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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: 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