homogenous too. How many miles do you have to travel before you hit a different race? In some cases thousands. Even if you cross a significant natural barrier, that gives you two races to work with. I hate fantasy where there is one random black guy who is of the same culture as everyone else. How could he have gotten from a place that had black people but have the same culture as the people he now lives with? How come no one seems to notice hes black despite the fact he is the only one around? Why is there always a random black guy and not a random asian or hispanic guy? I don't recall reading any books with this but I have seen it in film and television where they can throw in some black guy.

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What if I'm not wriitng pseudo-medieaval fantasy? Sure, people from the same place should be similar in looks, but traders/soldiers from different countries have always been a presence in the real world since the romans (who had non-roman soldiers, even), and probably before.

I'm writing a post-apocalyptic novel at the moment, and one of the things I noticed is the amount of people who seem to think only white people will survive the end days. U-huh. I'm setting mine in my home county, which is probably the least racially diverse county in the country (when I lived in the village I grew up in there were only two families that weren't caucasian. Two.) but as the city is a university city, shock, horror, other people of other races live here, and some of them might survive the apocalypse! Such a shock. However, I suspect post-apocalypse colour will matter less than your allegience to certain groups, settlements and tribes. Like the city is the main place, but people from the city think people from outside are undisciplined savages, and people from outside the city think that the people in the city are self-obsessed weaklings, and everyone hates the nomadic tribes.

Excuse me, but I heard that it is "offensive" to make black people the villains, so most bad guys in today's tv or movies are white, asian or latino.

Is that true?

Not describing skin color defaults to white. Sorry.

There are several nonwhite writers who have written nonwhite protagonists with nonwhite supporting characters.

SPMiller said:

Not describing skin color defaults to white. Sorry.

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Maybe for you it does, for me it doesn't.

Ardent Kat said:

Do you think non-human non-white races like the Klingons in Star Trek or the twi'lek in Star Wars "count" as representations of PoC in SF? Why or why not?

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I've thought about this a lot, and decided to go with no, they don't. They're aliens, not humans. People of color describes more than just skin tone, but also includes a shared history, which Klingons weren't a part of. However, the exception would be a story in which aliens were specifically being used as a stand-in for a racial minority, at which point they usually feel more like a metaphor than a real species anyway.

Octavia Butler's Wild Seed is on my to-read list, and after seeing her recommended in this thread, I'm looking forward to reading it.

As usual, the primary thing I want to see is diversity. If your science fiction covers multiple planets or your fantasy is large in scope, there should be people of multiple races and cultures. They should not all be minor variations on Europeans.

I won't get into the issue of if no description defaults to white, but I do think this is unacceptable in stories with a large scale. If not everyone is the same, then those differences are going to matter. Maybe they won't be critical, but it would come up for the characters. If you describe nothing there does tend to be an assumption that everyone is the same.

For examples, Steven Erikson does a pretty good job not falling into some usual traps. In addition to races that are entirely non-human (and they're not all pale elf types), his characters represent the real world spectrum. There's half a continent (home to many characters) where the population is dark-skinned. So it's far beyond an issue of "These three guys are black" or even "This one ethnic group is black." It's dozens of tribes and characters, including some of the main ones.

Ardent Kat said:

Do you think non-human non-white races like the Klingons in Star Trek or the twi'lek in Star Wars "count" as representations of PoC in SF? Why or why not?

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The Klingons are one of the reasons I do not like TOS. While it's notable that the crew represents many races of Earth, they've just pushed the "otherness" outward slightly. Vulcans are the good race, Klingons are the evil one. And remember this is before the forehead makeup or the warrior/honor bit: Klingons were just people with darkish skin who were arbitrarily evil.

So as far as I'm concerned, aliens do not represent people of color. But they embody difference, and how we view those who are different from us has a great influence on how we view race in the real world.

Ardent Kat said:

Is tokenism preferable to erasure when it comes to racial diversity in fiction?

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That's an interesting question and I'm not sure how confident I feel in the answer I'm about to give. But I suppose I prefer tokenism over erasure over heavy stereotypes. Stereotypes reinforce negative things, erasure is a relatively neutral part of a privileged worldview, and tokenism is misguided but at least attempting to include more diversity.

A couple of people have beaten me to Octavia Butler, so I'll just suggest "The Years of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson, an alternate history in which the Black Death kills most of the population of Europe. IIRC, most of the book is told through the eyes of Muslim characters and the few whites seen are slaves.

The first book in my own alternate history series doesn't have many explicit PoC, because it's set in Elizabethan London in a world where the Atlantic slave trade hasn't happened - hence many fewer black slaves around. I do mention a black (non-slave) dockhand and a Native American trader (the latter being an illustration of the alt history situation), but I didn't want to add non-whites to my main cast just out of tokenism. Besides, there was enough xenophobia in Elizabethan London without needing to include non-whites - even my half-French hero gets suspicious looks for his dark colouring.

In the sequel the characters are going to the eastern Mediterranean, so the ethnic mix is inevitably going to be more diverse. However I'm somewhat constrained by historical reality - my alternate history scenario doesn't wave a magic wand and make European racism go away! Muslim slavers from North Africa devastated European coastal populations during this period, so they are an obvious threat to the heroes on their sea voyage, but even there it's not a stark black vs white conflict, as there were famously a number of whites amongst the slavers, particularly Dutch sailors. Still, I'd like to balance it out by having some non-white characters in "good guy" roles - it's just a case of working out what would fit both the story and the historical facts.

The issue is much simpler in my secondary-world fantasy - the short story I'm shopping around at the moment has an interracial gay romance between a white guy and one whose ethnicity is similar to Southern India/Sri Lanka. I didn't particularly plan it that way, it was just how the character turned out when I wrote him

Empire of Bones by Liz Williams has a heroine who is an untouchable hindu (in a future period where India has reverted to enforcing the caste distinctions again).

I had real problems with Shadow in Neil Gaiman's American Gods... he is never described (other than to say he is 'big') but I always saw him as black. Or at least half caste (without giving away anything for anyone who has not read it and wants to, his father at least is white). It may have been the name Shadow which gave me that impression... The same book does, however, have one of the coolest characters of colour ever - Anansi. Then you have Anansi boys, the sequel, which has pretty much an entire Afro-Carribean cast apart from one ghost and one theatrical agent.

I can add to the above The Marquis De Carabas (Neverwhere) and Cat from Red Dwarf. Ok, technically Cat is a TV character but the Red Dwarf novelisations are actually very good...

Much of Pratchett's Guards books focus on cultural and racial differences - the Trolls V Dwarves antipathy is an example of this. The implication which is made quite heavily in the books is that Trolls (or at least some of them, the ones that aren't Chrysoprase and therefore an Italian Mafia Don stereotype) are black while Dwarves are distinctly Muslim.

I also read somewhere that the whole X men/Brotherhood of mutants antipathy was based in part on the Civil rights movement with Xavier in the role of Martin Luther King and Magneto in the role of Malcom X. Though there are few actual black mutants in the screen versions seen so far...

There is a fine line between being fair and open to all races and cultures in your work and deliberately thinking 'shit, I haven't got a black dude in there, must add one'. The latter tends to lead to badly written characters. In a fantasy/sci fi world which follows more or less the same climatic systems as ours, you will inevitably get a range of ethnicities.

BTW, have I mentioned before how I hate the term 'race' it implies a far greater difference between different ethnicities than actually exists in reality. I did say to my students recently that its not so much a case of different races but of different 'breeds' (and yes, not a nice term to refer to humans with but, hell, we are animals too this is why I prefer ethnicity) and the human 'breeds' are nowhere near so diverse as those of dogs (though dogs can be worse than we are for bullying other dogs smaller than they are... ) I think those who are afraid of the differences need to properly explore the similarities first...

Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, was a great book, and it takes place in modern London, but revolves around African mythology, so almost the entire cast is black. But Neil had to turn down a movie deal because the producers wanted to make all the lead characters white instead

areteus said:

There is a fine line between being fair and open to all races and cultures in your work and deliberately thinking 'shit, I haven't got a black dude in there, must add one'. The latter tends to lead to badly written characters. In a fantasy/sci fi world which follows more or less the same climatic systems as ours, you will inevitably get a range of ethnicities.

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Exactly. I think it's more a case of remembering to look at your work and think "hey, all my characters are white - is that an oversight or does it make sense in context?"

areteus said:

BTW, have I mentioned before how I hate the term 'race' it implies a far greater difference between different ethnicities than actually exists in reality. I did say to my students recently that its not so much a case of different races but of different 'breeds' (and yes, not a nice term to refer to humans with but, hell, we are animals too this is why I prefer ethnicity) and the human 'breeds' are nowhere near so diverse as those of dogs (though dogs can be worse than we are for bullying other dogs smaller than they are... ) I think those who are afraid of the differences need to properly explore the similarities first...

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Yes - lots of superficial differences caused by a few tiny genetic differences. If anything, humans are more like cats - minor differences in size and build, major differences (mostly natural) in colouring. E.g. Siamese and Burmese patterns, which are natural mutations of an enzyme that controls pigment production.

IMHO, "ethnicity" is a bit of mouthful compared to "race". The one that irks me as a biologist is calling fantasy non-humans "races" (a stupidity inherited from D&D, I think) when they are nearly always separate species.

For my current WIP, 3 protagonists are white, 1 is black. I took the easy way out and made the black guy sound conservative/witty/educated. No ebonics, certainly. I'm pretty sure he could be white, and it wouldn't make a big difference, but I wanted to diversify because I visualize alot. I do touch upon racism in his chapters, but it's a minor conflict, mostly to help fuel bigger conflicts.

Side characters - got every demographic represented. One of the gangs is specifically composed of one kid per race (takes too long explain why). They are all kids under 10, many of them with violent background. Went a bit more token language route here, because it's a story set in our time/place (similar to The Wire).

I saw Earthsea mentioned in earlier replies... with all due respect, this doesn't really count. ULG didn't have to face the choice of token vs whitewashing. She was at liberty to create whatever characters she liked in her fantasy world. If Ged had pink skin it wouldn't make a damn difference.