I can’t think of a single fantasy novel starring a ethnic minority. Does anyone know why this is? Is it simply because there’s a perception in the publishing business that ALL fantasy buyers are whites of European descent?
How about the fact that 99% of all fantasies are based on European legends from the middle ages? Same reason?
[sub]I’ve got MittleEuropephobia. MittleEuropephopia: Fear that if I read one more Tolkien based fantasy series I’ll go insane [/sub]
Try reading Octavia Butler or Samuel Delaney. Both are black Sci-Fi/fantasy authors. There are more that are escaping me at the moment.
Well, if the fantasy novel is set in a medieval type world it makes since; there were very few Africans and no Chinese, for instance, running around Europe.
European fantasy concepts are used I think because its what most people are familiar with, and foreign mythical systems don’t usually mesh that well; for instance, dragons in Asia versus Europe.
The more troubling racial stuff in fantasy, I think, is the idea of ‘evil’ races like orcs.
–John
Oh…fantasy novels. That’s all right then. For a minute I thought I was gonna have to move this to MPSIMS.
How about Octavia Butler?
And Nalo Hopkinson…she’s supposed to be good. BROWN GIRL IN THE RING was her first book.
And try the anthology DARK MATTER: SPECULATIVE FICTION FROM THE AFRICAN DIASPORA, edited by some woman named Thomas. It got great reviews when it came out.
Something I started wondering a while back was how close my mental picture of the hero matches up with the author’s beginning description of said hero, so I began paying a little more attention to how they were described.
They usually aren’t.
In other words, more incriminating than the idea that they’re all white is the fact that they AREN’T, we just assume they are.
Oh, and Aragorn was a minority. The Numenoreans had almost died out as a race, so nyah. There were only five Istari, so Gandalf was, too. Double nyah.
I’ve thought about this before, and I think it basically comes down to two reasons: the one Ethilrist mentioned, that we tend to assume characters are Caucasian until we hear evidence otherwise, and that almost all fantasy kingdoms are based on medieval Europe.
The best exception I know of - by a Caucasian author, no less - is Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea series (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu, Tales of Earthsea, The Other Wind). The people of the Archipelago, where most of the protagonists come from, are described as dark-skinned, while the Kargish “barbarians” are white. And it’s not made into a big PC deal or anything either, it’s just there. Can’t recommend these books enough.
Okay, a little more seriously:
Sacred Ground, by Mercedes Lackey, starring Jennifer Talldeer.
Oathbound/Oathbreaker, by ditto, one of the stars was Tarma, definitely not white european.
Various tales of the Free Minstrels, also by ditto, had gypsies and POC’s (P’s OC?) in them.
Well, in my fantasies she’s usually a Chinese girl with big…what? Oh, you mean fantasy writing.
I think the OP’s second guess is closest to the point. Most modern fantasy “literature” is based on Tolkien, which was based on earlier European stories, which were mainly about white people because that’s pretty much all they knew about.
I don’t think we need to look any deeper for more sinister reasons than that.
This is an excellent point. Some writers have more recently tried to deal with this by describing all the characters, not just the non-white ones. Niven and the crowd he works with do this fairly well, although that’s scifi. George R.R. Martin is trying to be more responsible, I think.
The thing that really bothers me is the way some writers have ripped off very specific elements of non-white cultures and given them to almost entirely white populations. Robert Jordan is the most glaring example, taking Taoist concepts and symbology, and Arabic lingusitic and cultural patterns, and giving them to tall, red-haired or blonde and blue-eyed folks.
I would like to agree with Fiver, but the fact that such cultural colonization continues ought to be scrutinized crtically.
Another writer who is doing a good job with this, (althoug not perfectly) is Gregory Keyes. Really neat stuff! I highly recommend his work.
Actually Medieval Europeans were probably exposed to a lot of people of different backgrounds…the Moors (mostly Arab and Berber, but some of them were “black”) by way of Spain and Portugal, the Saracens (Arabs and North Africans) by way of Italy, and the Asian Huns, Avars, and Mongols come to mind.
To their credit, medieval Europeans were not that “race” conscious - preferring to kill for the sake of religion and property instead. But to depict Medieval Europe as all “white” is sort of lazy thinking.
I can think of several major exceptions to this rule, and my reading of fantasy material is pretty narrrow. Alan Dean Foster’s “Spellsinger” series (which is pretty damn horrible IMHO) features an Hispanic girl as one of the main characters. The ‘Riftwar’ novels by Raymond E. Feist featured Orientals as the opponents, but always portrayed in a favourable light (they were for example far more magically skilled than the Europeans, technologically and artistically equal, brilliant if somewhat self sacrificing warriors and tacticians, end up becoming trading partners and equals etc. ) The spinoff ‘Empire’ series is centred entirely on oriental characters. And of course the ever popular Two Flower in the Discworld novels is obviously Oriental as well. Robert E. Howard’s ‘Conan’, ‘Kull’ and ‘Solomon Cane’ stories frequently featured Negro and Asian characters. The ‘Narnia’ series by C. S. Lewis featured dark skinned Arabic people, though admitedly not usually in a good light.
Based on my limited experience (those listed above, together with LOTR make up almost all my readings in ‘popular’ fantsy) I’d hazard a guess that fantasy doesn’t have fewer non-European characters than most other fiction. If it does then it’s probably because fantasy novels tend to be necessarily medieval. If they’re not then they become sci-fi. Medieval societies tended not to have minorities because the lack of travel/immigration rapidly equalises appearance in interbreeding populations. I agree with Saudade’s point about exposure to minorities in Medieval Europe, but minorities themselves didn’t really exist. The populations became increasingly dark as you moved south grading into Arabic and then Nego populations. They became more Asian as you moved East, but I can’t think of anywhere where distinctly Black or Asian people lived amongst a dinstinctly Caucasian population or vice versa for more than a couple of generations after the raping and pillaging horde passed through. As such single minority characters take a bit more explaining away than they do in most other genre. I can’t imagine how you’d introduce say an Asian into LOTR as one of the characters. He couldn’t just be wandering through or the characters wouldn’t have any reason to trust him. There couldn’t plausibly be a distinctly Asian Kingdom in the west of Middle Earth. He’d have to be an Ambassador or a slave or similar simply to exist, and those types of characters don’t really fit within the fellowship of the ring. Basically minorities in any medieval setting, fantasy or otherwise, will require an explanation after the fashion of the Saracen in ‘Robin Hood Prince of Thieves’ or Ibn in ‘Thirteenth Warrior’. You can’t just stick a minority in there and expect it to be believable. This severely limits the opportnities for minority characters.
LOTR was of course a special case since it had strong parralels to wetern Europe. It would certainly have lost much of its context if the Hobbits had been black.
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Well there is a reason they call it a fantasy and science fiction writers have been ripping off human cultures for their aliens for years. Let’s keep in mind that he also gives these same arabic/taoist folks some pretty odd European names like Rand, Perrin, Mat, and I think a bunch of Celtic ones that I have no hope of pronouncing.
And if you think about it before an age of mass transportation you’re not going to see all that many mixed populations anywhere in the world.
Marc
I would like to agree with Fiver, but the fact that such cultural colonization continues ought to be scrutinized crtically. **
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Larry Niven’s ‘The Magic Goes Away’ features characters of many races, including Native Americans and Australian Aborigines. ‘The Burning City’ (which is set in the same universe) is set in LA circa 14,000 BC and has many black characters. His Svetz stories look like SF at first glance but are actually fantasy, and has many non-white characters (as I recall ‘that frigid bitch’ in the story with the unicorns was black).
Though most of them are not very good, there are lots of stories set in the D&D Forgotten Realms settings with races based on real-world cultures.
I forgot, ‘The Bridge of Birds’ by Barry Hughart are set in a fantasy China, all the characters are Chinese.
But for the most part they didn’t live with them, they wouldn’t expect to run into them without an explanation, and they probably wouldn’t recruit them to go fight the evil wizard.
They were much smaller minorities, and came from other countries. For a fantasy novel, the odds on having one in the right place and time, and then that one being interested in the events of the story… it’s not plausible enough to turn up very often.
And yes, fantasy does have to be plausible; there are a lot of conventions to be lived up to. (Terry Pratchett has made his fortune messing with people’s ideas of those conventions)
–John
Well, Turtledove’s world of Videssos is based on the Byzantine Empire, and so his Vaspurakan have a distinctly Armenian look to them, the Makurani look a lot like Persians, and the Arshaum like Northeast Asians.
Well, with all the examples posted here I guess I have to ask. With the possible exception of LOTR (where even Strider was white anglo-saxon) can anyone think of a fantasy novel that doesn’t have any minority chracters?
I can’t believe nobody has mentioned Elric of Melnibone yet.
The Melnibonians are dark-skinned (Elric is an albino) in an otherwise mostly standard fantasy world.