The Sword and Laser discussion

this is something i have been thinking about since i read a bunch of sci fi. There are about 1.65 billion people who would be considered east asian on the planet
(these numbers are obviously not exact, but close to 2013 numbers). That 23% of the population. Almost 1/4 people would consider themselves east asian, living in east asia. there are 1.975 billion people living in the indian subcontinent, which is 28% of the population. yet in sci fi, it is rare to see many, if any, east or southern asians. (this is not counting the numbers of people, like me, who are either mixed or living outside of the country of ancestral cultural origin) realistically speaking, if we are talking about a united government of earth (like star trek) more than half of the people in starfleet should be asian. Am i just out there with this? does this not bother anyone else? It bothers me a little because it feels a little unrealistic and ethnocentric to me when all of the characters are white with a sprinkling of others when we are discussing the future. Barring circumstances where there are other explanations of why this is happening (like old man's war with only people from certain countries can join the CDF) it seems really strange. Firefly gave a bit of a nod to this with chinese being used as a second language and slang, but even then, it seems crazy uneven. I'm not offended, because i don't think it is a racist motivation behind this. If I was writing a book, i would have no idea how to name people in korean, aside from just using my cousin's names or something. It is extra research to find out how other culture's naming practices, much less trying to incorporate how their cultures would affect their characters. But when all the characters are written withe european names, it seems the future is a world without the majority of people on earth.

Tastykimchi wrote: "this is something i have been thinking about since i read a bunch of sci fi. There are about 1.65 billion people who would be considered east asian on the planet
(these numbers are obviously not e..."

You are not out there with this. It bugs me to no end. I'm also baffled.

It's interesting, when I watch a Sci Fi or Fantasy anime the cast is SO racially diverse. I'm watching Darker than Black and they actually have people from different countries participating in the events. And they show the full breadth of Japanese immigrants and how they impact Japan.

I enjoyed Dreamships . It's about the colonization of a new planet but in this case, members from S. and E. Asia colonized the planet so the planet has bits and pieces from those regions as opposed to being a new Western society as you see in most Sci Fi.

The secretary holograph is a woman wearing a sari. : )

You're not crazy! There should definitely be more Asians in science fiction.

Different authors do better or worse jobs in this regard, though I think a lot of them take a "in the future, it doesn't matter"--whether it's because Earth-based ethnicity isn't relevant or because the author is lazy is up to the reader...

For example, in the Honor Harrington series, the main character would essentially be considered half-Asian via her mother--but her mom is from Beowulf and they're 2000+ years in the future. (You also have a star nation--that doesn't get too much play--whose capital planet and aristocrats look Asian but have German names due to the weird nature of their founding.)

For SF on television and movies, you may have seen complaints about that when it comes to say, the recent Exodus film, and earlier to Shyamalan "The Last Airbender" debacle. Unfortunately, Hollywood seems convinced that Asian stars are hard to sell outside of martial arts films and smaller comedies. Complete and utter nonsense, but it's definitely a struggle to move for more Asian actors in non-stereotype roles in general let alone SF (one of the things I liked with the now-canceled sitcom "Selfie" is that John Cho and Karen Gillan were love interests and aside from a comment about k-pop, they didn't focus on his ethnic heritage).

I see most SF as non-ethnic in nature. I'd be hard pressed to pick an ethnicity for people named Lessa, F'lar, and F'nor. Foundation brings up ethnicity in its discussion of the look of people in various sectors of the galaxy, but only barely. Alastair Reynolds' stuff, some names are ethnic and some aren't, and Canasian is a major dialect - but so are descendant tongues of English.

@David: Selfie was cancelled?! O.O NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! T_T

Keidy wrote: "@David: Selfie was cancelled?! O.O NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! T_T"

Oh yeah, it only lasted 7 episodes before it was canceled. However, they're airing the remaining episodes (for 13 total) on Hulu and ABC.com. My wife and I are sad, we really liked the characters' chemistry.

Now back to your regularly scheduled scifi... :)

John says: "I see most SF as non-ethnic in nature. I'd be hard pressed to pick an ethnicity for people named Lessa, F'lar, and F'nor."

And that can definitely be true! But when it comes to visual SF, they tend to cast whites, and I imagine a lot of readers bring their own unconscious biases to books when authors aren't clear about what the characters look liked. Remember the silly outcry over Rue in the first Hunger Games film? She's cleared described as a black character, yet some people were surprised and unhappy that she was black in the film.

In your Pern character examples, they're still descended from Earth humans, and if you do Google Image searches, you'll find a lot of the fan art draws them white (though they'll probably described that way in the novels).

So with Tastykimchi's point, you'd think that with a large population of Asians on this planet Earth, a future Pern population should be pretty mixed and have a good proportion of people with Asian looks and features.

Very interesting topic for discussion. I think the underrepresentation of Asians in SF has to do with how literature reflects society more than anything.

One big factor is the difficulty in writing for "the other". For most writers, they stick to characters that they are comfortable writing about and they end up being a lot like the authors. In the end, what is worse: not including other ethnicities or including ethnic caricatures?

From what I remember of Pern, it is hard to say how unified the government was that sent the colonists. It is possible that the group sending them was more like in Old Man's War with only certain governments taking part. It has been way too long since I read Dragonsdawn to remember those details.

Funny thing about you mentioning Firefly is that I felt that Kaylee's character should have been played by an Asian.

I just checked the preview of Dragonsdawn on Amazon and it looks like the colonists on Pern should have been a pretty good multicultural spread. The mission was launched by the United Sentient Planets and they arrived in ships called the Yokohama, the Bahrain, and the Buenos Aires.

Based on all that, the population of Pern should include a good cross section of ethnicities.

The 2014 Xingyun (Nebula) Award for Global Chinese Science Fiction went for a book called Ruins of Time by Bao Shu.
(The Xingyun award is the Chinese version of the Nebula awards)
In case you hadn’t noticed there are a lot of people in China.
Which make that the most popular Scifi book on the planet.
It’s not available in English.

Warren wrote: "The 2014 Xingyun (Nebula) Award for Global Chinese Science Fiction went for a book called Ruins of Time by Bao Shu.
(The Xingyun award is the Chinese version of the Nebula awards)
In case you hadn..."

Yep. And while this doesn't address the overall problem of lack of Asian representation in western authored sci-fi, Ken Liu was on S&L a few months back and is doing great work translating Chinese and Taiwanese sci-fi authors. Since he was on the show his translation of The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu has come out, and Ken Liu's own novel, The Grace of Kings, comes out in April

Sky wrote: "Warren wrote: "The 2014 Xingyun (Nebula) Award for Global Chinese Science Fiction went for a book called Ruins of Time by Bao Shu.
(The Xingyun award is the Chinese version of the Nebula awards)
I..."

Translators are my heroes.

Warren wrote: "In case you hadn’t noticed there are a lot of people in China.
Which make that the most popular Scifi book on the planet.
It’s not available in English."

This is something we, english speakers, don't always consider.
I wonder how many great authors and stories we miss out on because of translation. Where are out universal translators already!?!?

Now that there are Indians in the Mars planetary orbit, it seems right that there should be Asians in sci-fi!

This is a topic that N.K. Jemisin talks about frequently in her blog. She often sees or reads scifi and then wonders what horrible unmentioned calamity happened in the work's fictional past that resulted in the death of all but a handful of persons of color. It's part of why I've tried to make adding authors from diverse backgrounds to my to-read list, but even then, I've added way more authors of African heritage than Asian of any description or from Spanish-speaking cultures. Although, thanks to Alif the Unseen and G. Willow Wilson, I've been more exposed to authors from Muslim cultures, although more for non-fiction and memoir than scifi and fantasy.

Check this out, it mention some international books
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/12/unde...

I feel like sci-fi from the 80s often (ok, probably just occasionally) featured Japanese companies, if not characters, probably because it seemed likely at the time that they would dominate space exploration due to their status as reigning technological giants. Now I think you see nods to the Chinese much more frequently, as in The Martian. But these tend to be more passing mentions (rather like Firefly) than anything else.

I'm currently in the middle of Altered Carbon, which is hard to fit into this sort of question because while the character is supposed to be of Japanese descent, he's wearing a Caucasian body. That being said, I think it does a better job of acknowledging future population dynamics than many books.

I want to read more sci-fi written by Asian authors - I feel like most of the books I've read with an Asian setting or major characters (Altered Carbon, Paolo Bacigalupi) are still written by Western authors. The Three-Body Problem is on my list!

there was also this (now funded)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...

I remember Neil posting to S&L forums at some point about it.

Google also shows this:

http://lontarjournal.com/

But I haven't checked it out yet. Again, most of the translated works coming out, except for the work Ken Liu is doing, seem to be short stories. If anyone knows of any other full book translations coming out, please share!

This seems like a good compilation of asian/SE asian speculative fiction authors:

http://carriecuinn.com/2013/06/18/lis...

Shad wrote: "One big factor is the difficulty in writing for "the other". For most writers, they stick to characters that they are comfortable writing about and they end up being a lot like the authors. In the end, what is worse: not including other ethnicities or including ethnic caricatures?"

This, it's really this, people tend to write what they know, in near future they normally put it in a culture they are personally familar with. For far future the skin color tends to be all over the place and mostly glossed over but the cultures tend to resemble ones they have done lots of research on with some new twists added.

As someone that reads a decent bit of chinese/japanese translations the token American/Westerner character is a thing and I have seen good books even ones with good characters drop into a horrible caricature of our culture I personally find it more funny then anything else. Meanwhile when they just write characters in their own culture it's a diverse cast and their culture normally isn't jutting out, like it is in many Asian setting books by non-asian authors, instead it's just there.

Yes, our translation project launches in the January issue of Clarkesworld. If you are interested in short stories from China, Ken Liu wrote a nice piece for us this month:
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liu_1...

It includes links to several translated stories that you can read online for free.

Thanks for the link, Neil! I remember seeing you at CapClave back in 2010, glad to see you around. I'm sorry I missed out on the Kickstarter, but I look forward to the fruits of labor.

I saw an appropriate tweet by Mary Robinette Kowal this morning.

https://twitter.com/MaryRobinette/sta...

"It's not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it's about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism."

Joanna wrote: "It's not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it's about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism."
This is my point. i don't want a token asian character. It just seems unrealistic.

I'm happy to be picking up more Asian-written SF.

There should be much more representation of Asians in future-speculative fiction, given that an extrapolation of population trends clearly shows that they represent a large portion of our species.

And yes, that's a great quote, and one I stand behind. I loathe the "token" characters inserted to appease minority audiences. That's just such a lazy approach to the problem. Sticking to the spirit of that quote, we can provide diversity in stories by just presenting reasonably realistic proportions of different ethnicities.

Israel wrote:
"That's a great quote. Last night I looked up the cast for The Expanse series and was hugely impressed that they are embracing the diversity of the universe and are casting a lot of new (to me) people. "

Wasn't remotely surprised to see that this is being made in Canada with a whole pile of Canadian actors. Science fiction tv shows with diverse ensemble casts is one of our major exports, it seems.

Brendan wrote: "Wasn't remotely surprised to see that this is being made in Canada with a whole pile of Canadian actors. Science fiction tv shows with diverse ensemble casts is one of our major exports, it seems. "

Bless your country for Stargate SG-1. I'm not familiar with any others, though.

Joanna wrote: "Brendan wrote: "Wasn't remotely surprised to see that this is being made in Canada with a whole pile of Canadian actors. Science fiction tv shows with diverse ensemble casts is one of our major exp..."

ORPHAN BLACK!!

My favorite is that Smallville was filmed in Canada. Since Superman is, you know, an *American* icon.

John wrote: "My favorite is that Smallville was filmed in Canada. Since Superman is, you know, an *American* icon."

Well, I mean unless you film in Montreal or Las Vegas, typical suburbs etc look pretty similar. xD Montreal's a popular filming spot for a "Paris environment". Some viewers are shocked when they find out Orphan Black was filmed in Ontario.

Warren wrote: "In case you hadn’t noticed there are a lot of people in China.
Which make that the most popular Scifi book on the planet.."

I'm not sure that follows. China has three times as many people as the US but they attend movies and buy cars at a fraction of what Americans do. Without knowing actual sales numbers, it's hard to claim they sell a significantly more books than other places.

Shad wrote: "Very interesting topic for discussion. I think the underrepresentation of Asians in SF has to do with how literature reflects society more than anything. "

I've never really noticed a lack of Asian characters in SF since some of my favorite SF series have had main (or major) characters which were explicitly Asian.

Louis Wu and Carlos Wu from Niven's Known Space series, for instance, including Ringworld, his most famous work.

Jack Chalker's Well World series has a character named Julee Wu in the first book, while the heroine of the rest of the series is Mavra Chang.

By the time we got to cyberpunk, Asians were prominent players everywhere.

I suppose it's just a factor of the particular works you happened to read.

My impression, from the lens of a 43 year old white dude, is that Asian characters are frequently present in Science Fiction, but often not the main character. It's most likely the fact that I read materials written more often by Americans, more of whom are white dudes(historically). I think Honor Harrington is a high profile Asian character. I see Asian characters frequently as ship members, soldiers etc in most military sci-fi I read. The best example I see is in Firefly, where Asian culture has been adopted by most space-faring folks. During my life time I think Science Fiction has slowly but surely followed the cultural lead.

my issue with firefly is that, while chinese culture and lamar are adopted, there are no asian people in the show/movie.

my issue with firefly is that, while chinese culture and lamar are adopted, there are no asian people in the show/movie.

Hmm. Now I will have to go look and see what Whedon thought about all that. I'm not sure if he was making a cultural statement or not.

Thinking back, new Battlestar Galactica did a halfway decent job on including a multicultural cast. They also did a good job showing every single job being filled with both men and women, including many that are historically filled with a majority of one gender.

Steve wrote: "Hmm. Now I will have to go look and see what Whedon thought about all that. I'm not sure if he was making a cultural statement or not."

Initially, Simon and River and Kaylee were supposed to be cast specifically Chinese but then he cast River as "asian-looking" whatever that means and changed his mind for the other two characters.

I've always wondered why Whedon cast Irish and German actors as the Tams. At that point why not change their names? Summer Glau could possibly pass as half-Asian, but Sean Maher is as Irish as it gets.

For all the talk about Chinese in Firefly, I can not for the life of me recall a single Asian person in either the series or movie.

At least in Agents of SHIELD they've hired actual Asians as part of the main cast. Not just Ming-na Wen as May but also Chloe Bennet as Skye who, it turns out, is the lynchpin upon which the series mythology is turning. That's probably due to Jed Whedon's wife, who is Asian and performs a song in Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog called "Nobody's Asian In The Movies."

There were a few asians as extras in Firefly. Mostly in market scenes or crowd scenes.
No speaking roles, which is inexcusable in a show/movie that heavily features a chinese language.

Edit: I just checked an episode I knew had a few asian actresses and Doan Ly actually does have several lines of dialogue. She is a minor character but is prominent throughout the episode "Heart of Gold".

Eh. I retract Firefly upon further evidence. I web searched a few articles and came away unimpressed with casting. Not that I'm going on a Whedon witch hunt. Someone mentioned "The Windup Girl," which is probably a better example of a story which shows differences in Asian cultural influences in science fiction.

What about The Man in the High Castle? One of the main characters is a Japanese man with some fascinating character elements. I can't say he's exactly a positive example, but he's not exactly negative, either.

The I Ching also plays a prominent role in the novel (and in its writing).

Japanese characters feature prominently in the Destroyermen series, which makes sense given that it starts during a battle in the Pacific during WWII.

Despite this start, the Japanese sailors are not portrayed as evil; bad guys come in all shapes, sizes and species. Literally - some of the bad guys are sentient dinosaurs.