Bouncing off of the recent question about human races on Star Trek, what are some SF stories (not limited to Star Trek) that include non-Human civilizations that have multiple races or ethnicities? I’m talking about civilizations where there is one intelligent species where everyone of reproducing age can reproduce with any person of reproducing age of the correct gender (as humans can), but there are significant racial, ethnic, or cultural divisions within that species? E.g., in Star Trek, there seems to be a single Cardassian language - are there any Star Trek works that would indicate that a branch of Cardassian civilization has ever used any other language? I do remember that there was at least one Star Trek episode where there was a black Romulan, but I don’t think they made anything of that or indicated that he was different from any other Romulan.
After posting this, I realized that Star Trek’s “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” is a good example. Are there any others?
Well, yeah, only there was very little cultural difference between the different races.
C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet has three races on Mars – the Seroni, the Hrossa, and the Pfifltriggi. They are distinct species, with different cultures and even different accents (the hrossa, for instance, pronounce most words with an initial “h” sound; the Seroni do not).
James Tiptree, Jr.'s “Her Haploid Heart” shows a world where there are two races – at least, as far as people know.
I suspect that alien anthropologists would conclude that there were very few cultural differences on Earth: it’s going to be a matter of where your perspective comes from.
The Hoka and the Silessi of Toka (Poul Anderson). Although that is more of a “two seperate races on the same planet that hate each other” situation, I’ll admit.
In Iain M. Banks’ Excession there’s a cameo appearance of a leader who participated in the genocide of such a group.
Mercedes Lackey’s Skitty stories involved an alien species with sharply opposed national/religious groups; they were in a Cold War in fact. An amusing detail is that the human traders simply assumed that the aliens were all one unified culture like in much of sci-fi, until one faction attacked them.
C. J. Cherryh’s space operas tend towards the anthropological and as such her alien species tend to have multiple “races” and cultures. I’m thinking in particular of the Atevi in her Foreigner series and the Hani and Mahendo’sat in the Chanur series.
In Vonda McIntire’s Star Trek novels, the Klingons have several ethnic groups. The Chakobsa are the majority, and the Rumai are the most visible minority. Military officers are expected to be multilingual, and it is considered bad manners to address someone in the wrong dialect.
In Poul Anderson’s Fire Time, the Ishtarians have several different cultures. The novel deals partly with a war between “civilized” and “barbarian” tribes.
Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet takes place partly on Venus. One of the human characters mentions that the Venerians they encounter (near the equator) seem more technologically advanced than the ones he grew up with (near the pole).
As for Burroughs’ Martians, the reds were an urban culture governed by hereditary monarchs. The greens were nomads where you became leader of the tribe by killing your predecessor. I would consider that to be a pretty signifigant cultural difference.
They’re more like separate subspecies - we don’t know how many different Motie types can reproduce together, and at least one combination can only produce sterile children - the brown and white Mediators, from brown Engineers and white Leaders.
Indeed. Much of Le Guin’s SF work deals with human or humanoid species with huge cultural differences. The Dispossessed involves two very different cultures, and Four ways to Forgiveness deals straight-up with skin-color-based racism on another world. I’m not entirely clear on whether these groups are strictly human, or just humanoid, though.
The Sparrow has two different main species, but those individual species have different cultural groups within them, IIRC.
I think the Foreigner books are a particularly good example, as the political situation evolved from the humans landing on an alien world and cheerfully going about making friends without realizing that they were screwing with ancient associations until kaboom the war started. If there are different races among the atevi, however, it’s too subtle for the humans to particularly notice. Cultures, certainly.
Not races either, but in Babylon 5 the Narn definitely have different religious denominations.
In Anderson’s “The Man Who Counts” (aka “War of the Wing-men”) an alien race has two very different cultures - so different that they think they are different species…
Another Star Trek example I remembered was Insurrection, with the
Ba’ku and the Son’a
If it is not clear, religious and linguistic differences do count, as long as the work in question treats them as having some non-trivial significance.