The Sword and Laser discussion

I can't remember if I already posted about this, but a quick search of the forums points to "no".

I took a break from reading seriously for a while and worked on other things I enjoy. Over the past three years I've been doing a lot more reading as well as listening to the SF short story podcasts Clarkesworld and Escape Pod. I've noticed something. The mainstream SF I've been reading is still the usual heterosexual white guy. (Or, as the discussion on this forum went with The Martian - the main character was culturally a hetero white guy even if his race is never mentioned)

Meanwhile, the short story SF I've heard on those podcasts and read in anthologies features a LOT more diversity. I've read (in addition to the "standard" hetero white guy) stories with gay/lesbian, Asian, female, Western-valued/cultured, Eastern-valued/cultured, African (both American and from the continent) main characters and probably more I'm forgetting.

So, some questions for my fellow S&L ladies and gentlemen:
1) Does this jive with your experiences?
2) Why do you think this is? Both in the books and on the podcasts these are professional writers being paid for these stories. So it's not like these are just amateurs who are telling more diverse stories (as is the case in the comics world - webcomics are WAAAAY more diverse)
3) One exception I've noticed (but I'm a neophyte in this subgenre, so maybe I'm wrong) is that Steam Punk seems to have something between 50/50 women to men to almost 70/30 women to men as main characters. Why do you think that is? The only hypothesis I can come up with is that the brain delights in the idea of an action heroine wearing all that crazy clothes that women had to wear in Victorian times.

Yeah the story centered around a male white hero is the usual thing. i think its still considered a risk financially to try something different in that regards. In the last couple of years I have come across actual books that were centered around female characters of color. Very pleasant change up.

Although it seems easier to find these types of characters for fantasy rather then SF.

The markets for normal fiction and for specialist short story magazines (/podcasts) are very different, I should think.

So I suspect there are two processes at work. On the one hand, those writing 'mainstream' fiction may be more likely to target their books at what their audience wants. Their audience is overwhelmingly straight white English-speakers (nearly 80% white in American and nearly 90% white in UK, and i suspect the SFF demographic skews whiter; sexuality statistics are more contentious, but depending how you measure guesses range from about 99% straight to 90% straight, with around 96% being the normal assumption iirc), and in most cases probably mostly male as well, so straight white male English-speaking characters are a good default option if there's no particular reason for them to be anything else.
Whereas if you're writing for specialist magazines, your writing is probably hoping to be judged more on other qualities - specialist readers are more likely to seek out challenging but well-written fiction, whereas generalist readers are more likely to just want something enjoyable.

That should be a fairly non-controversial reason. I suspect there's also a reason on the other side, which is that in a more 'literary' environment writers actually get extra 'points', as it were, for writing minority characters - this is something these writers are applauded for and that helps them stand out, so of course they're doubly encouraged to do it. Whereas writers for a more general market probably don't have that sort of incentive - again, general readers are more interested in enjoying the story, rather than judging the themes and ideologies and originality of the writer (within limits, of course).

So I think that on the one hand the broader market has one reason actively rewarding 'majority' characters, and on the other hand the specialist magazine market has another reason actively rewarding 'minority' characters. It's not a binary thing, of course, but in general you'd expect to see more 'minority' characters in magazine fiction, I'd think.

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Regarding Steampunk, I can offer two suggestions. Partly, I think you're right, and not just about the clothing. Putting women in Victoriana settings has a point: it's incongruous. You're taking characters who in that setting are expected to be very restricted in what they can do, and making them protagonists - that's exciting, and interesting. On the other hand, most SF (and there are exceptions, of course) assumes a future with more equality, which paradoxically makes it less interesting to have female characters: if a woman can do anything a man can do and vice versa, there's no specific benefit to making the character a woman. And while some SF has more dystopian futures, they tend to be more serious, which makes it harder to have oppressed protagonists actually supporting a plot: Steampunk has, on the one hand, a setting that makes female protagonists interesting, but at the same time it also often has a style, a levity and a disinterest in realism, that allows female protagonists to actually do interesting things.

Maybe that didn't make sense. To put it simply: a setting with passive women (or where we expect women to be passive) makes any active woman in it interesting. But then we have to explain how a woman is able to be an active protagonist given the repressive society around her. But if you're already in a setting with steam-powered space travel, monocles, and leather-clad airship captains, "she's kickass despite the pervading culture because I said so" becomes an explanation that lets the author move quickly on to the action...


A second explanation is just a guess. but in my experience one reason there's more of a female audience for steampunk (and hence more reason to write female characters) is that I think the steampunk movement has relied heavily, particularly earlier on, on the 'maker' and artist and cosplayer subcultures (e.g. I've never read a steampunk novel, but I have been to an exhibition of steampunk artifacts), and those subcultures, it's my uninformed impression, have a much higher proportion of women than general SFF fandom does. This may have helped contribute to a more female fanbase for the subgenre?

Just guessing, though.

Wastrel wrote: "The markets for normal fiction and for specialist short story magazines (/podcasts) are very different, I should think.

So I suspect there are two processes at work. On the one hand, those writin..."

Overall makes sense. I really liked your Steampunk explanation. That makes a ton of sense. I've also noticed a preponderance of female steampunk cosplay.

I would say it depends a lot on the story, what the message is that the author is trying to convey, and the author's intended audience. I agree with a lot of comments made by Wastrel. A writer submitting to a specialty magazine already knows that its readership is going to be a subset of the population. But when writing for mainstream publication, as a (would-be) author myself, I want to use a broad brush to make a story with as much appeal as possible. In the case of SF anyway, that would generally mean a white, hetero male just due to demographics. But that is not to say that it is not equally important to include other main supporting characters with diverse ethnic, cultural, religious, or gender differences. A story would just be flat otherwise.

Wastrel wrote: "On the one hand, those writing 'mainstream' fiction may be more likely to target their books at what their audience wants. Their audience is overwhelmingly straight white English-speakers (nearly 80% white in American and nearly 90% white in UK,"

The US is only 72% white (64% if you limit yourself to non-Hispanic whites), and that's using a definition that includes Middle Easterners and North Africans.

It also doesn't explain the male-centric issue, women making up more than 50% of the population.

and i suspect the SFF demographic skews whiter;

You don't think that's a direct result of the literature's overwhelming whiteness? Why would people of color or different sexual orientations and genders ever be attracted to a genre where their existence is barely acknowledged?

G.R. wrote: "I would say it depends a lot on the story, what the message is that the author is trying to convey, and the author's intended audience. I agree with a lot of comments made by Wastrel. A writer subm..."

Just wanted to point out these podcasts and anthologies aren't diverse-specific. (eg not a gay podcast or an asian podcast) They should have the same makeup as the regular SF audience.

Sean wrote: "Wastrel wrote: "On the one hand, those writing 'mainstream' fiction may be more likely to target their books at what their audience wants. Their audience is overwhelmingly straight white English-sp..."

Similar to the problem we have attracting women to engineering .There aren't many there and the ones there are constantly harassed. Who'd want to enter that domain?

The US is only 72% white (64% if you limit yourself to non-Hispanic whites)

Depends on your data. Many sources (the census bureau, the fbi, the cdc, the cia) include a further 6%, comprising people who said they were non-white but specified a group considered to be white - specifically, these were mostly puerto ricans and white cubans. You could also query the 3% of multiracial Americans - this is an almost sociological category, reflecting greater awareness of heritage (almost all Americans are multiracial in origin), and a large percentage of these people will be indistinguishable in appearance and genetics from the people who said they were "white". The census figures also don't consider that under the prevailing 'one drop' concepts of race in America, many people identify as non-white when they could equally (in terms of ancestry) identify as white. So I think 'nearly 80%' is a fair assessment.

In particular, I don't think it's helpful to try to import specific elements of modern American preconceptions - like the idea that puerto ricans aren't really white but sicilians are - into SF settings where often these conceptions aren't applicable.

I guess what I'm saying is that the government wants to know how many people self-identify as 'white', and that's fair enough. But when we're talking about people who look 'white' in SF, the fair comparison is with 'people who would look 'white' if they were in a SF book', and that's a larger number than those who might call themselves 'white' in modern America.

In any case, I think all this is missing the point. Which is, and using intentionally over-rounded numbers, if you write a white character, that character will look the same as 80% of the population, whereas if you write a black character they will look the same as only 10% of the population. And that's in America, an extremely multiracial country - I'm in the UK (like a lot of succesful SF writers) where the minorities are much smaller.

[And why the hell would you exclude hispanic whites? Leaving aside the question of why this is a thing in the US at all (as though the spanish language warped the genes?), and accepting for some purposes that you might want to take people at their word when they said they weren't 'white'... over 60% of self-identified hispanics/latinos in the US also identify as 'white'. Excluding them from the 'white' percentages is just bigotry, 'oh they say they're white but I don't like the set of their eyes...'...]

You don't think that's a direct result of the literature's overwhelming whiteness?
I think that question isn't really relevant. Economics is driven by reality - the causes of that reality don't change anything. Certainly there may be an element of a vicious circle here, as there is in any subculture - subcultures attract the sort of people already in the subculture. I would never deny that - but it doesn't change the reality of who the audience is. I think you're confusing the factual question (why is this the case?) with the moral question (what should be done about it?) - answers to the latter do not change the answers to the former, which is the question I was answering.

In any case, I think it's naive to think that the skew is due just to the content of the books. [And while we're at it, I don't think it's admirable to try to shame minorities into not reading books with majority characters. There are lots of reasons why someone might be attracted to a genre, not just on the basis of the skin colour of the protagonists, and it's not your or my place to tell them that they shouldn't be.] Sex and race can both be (and particularly in the US are) associated with cultural differences. Those cultural differences are hard to quantify, but there are some pretty obvious proxies. Median household income for black americans is $35,000, and slightly higher for Americans of Puerto Rican (38), Cuban (44), and Mexican (41) origin. This compares to $57k for non-hispanic white households, and even more for more specific claimed origins (eg $67k for scandinavian origin, $72k for russian origin). Similarly, 27% of non-hispanic white americans achieve a university qualification, compared to 10% of hispanic americans and 14% of black americans. These groups lag non-hispanic whites even more dramatically in science than in other subjects.

Of course, anyone can enjoy SF. But I'm guessing that even if every character in ever SF book were black, the readership would STILL skew white... because SF is more likely to be read by middle-class people with a college education and some interest in science, and that demographic skews very white...

[It also skews 'asian', of course, and I suspect there are more asian SF fans than their share of the population would suggest]

Wastrel wrote: "The US is only 72% white (64% if you limit yourself to non-Hispanic whites)

Depends on your data. Many sources (the census bureau, the fbi, the cdc, the cia) include a further 6%, comprising peopl..."

An eye-full, but since you brought it up, I would like to say that in starting this particular thread, I certainly wasn't saying that blacks should read black, women should read women, etc. (And I know you were replying to someone else, not me) I think we're all enriched by reading different characters. One of the most powerful stories I came across this year is in the game Analogue: A Hate Story.(which is almost 100% an interactive story - it's all on one screen, character doesn't move around) Experiencing the world from the point of view of a woman who'd been thrust into a backwards culture (from the Western point of view of sexual equality) Made me experience a vulnerability I never do in real life. (As a 5'8" white [racially; ethnically hispanic] male)

Depictions of The Other in our media help us realize what it's like to be The Other - whether it is contemporaneous or SF or fantasy.

I have, however, heard from lots of people that it's frustrating never to see themselves in media - even if they're just a small chunk of the population. I never felt that and it helped that during my lifetime there were two huge moments where hispanic and non-hispanic culture collided in the US and everyone was listening to spanish music and learning salsa. But not everyone has that. And I can see where that can be frustrating.

So I wanted to point out that if you feel that way, there are short stories. And, also, try and poll the readers here on their thoughts on why this is.

I should probably clarify my point there, since I may have come across too strongly.
I just think it's important to stay on the "'we' might get more minority readers if we had more minority characters" side of the question, rather than on the "well why on earth would you want to read SF if you're black?" side of the question.

In fact in general I think that "why would you do X if you're Y?" questions are unhelpful, even if they're well-meaning. They imply an abnormality in need of explanation - that those who do X despite being Y are deviant in some way - and that can push people away from X, or feel bad about it if they do it. [I may be white, straight and male, but I've been asked plenty of those questions myself and never found them pleasant.]

Is it just case that those podcasts are showcasing original fiction by newer authors. If you pick up an older SF anthology from 20 years ago you'll find far less diversity.

There are many existing books with white male protagonists and people are still writing those story but a look through the nominees over the last 4 years for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer shows that there are new writers writing more diverse characters and some really interesting sounding stories. Which means more books to add to my reading back log. (see the list below)

Its like anything I suppose if you go looking for it you can find it relatively easily.


Ramez Naam
Wesley Chu
Max Gladstone
Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Sofia Samatar
Chuck Wendig
Stina Leicht
Zen Cho
Mur Lafferty
Brad R. Torgersen
Karen Lord
E. Lily Yu
Dan Wells
Larry Correia
Lauren Beukes
Saladin Ahmed
Lev Grossman
Lezli Robyn
Gail Carriger
Felix Gilman
Seanan McGuire

Awesome. Hadn't heard of any of these.

Does the diversity need to be obvious? Taking Heinlein as an example, the protagonist of Starship Troopers is Filipino. It's not considered even worth mentioning until a throwaway at the end.

Other Heinlein diversity:
* Job: A Comedy of Justice has a strong female protagonist, who is also an Odin worshipper.
* Friday's main character is female.

John wrote: "Does the diversity need to be obvious? Taking Heinlein as an example, the protagonist of Starship Troopers is Filipino. It's not considered even worth mentioning until a throwaway at the end.

Oth..."
And the main characters of Tunnel in the Sky and I Will Fear No Evil are black.

I believe SF/Fantasy was once a very white male dominated genre...as far as authors go. People tend to write what is easiest for themselves to relate with to make a believable character. I think some of the problem may be that for many, many years the (American) media/culture propagated conservative, white, male, hetero...in what you wrote and read. And as Wastrel mentioned...more college educated readers and writers were probably privileged white males up until quite recently in the grand scheme of things. But that isn't to say that the diversity was not out there! It just didn't get as much notice.

But today I see many, many female and/or ethnic characters popping up (especially in urban fantasy). But I equate that to a more diverse range of authors getting published and a much greater acceptance to diversity in the general public. And an ever growing diverse audience. As a girl, it has become much more acceptable to read science fiction and not be thought "strange" in the past twenty years or so. There are probably many books out there if you start searching ;)

Also, as others have pointed out, much of the time the diversity is barely noticeable because it is often just a fact about that character and not something that drives every aspect of the story...because in the end we are all just human...(unless we're not but that is a different kind of diversity then what you're asking for)
S&L just finished reading Dawn by Octavia E. Butler, who was African American and who writes female African decent main characters; but in the case of Dawn, it hardly makes a difference compared to the xenophobia towards the alien race...

Some others to add to Alexander's great list:
The Hundred Thousand KingdomsN.K. Jemisin fantasy setting, "black" female main

He, She and ItMarge Piercy futuristic, cyberpunk, Jewish female mains

WraeththuStorm Constantine future earth/fantasy, gay/hermaphrodite mains

My go-to strong female in space, written by white male...Honor Harrington On Basilisk Station

I find it interesting that N K Jemisin has said in interview that Yeine isn't black. She's a person of color, but people assume that means she's black because Jemisin is.

I think that raises an important point: because minorities are defined through exception, an author can't have a 'neutral' character - a character not explicitly minority will be considered majority. This means it's not a matter of books with minority vs majority characters, but of books with minority vs majority-or-unspecified characters. And obviously unspecified will be the default - particularly in fiction that's not explicitly concerned with issues of social identity, race relations, etc. And particularly since much of what defines 'ethnic' differences is not superficially visible or likely to be plot-relevant.

Even with skin colour, which is superficially visible, it's not something most authors take the time to describe. We assume all characters are white unless otherwise specified, but how many are actually specifically pale-skinned?

And then there's the question of how much sense culture-bound concepts make outside of their culture. A trivial example: the american concept of 'the hispanic' doesn't traditionally exist in this country. There's plenty of people from south america here, and indeed from spain, but there's no special category on the forms (they're just asked for race and nationality), and the ones I've known would just have called themselves 'white' with no qualifications. (Conversely, society here considers a lot of people white who wouldn't be white in south america). After all, there's not a lot of cultural or genetic similarity between a mestizo kitchen worker from ecuador and a well-off university student from buenos aires. So if these categories don't hold between western countries, what hope have they of holding in middle-earth or on an orbital space colony?

At least with skin colour, there's something concrete and visual to base the categories on (though that's not really what the categories are based on. There are plenty of 'black' americans who are paler-skinned than many 'white' americans. I had a university tutor here once who none of us UK students realised was black until he told us - even on a physical level, black/white recognition is more about face shape than about colour). But categories like 'jewish' or 'hispanic', where there's no physical difference? How does that work 1000 years from now?

"Of course, Zogor's maternal ancestors a millenium ago had belonged to a small ethnicity defined by their historical relation to a numerically minor but historically significant religious group... but since the human species was no genetically homogenous and all worshipped the zargarian space-imperator Lord Bolbul, this was not particularly significant."

So if you want jews-in-space, for example, it's not just a matter of making your character jewish - you have to shape your entire setting around this, to be a setting in which it's feasible that there's even such a thing as judaism any more. In other words, the story must to some extent be ABOUT that ethnicity - and isn't including ethnic characters only because you want to write a story about their ethnicity pretty exploitative in its own way?

Of course, that problem doesn't apply if you're talking about a near-future setting, where modern society has only slightly been changed. But in anything more ambitious, I think it becomes an issue.

[Regarding that last point: if you really want to address issues of ethnicity and/or show support for a minority group, the best option is probably not to have jews-in-space, but just a minority that makes sense within the setting that can stand as a proxy for current minorities. And ideally one that isn't too flagrantly a particular current minority in disguise.]

Then again, I think that raises the question of what exactly the objective is. There's two reasons for wanting minority characters that I can see (simplifying here) - for their specific nature, to make people sharing that nature feel better about themselves, or for their minority status, to make people in minorities feel better and/or to explore the social issues around the treatment of minorities. Personally, I think the latter is more interesting, more universal, and more important. The former, though, can't be addressed in the manner I suggested above, since the objective there isn't to have 'a minority', but specifically 'jews' (or 'hispanics' or 'african-americans' or whomever). On the other hand, that need might be addressable through superficial elements.


That is, is the idea, to take an example, of a black american who wants SF to have more people who look like them (i.e. make the characters darker-skinned and everything's OK), or more people who share their experiences as a black american in 21st century america (in which case this is mostly impossible in SF, but could partly be addressed by creating groups who might share elements of the cultural situation of modern black americans)?
Or both - but trying to provide both at once is tantamount to suggesting that today's social groups won't just exist eternally but will also retain their current social situation eternally. Which seems sort of racist to me...

Wastrel wrote: "I think that raises an important point: because minorities are defined through exception, an author can't have a 'neutral' character - a character not explicitly minority will be considered majorit..."

I'd like to point out that Judaism (although it has evolved over the years) over 2000 years old. No reason to see it not existing in SF. Shoot, the first Star Trek series is only 300-400 years from now. No reason to think it wouldn't last another thousand.

Aside from that nitpick, one interesting thing I've seen explored in both Fantasy and SF and would dovetail with this discussion of "Jews-in-Space" is how your faith endures in a world with other creatures. I've seen every variation from realizing there is no god to there being an Earth god and a andromeda god. As well as CS Lewis which has the Christian do something like (I'm a bit fuzzy it's been a few years) do his first pass at life on Mars. Second pass on Earth. Third pass on Venus - where it finally goes perfect and "humans" don't fall to temptation.

As an interesting point to a lot of what others have surfaced in this discussion about whether the race matters and stealth race (like Hienlein)- it'd be interesting to see if others agree with me on this:

I'm listening or reading a story and there are two characters interacting. And it's a few minutes (or pages) before it's revealed that they're both men, women, or one man and one woman. At this point I have to go back (or feel like I have to go back)to re-read (re-listen) and experience it in a new context.

Why? Because it's an important context in the way in which they're interacting. Is a challenge to one's manhood from another man or from a woman? This makes a difference. Or is there flirting? Is it opposite genders or same genders? Because that can make a difference if the affection isn't returned - is it a mismatch (one gay/one straight) or does the other person just not desire them as a mate?

It's something visual mediums don't have to do and it's something that can be hard to do in novels without sounding awkward. Most of the time the pronouns fix it (he/she/him/her), but sometimes for whatever reason there aren't any pronouns used for a while.

I feel the same way with nationalities and races. Given our histories with each other, knowing one character's Russian and another's American can make a difference in how the scene is read. I also feel that if someone's disparaging a particular religion, it makes a difference if the person has experience and is doing it from the inside or is doing it from a point of ignorance.

Anyway, do others feel that way? That learning later on a person's gender, race, etc, changes the way you interpret the book?

PS - I know there would be some times in which it wouldn't matter. A man/woman might react the same way to a lot of an apocalypse or a first contact, etc. But there are some times where it does matter. I think. Although Wastrel does make good points about culture/race/etc meaning different things depending on how far in the future the story takes place.

Eric wrote: "...I'm listening or reading a story and there are two characters interacting. And it's a few minutes (or pages) before it's revealed that they're both men, women, or one man and one woman. At this point I have to go back (or feel like I have to go back)to re-read (re-listen) and experience it in a new context. ..."

This is one of the reasons I liked Ancillary Justice. I know some people think her use of "she" for every character was a bit of a simple trick but I thought it was really carried off well throughout the book.

Regardless of whether or not one feels that there is diversity in F&SF, if you are looking for more diverse stories, I've found the easy way to broaden the books I read is to add some new reviewers and podcasts to the ones I follow. For example, I only recently started listening to the squeecast (I know I'm late to the party). Every episode of it recommends works from diverse authors and featuring diverse characters -- not because they have a specific diversity agenda but because they are professionals in the field with diverse backgrounds and tastes. My TBR pile became more diverse pretty quickly.

Joanna wrote: "I find it interesting that N K Jemisin has said in interview that Yeine isn't black. She's a person of color, but people assume that means she's black because Jemisin is."

That is true. And I hesitated to say "black" because due to the character's physical and cultural description I visualized an "African" type people and society which shows more about my own cultural projections onto characters. Being a fantasy book not taking place on Earth, there are not the races/cultures we would anticipate but it is the closest "known" that I had to go on. I think Jemisin would like to move away from traditional stereotypes and say that you can have a person of color and they not be considered "black"/ "brown"/ "yellow" etc especially when it doesn't matter in the world around them (although in her book she often mentions skin color, hair colors, freckles etc and there is some consequences due to these differences in her fantasy culture)

Stephanie wrote: "But today I see many, many female and/or ethnic characters popping up (especially in urban fantasy).

In most of the urban fantasy I've seen, characters of color are typically secondary characters who are there to provide the hero with some cool ethnic magic.

But I equate that to a more diverse range of authors getting published and a much greater acceptance to diversity in the general public"

The data doesn't support this conclusion.

Interesting discussion. For generic-minority, can't do much better than AE Van Vogt's classic, Slan.

Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant series specifically involves Hispanics and the main character is Hispanic. The series isn't actually all that good, but it does contain this element.

I am also enjoying Kate Danley's series "Maggie for Hire." It's a bunch of silly fun about a private detective who fights vampires among other supernatural entities, and generally winds up saving the world each book. I think the first one is free, have a look.

John wrote: "Interesting discussion. For generic-minority, can't do much better than AE Van Vogt's classic, Slan.

Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant series specifically involves Hispanics and the main chara..."
I'll definitely take a look. Description reminded me of Buffy.

I think with short story anthologies and with magazines there is a clear sense that if you do not take some measures to be representative you will be called up on it and a general sense that readers want diverse stories from different writers with different perspectives. The Strange Horizons "Count" and many other pieces of genre journalism will highlight how magazines succeed or fail in publishing and including diverse stories from diverse writers.

As others have mentioned earlier if you want diversity in SF and fantasy there is plenty out there at longer lengths although more could be done for this work to be reviewed and talked about than perhaps is taking the place at the moment.

Wastrel wrote: "Then again, I think that raises the question of what exactly the objective is. There's two reasons for wanting minority characters that I can see (simplifying here) - for their specific nature, to make people sharing that nature feel better about themselves, or for their minority status, to make people in minorities feel better and/or to explore the social issues around the treatment of minorities."

I've considered a few reasons to push for more diversity/inclusiveness:

1) Verisimilitude: to reflect society the way it actually is (i.e., avoiding erasure). E.g., if you set your story in a large urban centre somewhere in the modern-day southwestern US, then you'd have textual evidence that a significant number of people of Mexican and other Hispanic heritages live and work there.

2) Identification: So readers other than white, middle-class straight men of North European extraction can have characters they can identify with. This mostly works for fiction set in the modern-day or not too far removed from it in either direction.

3) Educational: It can't hurt for readers to learn that people different from them are people too, and can be smart, capable, heroic, etc. as well. It might be obvious to some that we're all more similar than we are different. But it's not obvious to everyone, and you never know where or when the lesson might be learned. A novel's as good a place as any.

4) Aspirational: So readers can have characters who resemble or remind them of themselves in positive, important positions and show them either that they can aspire to such positions, or that the world should change so they have the opportunity. This is best illustrated by the anecdote of Whoopi Goldberg seeing Nichelle Nichols on an episode of Star Trek as a child, and running to tell her mother, "There's a black lady on the TV and she ain't no maid!"

5) Escapism: A core element of SF&F and several other genres. Sometimes, you just want to read about somebody badass or cool or attractive who has things you don't have and does things you can't do. And it's so much sweeter when you can relate to them on more than one level. E.g., to me, the animated series COPS was just one of several terrible animated series in the 1980s produced to sell toys that I watched alongside Transformers and Thundercats. To several African-American comic book/geek writers I've read online, it was their favourite because the leader of the good guys was an African-American FBI agent.

6) Variety: How many times have you seen the straight white male hero of North European extraction go through the exact same motions of the Hero's Journey or the Anti-Hero's Roaring Rampage of Revenge? Wouldn't you like to see something different now and then? E.g., playing through the Mass Effect video game series, you have the option to play Commander Shepard (the player character) as male or female, and to tweak your appearance, including skin tone. Default white male Shepard is yet another white male space marine cum interstellar saviour in a genre and medium chock full of those guys. But female Shepard? Or wo/man of colour Shepard? Even though Shepard is essentially the same character regardless of appearance (except maybe the calibre of voice acting), non-white male Shepard's story is instantly more interesting solely because we almost never see it. It's easy to do this badly--e.g., race and genderbending your characters solely to score points on some amorphous diversity scale, but with proper care it's a good way to introduce more creativity in the genres as a whole.

That's just a few I can think of, there's probably a lot more good reasons other people can come up with. So then the question: Which of these is the goal? They all are. Not every work can encompass all of them, but not every work has to. There's not just one path to diversity. There's a place for Octavia Butler to explore the legacy of African-American slavery through an SF lens, and a place for Saladin Ahmed to write a retro-epic fantasy set in a second-world inspired by medieval Islam instead of medieval Christendom. One is as legitimate and important as the other, even if you personally prefer one over the other.

I think you're missing my point - it's not so much what the objective of X is, but what the X in question is. Take, for example the example of a black man in America. There are two different types of things about him (relevant to his colour): there's the facts of his being a black man (which could be further divided into blackness as physical fact and blackness as independent cultural identity) and then there's the facts about the way black men are situated in wider american society. Or to put it another way, there's what his differences mean in terms of how he is, and what his differences mean in terms of how others see him.

In the world, those two things go together. But in SF, they needn't. You can have people with dark skin who do not share the subordinate position black people currently have in american society, and you can have people who do share that position who don't have dark skin.

You could, of course, combine both. But that would be assuming that things could never change, and could never improve - that black people will always have the status in the world that they have in modern america. And that seems either naive (if accidental) or racist (if intentional).

Sean wrote: "In most of the urban fantasy I've seen, characters of color are typically secondary charaters..."

I started to list a bunch of urban fantasy that had African-American female leads or Native American or Latino but then found this list https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...
But here is a few off the top of my head:

And some science fiction that just came to mind:


The data doesn't support this conclusion.
You are correct that I was making assumptions on personal opinion and no data research (though I think that particular data collection was a little hole-y) because in the past 20 years I have seen a trend toward more diversity. Is it perfect and equal and fair?...no, not by far, it has a ways to go yet and people need to continue to encourage and demand that diversity.... My mom was in high school when schools in her area were desegregated. When I was in high school I went to scifi conventions and animecons and it was a chaos of awesome nerdy kids having a good time together and no one cared what color, religion, or sexual orientation you were but they were just excited that share the things they loved...but that is a small portion of the population and I suppose made me a bit of an optimist...
I think as far as books go, we are making strides...I'm sure the numbers on those graphs would be terribly different 30 years ago...

I think it's a complex combination of factors. Writers are slowly making conscious efforts to break out of the mold, but traditional publishing tends to stick with what's proven.

Over the course of a couple years I sent over a hundred queries for the MMORPG novel I wrote based on Hindu mythology and with a wide mix of characters, but couldn't get even one agent to look at the manuscript let alone represent it. Which is why I finally went the route of self-publishing it.

Of course, another novel with a white male protagonist got picked up fairly quickly and is coming out next April, but I still managed to get Amerindian and Hispanic main characters in there.

We just have to keep chipping away at it.