A litle help with an unusual book recommendation please.

[Ouroboros]

[quote name='Ser Stubby' post='1649541' date='Jan 14 2009, 23.53']Juliet Mckenna's Aldabreshin Compass is pure epic fantasy (over a 4 book series) that involves a wonderful Polynesian-like culture. 90% of the charatcers are polynesian/maori in appearance, including the main hero.[/quote]
Only read the first book in that series, but I thought they were supposed to be Indonesian. Guess I should have paid better attention. :leaving:

[The Iceman of the North]

It's been a while since I read any of it, but aren't the members of the Culture in Ian M. Bank's series black skinned?

[needle]

[quote]I think science fiction badly needs to have a conversation with itself about diversity...because the implicit message in so much of this sort of science fiction is that diversity is bad, that everything would be better and we would all be morally superior if we could just all act the same [1] and treat race the same way we do haircuts. And this may be true; certainly diversity -- pluralism rather than toleration -- is difficult to maintain, puts strains and stresses on a society. But I wish there were more SF authors using the speculative possibilities of fiction to examine the pros and cons of diversity. What do we lose in these futureworlds that have no need for the concept of the other: what are the implications for the ways societies grow and solve problems; what are the implications for the arts; how does that impact the inner life of people?[/quote]

I liked the rest of MattD's post, but I'm not sure about this, as so much of sci-fi is about diversity - whether it be humans evolving in different directions ( Reynolds, Hamilton, Gordon Dickson, Frank Herbert) or diversity issues dealt with in terms of alien cultures ( larry Niven & Pournelle, David Brin, Iain Banks, Scott Card). I think the way Sci-fi often deals with race is to take it to a whole other level - post humans or aliens are metaphors for race, surely? about the attempt to understand that which is fundamentally different ( or [i]not[/i] different, as the case may be)? Skin colour becomes a non issue when you're dealing with whether people can live under water or not.

Having said that, I do beleive sci-fi has moved on from the days when it was written by white men for white men exclusively. I think a lot of the 'space exploration/near future' novels of the nineties included mixed race crews and began to include heroes of many colours. I'm thinking of Kim Stanley Robinson, Ben Bova, Verner Vinge ( the lead in the Across Real time duology was black IRC)

In fantasy - well, Raymond Feist had black people in Midkemia, and the Kelewan lot were Japanese. Daniel Abraham's main characters are equivalent to chinese or japanese, with the Galts being Western equivalent. Erikson's lot are every colour under the sun as has been said. Engineer trilogy that I am reading at the moment - the Engineers are dark skinned.

Just dcon't give your friend Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold, whatever you do...possibly the most racist book I have ever read.

[Happy Ent]

[quote name='needle' post='1649772' date='Jan 15 2009, 10.27']Having said that, I do beleive sci-fi has moved on from the days when it was written by white men for white men exclusively.[/quote]
Do we have data for this? (I’m honestly curious.)

Tangentially, [i]white men[/i] is probably misleading here. To stick my neck out, sci-fi was been written by people with 115+ IQ for people with 110+ IQ, and I think that’s pretty much unchanged. I could be wrong. Of course, sci-fi has changed its medium to television, and that would further confound the issue. (Is it interesting to compare the Flash Gordon audience to the Asimov readership?)

Again without data, I would venture that there is another genre with a more visible demographic shift, and also one that isn’t primarily correlated with intelligence: During the 70s [i]Fantasy[/i] moved from “written for boys” to “written for girls”. Again, I may be completely wrong and would be very happy to see some data.

Another question for the cognoscenti: would it be valid to credit the producers of the television series [i]Star Trek[/i] with groundbreaking work here for their inclusion of Ohura? Or were they mainly following a current that was already visible in the rest of the genre?

[needle]

[quote]Do we have data for this? (I’m honestly curious.[/quote]

As in spreadsheets and stuff, charting what number of races were represented in which novels over which decades? :P

No. That's why I merely gave examples and used the modifier 'believe' rather than 'it is a fact that'. My answer was entirely based on my own reading of sci-fi produced in the last 60 years, to clarify. Not sure what the IQ thing has to do with races represented?

[quote]Again without data, I would venture that there is another genre with a more visible demographic shift, and also one that isn’t primarily correlated with intelligence: During the 70s Fantasy moved from “written for boys” to “written for girls”. Again, I may be completely wrong and would be very happy to see some dat[/quote]

[i] Without data[/i], I think examples at least help one to understand where you came up with this idea. :P

[Marcelo Rebelo Firqoralas]

[quote name='Happy Ent' post='1649778' date='Jan 15 2009, 10.41']Again without data, I would venture that there is another genre with a more visible demographic shift, and also one that isn’t primarily correlated with intelligence: During the 70s [i]Fantasy[/i] moved from “written for boys” to “written for girls”. Again, I may be completely wrong and would be very happy to see some data.[/quote]
I have never seen any data suupporting this and it also contradicts my own personal experience. I think it is an idea that comes from sf fandom: boys read sf and girls read fantasy, and while it's probably true that fewer girls read sf than fantasy, they both seem to be genres with an unusually high fraction of male readers. If we look at Sweden for instance, where very little sf is published, fantasy would be the most stereotypically male literature genre.

Looking at the best selling fantasy authors of the last twenty years (for instance Jordan, Goodkind, Feist, Martin and even Rowling), few could be said to be "written for girls".

[Happy Ent]

Needle, I really only ask because I find the question interesting. I would assume [i]somebody[/i] in the book industry has good data about the demographics of sci-fi readership, and possibly somebody of this amazingly well-connected forum is privy to that kind of information.

[Greyweather]

The Asharites of [b]The Lions of Al-Rassan[/b] by Guy Gavriel Kay are analogues of the Berber peoples of Al Andalus.

[needle]

HE - fair enough , apologies if I came over as defensive. Maybe the fantasy gender thing should be another thread ( but with examples, plz!)

[Maia]

[quote name='needle' post='1649772' date='Jan 15 2009, 05.27']Just dcon't give your friend Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold, whatever you do...possibly the most racist book I have ever read.[/quote]

OTOH, "Starship Troopers" may actually qualify for some definitions of "dark" as the protagonist is actually a Philippino ethnically. Not that you'd know it from covers and IIRC it is only mentioned a couple of times in the text.

[MinDonner]

[quote name='The Iceman of the North' post='1649771' date='Jan 15 2009, 09.24']It's been a while since I read any of it, but aren't the members of the Culture in Ian M. Bank's series black skinned?[/quote]

IIRC it's only the Player of Games guy who's specifically described as black-skinned, and that only because he's a bit old and crotchety and resistant to change his own appearance; the rest of the Culture are various alien species, who can change pigment at will, so skin-colour is irrelevant.

[Werthead]

Garry Kilworth's bonkers [b]Navigator Kings[/b] trilogy is an epic fantasy based on Polynesian society, mythology and history. Most of the characters are Polynesian. One of the books' conceits is that New Zealand and Britain have swapped places, so in the later books the Celts get involved in the action as well, leading to culture clash hilarity and guys in kilts piloting war canoes.

[Bellis]

I am trying to a put a finger on why some of the suggestions in this thread, especially those from space opera, strike me as weak "colouring to add exotic flavour" while others feel more of a genuine desire to explore different ethnicities and how they affect the character or the reader. I think it makes a difference whether the setting is post-racial or more closely resembles the world in which we live (which doesn't mean that the characters experience racism, but that they could conceivably).

Though as I think Min said upthread, space opera often uses different alien races as a proxy to explore issues of diversity and the other. Star Trek, Le Guin and Banks do this pretty well.

A lot of these examples from the middle east don't count for me. Arabs are not really non-white imho, not more so than other mediterranean peoples. For another thing, middle eastern history is pretty well interwoven with european earth history. The middle east/Islamic world has traditionally been a source for the "dark other" in fantasy (and this is still true of say Kushiel's series), so any story set with a Crusades subtext is really quite traditional.

R. Scott Bakkar does something interesting though in that he quite clearly shows that the "Christian" peoples are probably more barbaric than the "Islamic" peoples. However, he still doesn't tell the story through the Kian (?) point of view, choosing to tell it through "European proxy" POVs (for overwhelmingly Western audiences). Maybe this'll change later in the series though as Kelhus attempts world domination, so it may be too early to pass judgment.

[Happy Ent]

After some googling I found [i]film[/i] genre preferences by age, sex, and race. [url="http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/sfischo/media3.html"]http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/sfischo/media3.html[/url] It’s far from the information I was looking for, of course.

Still. The race that likes Sci-Fi is best is (US) Asians. The race that likes Fantasy best is (US) Whites. (US Blacks like Drama by an overwhelming margin (really stunning – have a look).)

Also, the Sci-Fi / Fantasy preference is indeed reversed for men and women.

(No separate entry for furries, unfortunately. But there is "animal-based" as a genre. Also, arboreal literature is, as usual, completely ignored.)

(ETA: Don’t take my inclusion of this article as a recommendation. The “Ethnic identity congruence”, for example, seems to be nonsense.)

[MattD]

[quote name='needle' post='1649772' date='Jan 15 2009, 04.27']I liked the rest of MattD's post, but I'm not sure about this, as so much of sci-fi is about diversity - whether it be humans evolving in different directions ( Reynolds, Hamilton, Gordon Dickson, Frank Herbert) or diversity issues dealt with in terms of alien cultures ( larry Niven & Pournelle, David Brin, Iain Banks, Scott Card). I think the way Sci-fi often deals with race is to take it to a whole other level - post humans or aliens are metaphors for race, surely? about the attempt to understand that which is fundamentally different ( or [i]not[/i] different, as the case may be)? Skin colour becomes a non issue when you're dealing with whether people can live under water or not.[/quote]
I'm not suggesting that a lot of SF isn't "about diversity," rather that a lot of that SF (though by no means all) makes certain assumptions about the value of diversity that should not go unexamined.

The part of my post you quoted took as its starting point a specific type of SF story that depicts an advanced human future in which race doesn't matter. There are plenty of contemporary SF books being published that do exactly this only in the context of humanity, without any sort of alien contact and conflict: Edelman's [i]MultiReal[/i] and Williams' [i]Implied Spaces[/i] are two I've read in just the past few months. Are stories with aliens metaphors for race? Sometimes. But I'd suggest that many of the SF stories in which a united Earth (where the historical aspects of race, and thus elements of culture, no longer matter) must come to an accommodation with an extraterrestrial, alien other [1] are also making the same implicit value statements about diversity as many of the human-only stories -- namely, that progress comes from erasing diversity as much as possible.

There's a certain intuitive appeal to this idea, in the sense that differences can get in the way, but there's also an intuitive appeal to the idea that diversity feeds progress by offering different points of view to help solve problems, that it fuels the arts, that it enriches the individual by asking us to come to terms with the scope of differences people can have. My point is that I don't see a lot of SF that incorporates that latter argument, either to argue for or against it.



[1] Star Trek for example, since it's been mentioned...the solution is almost always to reduce the otherness of the other rather than to transform ourselves or learn to coexist with the other as we find it. We see this with Spock, with 7 of 9, etc. When the Star Trek crew encounters an other whose otherness cannot be reduced, they typically end up needing to be destroyed or shunned.

[Bellis]

I'm going to shout out to Peadar's [i]The Inferior[/i]. Indrani's people are obviously descended from Indians. I wonder whether their vegetarianism ties together with their Hindu cultural heritage somehow. Perhaps Peadar can drop by and comment on whether this was deliberate?

[Happy Ent]

[quote name='MattD' post='1650066' date='Jan 15 2009, 17.25']When the Star Trek crew encounters an other whose otherness cannot be reduced, they typically end up needing to be destroyed or shunned.[/quote]
You forget “talk it into ponder a logical contradiction and self-destruct.”

[needle]

[quote]The part of my post you quoted took as its starting point a specific type of SF story that depicts an advanced human future in which race doesn't matter. There are plenty of contemporary SF books being published that do exactly this only in the context of humanity, without any sort of alien contact and conflict: Edelman's MultiReal and Williams' Implied Spaces are two I've read in just the past few months. Are stories with aliens metaphors for race? Sometimes. But I'd suggest that many of the SF stories in which a united Earth (where the historical aspects of race, and thus elements of culture, no longer matter) must come to an accommodation with an extraterrestrial, alien other [1] are also making the same implicit value statements about diversity as many of the human-only stories -- namely, that progress comes from erasing diversity as much as possible.

There's a certain intuitive appeal to this idea, in the sense that differences can get in the way, but there's also an intuitive appeal to the idea that diversity feeds progress by offering different points of view to help solve problems, that it fuels the arts, that it enriches the individual by asking us to come to terms with the scope of differences people can have. My point is that I don't see a lot of SF that incorporates that latter argument, either to argue for or against it.[/quote]

Unfortunately, I haven't read either Multireal or Implied Space ( any good? I'll maybe try and pick them up if so) but I get where you are coming from, that there's an implied assumption in many books that race will become a non-isssue, and that humankind will become a homeogenised mass - it's an extrapolation from increasing globalisation. I just take issue with the idea that sci-fi as a whole never adresses this though, and that it ignores the question of cultural differences, or implies that the erasure of difference is always a good thing. One of the commonest themes in genre - from Stephenson's The Diamond Age, to Haldeman's the Forever War*, to Reynold's Conjoiners, is examining the dangers of group minds - homoegenisation taken to its extreme, humanity literally becoming one mind, and losing the sense of the 'other'.

Have you read Corwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Man? It's a series of linked short stories set in the far future, and one of the themes is the stultification of the human race brought about by homogeneity, and attempts to redress that by reintroducing the concept of 'nationalities', and 'languages'. It's a bit of a classic, and I think adresses your issue well.

[i]* I think I actually meant The Forever Peace[/i]

[Edda van Heefmstra Ruston]

HE - Interesting. However, I think that 1) there may be a difference in the public's categorization of some of those fantasy movies and 2) there would also be a difference in where the novel is placed.

For example, if you ask people to name a fantasy movie, I think that something like [i]Willow[/i] would come up more often than [i]It's A Wonderful Life[/i], even though both are clearly fantastical.

It's even true in books. Here's what I've seen from the categorization of a single online bookseller (amazon.com): [i]Forrest Gump[/i]'s main category is listed as "Literary" Searching for similar items by Subject gives you the options
"Modern fiction
Fiction
Fiction - General
Fiction / General
General
Literary"

The story upon which "It's a Wonderful Life" is based is considered "Fiction & Literature > General > Classics", or "World Literature > US Literature > General". Its Similar Subjects are
"Classic fiction
Modern fiction
Popular American Fiction
Fiction
Literature - Classics / Criticism
Fiction / General
General
Performing Arts / Film & Video / General
Social Science / Holidays (non-religious)
Classics
Christmas stories"

[i]The Wonderful Wizard of Oz[/i] probably comes closest to actually being recognised as a fantasy book as well as a fantasy movie, even though its primary category is "Children's Books". Its Similar Subjects are
"Classic fiction
[b]Fairy tales, folk tales, fables, magical tales & traditional stories
Fantasy.[/b]
Juvenile Fiction
Children's Books/Ages 9-12 Fiction
Children: Grades 4-6
Classics
Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / General
Juvenile Fiction / Classics
[b]Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Magic
Fantasy
Fantasy fiction[/b]
Children's Fiction"

It highlights to me that there's still (for most people) a difference between "Fantasy" and "things with fantastical elements in them." I have a feeling that you can do the same with books, but unless the definitions used are also widely-held, you're going to get misunderstandings and disagreements when the results come out.

I also just realised that this is a huge WALL-o-TEXT on a tangent, so, sorry guys.

[Zoë Sumra]

[quote name='needle' post='1652374' date='Jan 17 2009, 12.34']I get where you are coming from, that there's an implied assumption in many books that race will become a non-isssue, and that humankind will become a homeogenised mass - it's an extrapolation from increasing globalisation. [b]I just take issue with the idea that sci-fi as a whole never adresses this though[/b], and that it [b]ignores the question of cultural differences[/b], or implies that the erasure of difference is always a good thing.[/quote]
I agree with this, very much so. I'm looking for recs of more books that touch on this, so seeing this thread was great. :)