As for the books... I'll be the first to admit that fantasy fiction has, from its earliest beginnings, been plagued with Eurocentric doggerel and that the vast majority of the genre ranges from exclusionary (pretty much the entirety of Arthurian fiction, for example) to outright racist (the human allies of Mordor from the eastern and southern lands in Tolkien's Middle Earth). The main reason I don't read more fantasy is that so much of it is formulaic and just plain bad writing, though the field's tendencies towards continuing the traditions of sexism, racism, and imperialism being portrayed as okay certainly don't endear fantasy fiction to me either. That said, there are a fair number of good novels which fall under the category of fantasy and which I think you would enjoy reading: the Neveryon series and They Fly at Ciron by Samuel R. Delany, The Grey Mane of Morning by Joy Chant (long out of print but worth tracking down a copy of), and Sword of the Demon by Richard Lupoff (features a fantasy setting based on Japanese rather than European folklore and mythology). Those are off the top of my head (except for having to look up the author of Sword of the Demon, which I last read nearly fifteen years ago), but if you like I can provide you an expanded list.
For science fiction that meets the same criteria, I can produce a longer list just as readily: Jerusalem Fire by Rebecca ("R.M.") Meluch posits a future where racial mixing has led to an almost universally brown- or tan-skinned world population and a "white" man is a curiosity; Moving Mars by Greg Bear pulls off the double feat of a believable female protagonist written by a male author and a believable non-white protagonist written by a white author in addition to just being well-written; Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge features a multicultural cast whose ethnicities are more than simply masks over cardboard cut-out characters, and while Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep features few human characters in comparison to its cast of various and varied aliens one of the humans -- singled out specifically as a representative of the species -- is a mixed-race man with an Asian name; Up the Walls of the World by James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) took on the issue of the African tradition of so-called female circumcision four years before The Color Purple was published; Spider Robinson's early novel Telempath features an African-American protagonist and explores the fallout of a spectacularly bad solution to societal ills; Four Ways To Forgiveness by (of course I had to come back to her) Ursula le Guin looks at the intersection and interactions of skin colour, culture, religion/spirituality, slavery, and imperialist social policies, but delves into yet more themes without bogging down in its own postulations; and The Telling, also by le Guin, is stellar even among the author's other masterpieces, looking at cultural identity through the double lens of an Indian- (subcontinent) descended Earth woman whose lesbian relationship with an ethnic Chinese woman led in part to her feeling disconnected from her own heritage, and a planet on which, not unlike Chinese-occupied Tibet, rulers of a modernising, urban-based empire have outlawed and tried to eradicate traditional spriritual beliefs and language which people in highlands far from the cities continue to preserve as much as they can. Again, I could go on, but that actually is an off-the-top-of-my-head listing.
And I know that, should you want to discuss most (some of them are obscure even within their genre) of these books with like-minded people, such people do exist within speculative fiction fandom, and easily outnumber cretins like redhawk.
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timeasmymeasure
part 2: the books
Date: 2004-12-20 07:53 am (UTC)For science fiction that meets the same criteria, I can produce a longer list just as readily: Jerusalem Fire by Rebecca ("R.M.") Meluch posits a future where racial mixing has led to an almost universally brown- or tan-skinned world population and a "white" man is a curiosity; Moving Mars by Greg Bear pulls off the double feat of a believable female protagonist written by a male author and a believable non-white protagonist written by a white author in addition to just being well-written; Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge features a multicultural cast whose ethnicities are more than simply masks over cardboard cut-out characters, and while Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep features few human characters in comparison to its cast of various and varied aliens one of the humans -- singled out specifically as a representative of the species -- is a mixed-race man with an Asian name; Up the Walls of the World by James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) took on the issue of the African tradition of so-called female circumcision four years before The Color Purple was published; Spider Robinson's early novel Telempath features an African-American protagonist and explores the fallout of a spectacularly bad solution to societal ills; Four Ways To Forgiveness by (of course I had to come back to her) Ursula le Guin looks at the intersection and interactions of skin colour, culture, religion/spirituality, slavery, and imperialist social policies, but delves into yet more themes without bogging down in its own postulations; and The Telling, also by le Guin, is stellar even among the author's other masterpieces, looking at cultural identity through the double lens of an Indian- (subcontinent) descended Earth woman whose lesbian relationship with an ethnic Chinese woman led in part to her feeling disconnected from her own heritage, and a planet on which, not unlike Chinese-occupied Tibet, rulers of a modernising, urban-based empire have outlawed and tried to eradicate traditional spriritual beliefs and language which people in highlands far from the cities continue to preserve as much as they can. Again, I could go on, but that actually is an off-the-top-of-my-head listing.
And I know that, should you want to discuss most (some of them are obscure even within their genre) of these books with like-minded people, such people do exist within speculative fiction fandom, and easily outnumber cretins like redhawk.