Khasm13 : Beyond ‘Game of Thrones’: Exploring diversity in speculative fiction

Khasm13

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Mar 26, 2003
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for my sci fi heads....


Last August, Weird Tales magazine, long a fixture on the speculative fiction landscape, got hit with a heavy dose of online fury.
The publication had made plans to publish an excerpt from an ecologically themed dystopian novel in which whites are the oppressed minority and their oppressors are referred to as “coals.”
Those who attacked the work were upset by a number of elements seen as racially problematic, up to and including the title, “Saving the Pearls,’’ “pearls” being the book’s term for white people and a word read as charged with an altogether different tenor than the notion of “coals.” In response to the outcry, the magazine pulled the excerpt.
Online protests and allegations of racial weirdness in science fiction and fantasy are hardly new, but they began to seriously come to a head with the still contentious Internet debate dubbed “Race Fail 2009,” sparked when authors and readers clashed over ideas about culturally insensitive depictions in fantastic literature.
That conversation has helped galvanize writers and fans of color in the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) community; their voices could be heard loudly in the swirl of protest over the Weird Tales excerpt.
For many, one larger objective is pushing back against the notion that readers of color don’t read SFF. “I think the effect is forcing editors, publishers and marketers to reassess their assumptions as to what is acceptable and what will be noticed,” said K. Tempest Bradford, a writer and critic who serves on the board of the Carl Brandon Society, an organization devoted to exploring race and ethnicity in speculative fiction.

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/book...xploring-diversity-in-speculative-fiction/#/0
 
i don't even watch tv...but i occasionally browse the tv shows on netflix and amazon....
going through the sci-fi genre i searched for one show out of about 300 titles that had a black person in a leading role...alas, there was none...just white males with "powers" or "special insight" or blah blah blah....
it's depressing...

there were a couple black side kicks though...:puke:

one love
khasm
 

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