On racializing the sci-fi genre
On the sci-fi website Infinite Matrix, Pam Noles discusses the lack of ethnic minority representation in speculative fiction. The essay/memoir starts in the basement of Noles’s childhood home, where she watched, ignorant of racial issues, as exclusively white wizards battled dragons and white spacemen explored the cosmos. The essay goes on to chronicle her discovery of a groundbreaking sci-fi novel, Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which was one of the first books in the genre to feature non-white protagonists; the subsequent whitewashed television adaptation of the Earthsea series; and the lack of coverage of this whitewashing in the genre’s news outlets. The issue was eventually discussed by LeGuin herself on Slate, and only then did it receive ink in sci-fi news outlets. With the increasing acknowledgment in pop culture — and sci-fi books — of ethnic minorities, asks Noles, why is the sci-fi contingent of Hollywood so slow on the uptake of non-white characters?
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Click here for Pam Noles’s piece
