Coloring my SF
Mar. 26th, 2012 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltdA criticism leveled at me for the last couple books was that my casts are pretty monochrome. It couldn't be helped for the first chapters of one book (all we see is a dad and his 6 kids, and a long-dead Puritan from New England). And this was very white for Memphis, which is more than half black. The cast grew more colorful as the story progressed.
But it reflects how I see Memphis. Real people--my immediate family, close friends I see regularly--are white. Moving wallpaper--everyone else from doctors to clerks to people on the street--comes in a variety of shades.
Now, my cyberpunk world is "too Anglo." Except it's totally not. Only one character out of the 8 being criticized is actually Anglo. Two are Israeli and the other 5 are Celts. True, everyone's WHITE, but not Anglo. It's the wallpaper problem again. The wallpaper of the world is colorful: Thai streetwalkers, black bounty hunters, Asian shoppers, a little bit of everything. Rodriguez, Martinez, Nakumura, all on the strike team later in the book, but still wallpaper.
My hero is an O'Neill. Nick muses are always of Irish descent. Never actually born and bred, but always American Irish of some sort, whether 2 generations (like Henry in Sky-Rat) or so far from Ireland that all they have left is the name and the Catholicism (as Sean does).
Tara McLean is Irishgirl in the net. She's much closer to her ethnicity and faith than Sean ever was. Tanis incarnations tend to do that. I do not have time to write her as a pretty Hispanic girl, all big liquid eyes and long dark hair, because it would mean totally rewriting a several chapter action scene.
My thought was when told "It's all white, why?" was to say "It's the future, DUH!" But that's a nasty racist comment and I know it. It's the same problem I have in the Cliff Cody universe. It's all white because in my world people of color (and most whites) are moving scenery. And that will not fly as a good reason.
Then I remembered The Resource Wars that are vaguely alluded to a few times. Corporations won them, with their arcologies and private armies. The Nation-State is pretty much a thing of the past, existing to serve the various corporations that choose to headquarter within its boundaries. I expect mostly American and European corporations, with some Asian and Indian, a very few South American and African corps, came out well. And the heads of the corporations could decide who got to live in their arcologies. So I'm thinking yeah, we could be doing a fairly pale future in some regions.
But I made an effort to get Characters of Color into roles where there was no particular necessity for the character to be white.
Jessica Harveld no longer looks like this:
but is a cyborg, all chrome where she's not deep brown. Her clothing is still abnormally clean and white (ionized repelfabric is a great thing, keeps off dirt, food, blood, mud and other messes) for her environment.
Where was I going with that? I'm not sure. Lunch and life intervened. I'm skittish about writing characters of color and terrified of not writing them. It's one thing to have 2 characters locked in their room, staring into each other's eyes, there you can make them both white, both black, one of each, or anything else you fancy... (no, bad slash goggles, there will be NO, repeat NO green Martian smut or red Martian smut, and especially no mixing of the two)
But get them out of the room and they need more color in the wall paper of their world.
But it reflects how I see Memphis. Real people--my immediate family, close friends I see regularly--are white. Moving wallpaper--everyone else from doctors to clerks to people on the street--comes in a variety of shades.
Now, my cyberpunk world is "too Anglo." Except it's totally not. Only one character out of the 8 being criticized is actually Anglo. Two are Israeli and the other 5 are Celts. True, everyone's WHITE, but not Anglo. It's the wallpaper problem again. The wallpaper of the world is colorful: Thai streetwalkers, black bounty hunters, Asian shoppers, a little bit of everything. Rodriguez, Martinez, Nakumura, all on the strike team later in the book, but still wallpaper.
My hero is an O'Neill. Nick muses are always of Irish descent. Never actually born and bred, but always American Irish of some sort, whether 2 generations (like Henry in Sky-Rat) or so far from Ireland that all they have left is the name and the Catholicism (as Sean does).
Tara McLean is Irishgirl in the net. She's much closer to her ethnicity and faith than Sean ever was. Tanis incarnations tend to do that. I do not have time to write her as a pretty Hispanic girl, all big liquid eyes and long dark hair, because it would mean totally rewriting a several chapter action scene.
My thought was when told "It's all white, why?" was to say "It's the future, DUH!" But that's a nasty racist comment and I know it. It's the same problem I have in the Cliff Cody universe. It's all white because in my world people of color (and most whites) are moving scenery. And that will not fly as a good reason.
Then I remembered The Resource Wars that are vaguely alluded to a few times. Corporations won them, with their arcologies and private armies. The Nation-State is pretty much a thing of the past, existing to serve the various corporations that choose to headquarter within its boundaries. I expect mostly American and European corporations, with some Asian and Indian, a very few South American and African corps, came out well. And the heads of the corporations could decide who got to live in their arcologies. So I'm thinking yeah, we could be doing a fairly pale future in some regions.
But I made an effort to get Characters of Color into roles where there was no particular necessity for the character to be white.
Jessica Harveld no longer looks like this:
but is a cyborg, all chrome where she's not deep brown. Her clothing is still abnormally clean and white (ionized repelfabric is a great thing, keeps off dirt, food, blood, mud and other messes) for her environment.
Where was I going with that? I'm not sure. Lunch and life intervened. I'm skittish about writing characters of color and terrified of not writing them. It's one thing to have 2 characters locked in their room, staring into each other's eyes, there you can make them both white, both black, one of each, or anything else you fancy... (no, bad slash goggles, there will be NO, repeat NO green Martian smut or red Martian smut, and especially no mixing of the two)
But get them out of the room and they need more color in the wall paper of their world.
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-27 02:48 am (UTC)In my Through Neon Eyes series both main characters are white but there are people of color on stage in main roles. The Director of Research is Carlos Perez, who is also an antagonist. His bodyguard is Mae, a woman of Japanese origin.
They behave, not as a Hispanic man or Japanese woman of the 21st Century, but as people in their respective roles within the corporation behave.
When dealing with the present, or the past, then you have to put more attention into the cultural/racial characterization. The time-frame dictates the cultural and racial identity of your characters and how other people interact with and perceive them.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-29 06:24 pm (UTC)Memphis is more than half black. Yet every native Memphian in my story is white. The city is quite segregated.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-29 09:03 pm (UTC)I'm doing research for an m/f set in the 1960s with a white hero and black heroine, and I'm doing a black hero/white heroine holiday story. Both of these will probably wind up with strong paranormal elements because I don't really enjoy writing straight up contemporary. Then there's the fact my usual readers don't seem to like them.
My scifi m/m/m, 'By the Sword' has one anglo, one Chinese and one Japanese bred battlepet human/snow leopard cross. It's one of the stories I'm most happy with as far as racial diversity goes.
Edited to add: You know this conversation has me thinking about adding some new characters to the Midnight Rain book. When Auburnimp and I wrote it most of the key characters in the first one were Japanese. I think I should diversify and get some other races on stage for the second book.
The D-Man Checks In
Date: 2012-03-29 11:54 am (UTC)Dare I say... Kinshassa? Hmmm. Congolese, as I recall? Definitely Black. Good, strong scene too where he & Sean meet up.
Dare I say... A fair chunk of the duty roster of that EIT strike team later in the book? Latino, Asian, Black, and Jewish there, mixed in with the Whites. Not too many White folk with names like: Ortega, Nakamura, or Crow... and Goldberg all but screams Jewish.
Dare I say... Gemini? Israeli Arabs, as I recall? Bronze-skinned. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Probably not White guys.
Dare I say... Tatsuhari, or whatever that name is of the major Asian corporate giant that rivals LedaCorp, Broine Enterprises, and EIT? Definitely not probably run by a White guy.
We had a German mugger.
Nice to see a White guy stuck as a petty criminal for a change, as that's usually a role given to the Blacks or Latinos.
We had a Korean shopkeeper, but you nix'ed him from the street run.
Nonetheless, I feel the color mix of this story and the world it shows us is appropriate. Nothing says Whites will still not be the dominate majority in North American & all across Europe & Russia in the future, putting all other races still in the minority column... which means (still) not seen everywhere.
Granted most of the major characters are not from a minority race, but hey... We really only got 6-7 to work with. Of that number, 2 are Isreali Arabs. 2 out of 6-7 is still not a majority, granted, but it's a good percentage nonetheless.
I think we are doing better here than usual here for race depictions.
Re: The D-Man Checks In
Date: 2012-03-29 06:23 pm (UTC)We have a mention, a 3 page scene, wallpaper goons, and a mention.
And Gemini are ethnic white. Like Greeks or Slavs or Spaniards. Or maybe it's growing up with stepsisters of that shade, who definitely did NOT identify as women of color--they were WHITE and NOT subject to the still-lingering remnants of Jim Crow in the 70s--that makes me think this.
I haven't written a main character of color since Chuck Hummingbird in GLAD HANDS. (Adlai Goodman in Privateer Plundered doesn't count yet, it's not published)