Dear SF Signal Readers,
Hi! My name’s Zack Jernigan. I conducted this roundtable interview over the last year. Just so you know, I wrote a long, painfully self-conscious introduction about my upbringing as a white, heterosexual male born into a middle-middle-class family and how that contributed to my desire to start a discussion on the subject of Writing About Race in Sff Literature, but I scrapped it. When you’ve received such amazing responses from your interviewees, it’s best to get to them with the minimum of words.
So: Suffice it to say, this is an important topic for discussion. I hope that you enjoy reading this first part, that you’ll return for the second, and that you’ll feel free to comment. I also encourage you to visit the authors’ websites and buy their amazing work.
And enjoy!
Personal point of reference on a limitation of mimetic fiction… My first two novels were mainstream works about African-American history. Readers that picked up those books did so because they wanted to read about race and slavery. They went in knowing the material would be difficult, and most of them probably believed that ruminating about our racial history is relevant for modern day. That’s great, but it means a limited readership. What about reaching more folks-including folks that don’t think they’d be interested in reading about race?
Fantasy certainly reaches a wide audience. It speaks to people precisely because it takes us out of our “mundane” world. I discovered fantasy like most everyone else my age or older-through Tolkien. As a kid, I happily escaped into a magical European past, despite the fact that I read The Hobbit while visiting my father in Trinidad. I sat in the shade of our back porch, smack dab on the equator, brown-skinned people all around, with views of palm trees and lizards and buzzards flying over hills lit up by wildfires. Not exactly Middle Earth. The excitement of Tolkien’s imaginative storytelling drew me in, and I was perfectly happy to read about a world that didn’t include anybody that looked like me. Shouldn’t the same possibility apply for anyone? And shouldn’t that mean that readers engage with non-European settings with the same enthusiasm?
One would hope so, but…
Especially in the epic fantasy side of the genre, nostalgia for a fantastical Europe is alive and kicking. We live in a world that is, in actual fact, majority brown, with myriad shades to either side and tons of problems because of it. But a lot fantasy imagines worlds that largely eliminate non-white cultures. For many fantasy readers that’s a part of what defines the genre as fantasy. I’ve heard people say that they read fantasy precisely to float off to Old Europe. What’s wrong with that? It’s just fun, right?
Fair enough, but part of why it’s fun must include the fact that those settings can be free of the myriad of thorny, aggravating problems we face along racial lines in the real world. So perhaps fantasy has Europe in its DNA, and the effort to complicate that by including variety inspired by the rest of the world is doomed to failure?
Maybe, but two things strike me as having great potential for including race in fantasy. One is that so much awesomeness is to be found in hanging out with folks not like you. What I remember from reading mainstream world literature in college was how exciting it was to get bombarded by different perspectives, and by the storytelling verve coming out of different traditions. Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe: writers from these places smacked me upside the head with all sorts of new ideas. I loved them for it. It was good for me, and it was terrific fun. What could be more interesting than adding magic to those myriad worldviews, throwing in a few weird creatures, and seeing what happens?
On the other hand, fantasy allows writers to create cultures inspired by our world but not constrained by our particular social history. Preconceptions are trickier to hold to. Sides aren’t inherited by blood. Guilt or shame aren’t inherently a factor. Fantasy can allow readers to engage with imagined “others” in ways that just might help them to see real world others in a different light as well.
At least, I hope that’s the case.
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