🦋 Butterfly in the Sky ... as Long as You Are the "Right" Color
What fights about purity in fantasy and science fiction tell us about America
Why do people only care about realism in fantasy when it comes to people of color?
The vast majority of the popular works of science fiction and fantasy include characters who are white, and inspired by topics and locations that are western, medieval European or classical Greece in character. Newer works carry over these themes, but include main characters who are blue aliens, courageous hairballs, or mermaids.
Very few center on characters that resemble the United States today. As a fan of science fiction, I grew up reading about and always imagining the characters in these books as white. For most of my life, science fiction was a story I read about “others”, not one I ever read about myself, and certainly never a story I could relate to at a fundamental level.
To overcome this gap in representation, a new generation of science fiction and fantasy writers, many of them of color, have started writing stories about or inspired by diverse characters.
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