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posted by cmn32480 on Friday August 12 2016, @09:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-how-do-you-fix-it dept.

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."


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 14 2016, @04:18AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 14 2016, @04:18AM (#387731) Journal

    Yeah, those were the search terms - "andre norton biography". I plugged a few other authors in, and got some minor surprises - I leave it to you to find your own surprises if you care to.

    All the authors, however, are human. I did not uncover any artificial intelligences writing top selling science fiction.

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