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.
