I didn't know this was even happening until a friend posted a link today to this article by Nalo Hopkinson on race and gender in SF, and I started following up. And then I found this community on LiveJournal. So yeah. May 18th, 2009. A day to sit back and ask, why is the future so full of white guys?
Look at the new Star Trek film, even. Sure, they didn't want to go switching up such well-loved characters (as the writers at Battlestar Galactica did when they made Starbuck a woman) so maybe they're bound by the old casting. But the fact remains that the bridge crew still only has one Asian, and one black, member. And Sulu's played by a Chinese guy, and Uhura's still the Intergalactic Receptionist (thanks to Nalo for that phrase.)
It's true, isn't it? The future's full of white people. Maybe not as much as it used to be, but still, you read science fiction and you'd be forgiven for assuming that at some point a global catastrophe struck 85% of the planet, wiping out all but Europe, because there are all those blond, blue-eyed spacefarers in their shiny ships. And not only that, but they all interact with the world through a pretty white, Western, Judeo-Christian lens, don't they?
There are exceptions. William Gibson's Rastafarian orbital colony in Neuromancer was a nice touch, gave a minority group a place offworld. I like that everyone swears in Chinese on Firefly, and that when I was but a wee RPG player, the games Cyberpunk: 2020 and Shadowrun both incorporated a street argot cobbled together out of Japanese, Spanish, Russian and Swahili. (Yeah, at the time, we all thought we'd all need to speak Japanese in twenty years...) If you want to include fantasy in this discussion (and I do) then there's an interesting case in Neil Gaiman's book Anansi Boys, one of the first I've ever read in which the only time a person's skin colour was mentioned was when they were white... because otherwise all the characters were black. And British.
SF, for me, is not about the future, but it's so often set in the future that it's hard not to think in those terms. Even if it's not, if, as in so many of Ursula Le Guin's books, the story happens somewhere among people who are furry, or hermaphroditic, or otherwise not bound by human biology and ideas about human biology - even then, we tend to think about it as happening in a time with roots in our own.
I wrote science fiction as a kid, and having read so damn much Le Guin, I found I kept reminding myself about this sort of thing as I wrote. All people are not blond like me, English-speaking like me, all people don't have my experience or background. It's the same for all fiction, but in SF, because it is thought to predict the future, it matters more.
Sure, my main character in these stories could be blond and blue-eyed, could be a girl just like me from the eastern side of Canada if I really wanted (and probably should be - I don't feel qualified to adopt the voice of, say, someone from Uzbekistan), but I kept remembering, each time I came up with a new character and described her, that, for one thing, by the time we humans actually make our way out into the universe and start colonizing other planets (if we ever do), we will not be blond. The vast majority of people on this planet are not. By the time we go out there, I hope, we'll all be kinda brown. With epicanthic eyes, and probably spirally-curly black or brown hair. Genetics says, brown eyes trump blue, dark skin trumps pale. Usually. Maybe there will be the occasional throwback, who'll look like me, and be really weird.
I also had to remember that it's far too easy - too knee-jerk - to associate physical traits with character traits. Isn't the evil emperor usually black-haired, bearded, saturnine? Isn't the big guy usually stupid, for that matter, and the small guy brainy but weak? Orcs have black skin, elves are fair. (Even the more heroic and handsome hobbits are lighter-skinned, and taller, than the rest.) What do Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Starbuck (the original), Captain Kirk, and Luke Skywalker all have in common? Look at Klingons. Even the original ones that didn't have all the bony forehead stuff going on. They were a pretty swarthy bunch, weren't they?
So I'd stop, and catch myself decribing something with that received-knowledge viewpoint - that I had to describe those characters that don't look like me, but not the ones that do. And that certain descriptions can be taken as shorthand for personality traits.
I still do stop and rethink: I recently revived one of those high-school SF plotlines to go back and visit, and play. And I discovered that the universe I was creating is still a pretty diverse place, and the humans are still mostly brown, and they're are still about 50% female, like always, and the tough girls still like to cuddle sometimes, and the big guys don't have to be dumb, and if there's an enemy, it's not because they're 'just evil', and planets don't have only one culture/language/climate, and there is still stupidity and prejudice and selfishness (because if there wasn't, what kind of story would there be?) and in a thousand years, or a few hundred, no one will be speaking English in any form we'd recognize (so don't get comfortable, fellow English-speakers), and out among the stars we'll have to count time in something other than years .... and it's a whole lot of work to stop and remember all that, while I'm really just trying to have fun playing around with my SF space-opera.
But Le Guin and my parents told me: SF is the absolute last place you should fall back on those insidious assumptions that have become part of the genre by accident or through laziness and old habit... Because what SF is talking about is what it's like to be human, and being human is a whole hell of a lot broader than being young, thin, fit, straight, male, Christian and white.
