Diverse Voices in Sci-Fi

For this week, I read "I Live with You" by Carol Emshwiller. I think it's a superb piece of weird fiction from a point of view I didn't expect. I was always afraid that a creepy stranger was living in my house growing up, but Emshwiller makes that horror a full reality.

I admit, I had to reread the story because I thought "where's the diversity?" Then I realized, ah, yes, it's written by a woman: that's the diversity. It's a woman writing about a female protagonist (anti-hero?) and that's what makes it so special. I'm spoiled to live in the era of today where women writers are taken more seriously. Though there are more and more women published each day, there are still boundaries.

Reading the story made me think more about women in genre fiction. I can list three genre fiction authors off the top of my head who are women (Ursula K. LeGuin, Anne Rice, and Octavia Butler), but men I can list on and on and on (Clarke, Asimov, Lovecraft, Barker, Tolkien, Lewis, Gaiman, King, Patterson). I'm sure if I put more thought into it I could think of more women in genre (J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins), but it doesn't outweigh that for every female genre author I can name way more men (Pullman, Heinlen, Ellison, Borges).

So while I'm lucky to live in a more diverse society, there are so many more changes that need to be made from multiple fronts. Gender and sexual orientation are hardly represented in fiction, let alone genre, and women and people of color are often omitted or given stereotypical roles. This is changing very slowly, and I think the emerging mainstream popularity of Dungeons & Dragons is helping that. With more and more people making fantasized versions of themselves, the more people are realizing that diverse characters rarely exist in the fantasy realm.