D. Thomas Minton

This week, I’ve been thinking about the importance of diversity in science fiction and why science fiction needs to embrace diversity as a genre.  That got me wondering:  How much my fiction actually includes diverse characters and cultures?  So, I decided to go back through my stories and do some analysis. 

This isn’t a scientific assessment by any reach.  There’s a lot of subjectivity, but here’s what I did.  For each of my published or forthcoming stories (21 in total), I identified the gender, age, race, and socio-economic class of my protagonist, antagonist, and the significant supporting characters.  I selected one character to be the protagonist.  Not every story had an antagonist per se, but I tried to pick the one character who best filled that role.  I included only supporting characters that I felt played an important role in the story.  Defining a character’s the gender, age, race, and socio-economic class also wasn’t always easy.  For many characters it wasn’t defined or easily inferred from the text, so I designated these characters as “undefined.”

Gender: I was actually surprised to see that over 86% of my protagonists were male.  I’ve always thought that I wrote more women protagonist, but I the data don’t lie.  What I find interesting is that the percentage of woman as antagonist and support roles increases to 31%.  I’m not really sure what to make of this, except to say that I probably should have more women in my stories in general.  Finally, I had an “other” category, which included non-human characters.  I don’t tend to include many non-humans in my stories, but when I do, they are often the bad guys, it would appear.

Age:  I divide ages up into somewhat arbitrary categories, but they illustrate what I want.  I actually had a fairly good spread of ages in all my categories with only children being under-represented.  This isn’t too surprising, because I don’t tend to juvenile or young adult stories.  I’m surprised that more children didn’t show up as supporting characters.  I assume this is an artifact of what I considered a significant supporting character, because children often play a key role in the motivation of my main characters.  I had more elderly characters that I would have thought.  The final category, which made up a surprising number of my antagonist (18%) included characters that either had no easily defined age or were ageless.

 Race:  I was pleasantly surprised to find so many races represented in my stories.  I’m not sure if I actually managed to accurately capture the individual cultures, but I hope I did.  The majority of my characters were still Caucasian, but groups like Pacific Islanders made up a significant percentage of my protagonists.  I’m pleased to see that my antagonists did not have a significantly different racial distribution.

Socio-economic Class:  I don’t tend to write about rich people or the “ruling” class and that’s borne out in the data.  Nearly 87% of my protagonists fall in the middle or working class.  This pattern is also held (more or less) for my antagonists and supporting characters.

 So to sum things up, adult, white males comprised about 64% of my protagonists.  This is higher than I expected, and it’s also considerable greater than the percentage of adult, white, male antagonists (31%) and supporting characters (44%).  This analysis was eye-opening for me, and shows that I could do better bringing more character diversity into my stories, especially for my protagonists.

A few days ago, I wrote a post about diversity in science fiction—or more accurately the lack of it.  I realized after writing it that I simply accepted the premise that diversity is a good thing.  To be honest, I’ve never questioned this base assumption.  Yet, as a scientist, I’ve been trained to question everything, especially basic assumptions in an argument, because if these prove false, then every part of the argument built upon that foundation is potentially flawed.

Now before anyone gets bent out of shape, I think diversity in science fiction is desirable and important.  Not even considering the usual “politically correct” arguments, I think diversity is good for the science fiction because it will make the genre more vital and improve its survival prospects.  I see diversity in science fiction in the same way as I see genetic diversity in a plant or animal population.  In biology, high genetic diversity is usually associated with a decreased likelihood of extinction; genetic diversity gives a population the raw material needed for it to adapt to a changing environment.  For science fiction, the more diverse the people reading and writing it, the more likely it is to maintain its relevance in the face of a changing literary, social, and economic landscape.

Currently, there’s the perception that science fiction is a dying genre.  My Hopefull Monsters writing group has had numerous discussion about how many of the “big” magazines seem to be stagnant with the type of stories they publish.  This stagnation is likely the result of not enough diversity in writers and readers in the field.  After all, these publications must sell copies to stay alive, and probably can’t frequently forge into new territory without considerable risk, but that’s where I think smaller “indie” magazines can, and to some extent do, fill an important void.  I think expanding the diversity within the genre is crucial to keeping science fiction vigorous and relevant into the coming decades.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about diversity in science fiction (and I define this narrowly, meaning English-language science fiction).  This tends to be a touchy topic in many quarters, and for a while, I thought about not writing anything here.  I decided I wanted to post something, however, because I think it’s an important topic.  I’ll be up front with two things: (1) I don’t have the answers, just some opinions, and we all know what opinions are worth; and (2) while I’m certainly open to discussing the topic, I won’t let comments degenerate into ugliness (it’s my site; if you can’t respect that, stop reading and go post on your own site).

Right or wrong, science fiction has long been considered a field lacking diversity: middle-aged white guys writing about other white guys (I can say this, right, because I’m a middle-aged, white guy?).  While I believe the genre has become more inclusive over the past 20-30 years, I still think this is a fairly accurate assessment.  How many minority science fiction writers can the average reader name?  Probably not more than small handful (and likely several of them are no longer writing or even alive).  What about woman, science fiction writers?  Here they can probably do better—I know I can.  Minority, women science fiction writers?  Probably shouldn’t even try going there.

I’m sure there are many learned articles by smarter people than me examining the reasons behind this, but I haven’t read them.  I’m also sure this is a more complex issue than I imagine, encompassing aspects of socio-economics, culture and lifestyle that are beyond my learning.  That said, I’m going to make a simple observation: it seems to me that people who write science fiction, grew up reading it.  Those who didn’t read it, don’t tend to write it.  So perhaps that’s were the key lies?  Maybe the lack of diversity in the genre is a self-perpetuating artifact of the original writers, who tended to be middle-aged, white guys writing primarily for white, male audiences.

I read science fiction as kid because something about it spoke to me.  Was it the white protagonists?  I’m not sure that’s it, but I suspect having characters and cultures to which I could easily relate helped (I recall once struggle to read a fantasy novel set in a “fantasized” middle Eastern culture, but in hindsight, I’m not sure if it was the different culture or the book’s poor writing that challenged me).  I wonder if having a greater diversity of characters and settings in science fiction would attract a more diverse readership, eventually resulting in more woman and minority writers down the line. 

Assuming this thesis is true, then we potentially have a chicken-and-egg problem: if the field lacks diversity in its writers, who writes the stories with diverse characters and cultures that will attracted diverse readers?  I know some people would disagree, but I think a lot of fine writers can write convincingly about different people and cultures.  (Of course, this is no substitute for people of diverse cultures writing about their culture.)  Science fiction writers need to embrace the diversity out there, do their home work, and most importantly not be afraid to write stories outside their cultural comfort zone.  This is no small challenge, given the perception by some that only minorities can understand and write about the minority condition (I don’t necessarily subscribe to this line of thinking).  This might be the only way to break the cycle and ultimately bring more diversity to the genre.  Like diversity in nature, diversity in science fiction would be a good thing, and it may help increase the genre’s vitality and readership.