Science fiction enthusiasts dressed as characters from Star Trek, pose for a photograph outside the twelfth annual Sci-Fi London festival in East London on April 28, 2013. Science fiction and fantasy have traditionally underrepresented minorities and other marginalized populations. (Reuters/Suzanne Plunkett)
Last week, the #DiversityinSFF hashtag gained momentum on Twitter and spawned a necessary conversation both on Twitter and beyond about race, gender, sexuality and class—or, more succinctly put, difference—in the literature the Science Fiction & Fantasy (SFF) community produces. Scrutiny was also applied to the literary gatekeepers of that community, as it should be applied to all literary communities.
At The Guardian, David Barnett offers solid insight into the conversation and the climate that served as catalyst. Jim C. Hines, who coined the hashtag, offers a round up of related responses. Most notably, Tor added an explicit diversity statement to their submission guidelines. Such gestures are an excellent start.
As is always the case during such conversation, there have been precious, panicked pleas to avoid quotas and to remember the importance of quality, as if a demand for diversity is synonymous with a higher tolerance for mediocrity. These pleas arise any time the marginalized demand to be heard and those making their needless pleas realize the status quo is about to change.
The conversation about diversity in SFF is also striking because it reveals how discrimination and its deeply embedded cultural effects are so pernicious that even imagination, the very thing that should transcend the world we live in, is constrained. Some writers suggest that they simply don’t know how to write diversity into their novels but have no problem creating elaborate worlds set in alternative times and realms, populated by beings human and otherwise.
What does it say about writers that it is easier to imagine creating an alien species and alien worlds than it is to create a non-white and/or heterosexual and/or male and/or differently abled and/or working-class humanoid character in a non-Western setting? We see such reticence to approach difference in fiction, across genres and it is, in part, understandable but it is also a bit offensive, this notion that underrepresented people are so different and mysterious, so far from the dominant understanding of normal, we dare not even try to write their experiences.