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The Guardian reports on a new study which has found that
The world of speculative fiction publishing is plagued by "structural, institutional, personal, universal" racism, according to a new report that found less than 2% of more than 2,000 SF stories published last year were by black writers.
The report, published by the magazine Fireside Fiction, states that just 38 of the 2,039 stories published in 63 magazines in 2015 were by black writers. With the bulk of the industry based in the US, more than half of all speculative fiction publications the report considered did not publish a single original story by a black author. "The probability that it is random chance that only 1.96% of published writers are black in a country where 13.2% of the population is black is 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000321%," says the report.
The editor of Fireside Fiction goes on to say...
"Fiction, we have a problem. We all know this. We do. We don't need numbers to see that, like everywhere in our society, marginalisation of black people is still a huge problem in publishing ... The entire system is built to benefit whiteness – and to ignore that is to bury your head in the flaming garbage heap of history."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Friday August 12 2016, @09:33PM
What color is Alastair Reynolds? Kevin J Anderson? Blake Crouch? Peter Hamilton? Don't know, don't care. Write a good story and I'll read it, I don't care what color you are.
Some 20 years ago I read a story by John Barnes. About halfway through it the author made clear the protagonist was black. On the cover he was white. That turned into a real WTF moment when I found out Barnes himself was black. If I was Mr Barnes I'd be pretty pissed off at someone.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @09:37PM
If only there were some kind of tradition of including photographs of authors on dust jackets. Won't someone please think of the racists who need to know which books not to read.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday August 12 2016, @10:06PM
I don't recall seeing pictures of any of the authors I mentioned. Books with the author plastered on the back tend to have titles like A is for Asshole, and The Jailhouse Lawyer. Mass market crap I don't waste time reading.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday August 13 2016, @03:36PM
You very obviously have read very few hardcover books, then. Books with sleeve wraps almost always have a photo of the author.
As to "is science fiction racist", nearly all of America was racist in 1956, when Future Science Fiction published Fred Pohl's Day of the Boomer Dukes. [mcgrewbooks.com] It takes place in Harlem and concerns a Mexican gang, a black gang, a black cop, a white reporter, and time travelers from thousands of years in the future, one of whom is a black woman (Pohl did an excellent job of dialect in that story).
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 13 2016, @02:06AM
In my experience, that "tradition" only applies to well established authors. Isaac Asimov's photo appears on a hell of a lot of books - after he was established as a master in the field. His photo sold books, because he was well known. When he first started writing, his photo meant nothing to anyone - his stories had to be good stories, or no one would read them. If his first story or six sucked, no one would have gone back to read stories seven through ten.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 12 2016, @11:54PM
About halfway through it the author made clear the protagonist was black. On the cover he was white. That turned into a real WTF moment
Was the pix from a movie?
"The Martian" in book form did some good although maybe a little stereotypical character development with a village people cast (in that casting the village people didn't help tell the story, although it was very SJW to make extremely certain everyone in the book was non-white). It was, aside from that, a good book and I enjoyed it.
The movie took the village people theme and re-rolled the dice and everyone asian suddenly became black and everyone black became white.
Admittedly I haven't bothered watching the movie yet (my experience is if I like a book, the movie will suck)
Anyway my ramble means maybe the author had nothing to do with it, PR just took stills from the movie and slapped them on the cover. So in the book, Picard was an old white male, and in the new movie she's a lesbian black woman (of course...), and when the new edition of the book comes out with the movie captain on the cover, its going to confuse the hell out of people.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday August 13 2016, @01:49AM
The Martian was an OK movie, nowhere near as good as the book. The book is prolly one of the best 3 books I've read in my life (yeah, including the Hobbit and LoTR trilogy). Seriously, if you haven't read The Martian yet, and you enjoy reading, read this book. The movie is skippable.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday August 13 2016, @02:06AM
Realized I didn't answer your question. AFAIK the book I was talking about was never made into a movie. It was written maybe 30 years ago, the protagonist was good at martial arts. Outside of the book said he was black, the cover said he was white, and the author turned out to be black, that's all I remember of the book. If I saw the cover I'd remember it and, nope, google/wikipedia give lots of dead links, warnings about going to bad sites, and no pictures of book covers.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday August 13 2016, @03:29PM
No, actually it was a very good movie. It's just that the book was so damned GOOD. I wish I'd seen the movie first, but I'd read the book when it was first published.
Interestingly, Mr. Wier couldn't get a publisher, or even an agent! After trying to get it traditionally published for a year he put it on Amazon as a $2 e-book, where it shot to the top of their best-seller list. When that happened, the publisher went to HIM and offered a six figure advance.
And a couple of years later the movie studio hired the wrong scriptwriter and the wrong director; there was as much hilarity in the book as seriousness, while the movie had very little humor at all. But what would you expect from the guy who made Blade Runner?
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @11:58PM
If you are reading Kevin J Anderson after he parasitized Dune ...
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday August 13 2016, @01:46AM
Kevin's original stuff is good. Haven't bothered reading his Superman stuff.
Hmm, according to Wikipedia Kev is:
A) White
B) I've only read his 7 suns series, everything else he wrote is the kind of stuff I avoid.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.