Red Scholar's Wake Q5: Representation

NeilNjae

The book is very different from the "standard" SFF that features cis-het WEIRD men (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic). Characters are non-Western, often poor, in a hierarchical society. Most of the named characters were women. And yet, I think just about everyone in this book club is a cis-het WEIRD man.

I want to ask a question about representation and building a broader community in SF and other "geek" spaces. But I don't think we are the ones to answer that. Which then raises the question about where are the other demographics, and should there be more diversity in this community?

Apocryphal

As I may have hinted in my other replies, I don’t think it’s really very different than ‘standard’ SF in its tropes. Using Vietnamese culturally overlay or making 80% of the characters female gender doesn’t really matter very much. These things are common these days. Maybe they weren’t in the heyday of SF, but that’s fine. I think this book has helped me to get at tge heart of why I prefer older works and tge newer ones tend to leave me feeling flat: I read SF to explore! The older books explored!

Lately, many of the books are just relying on SF tropes to make the SF aspect happen, and changing the cultural and skin veneer. I’m really perfectly fine with seeing others represented - I welcome that, and I’ve always exploring other cultures in fiction because I’m inherently very curious about our world - but I think SF needs a stronger hook than that. And the more recent books seem to lack those hooks.

As for this group, I don’t think there’s any ‘should’ here. We accept any human that applies, so anyone that wants to can join already. We probably come off as a clique of aging, curmudgeonly guys, which might have a passive effect on keeping people away. If that’s the case, then we might be stuck with that, cause we’re not likely to change who we are.

Hopefully we’re aren’t passively excluding anyone on the basis of culture, colours, genders, age, or whatever, but if we are and can improve something so a not to, I’d like to hear about it.

But at some level we have to recognize that knitting sessions will always have knitters, and I don’t think they don’t have to take special steps to draw in more quilters. Nor should they exclude the subset of knitters because they also happen to like quilting.

RichardAbbott

Dealing with an entirely minor point in your discussion starter, I'm not at all sure that people were poor - there were several passages which stated that they were, but nobody seemed to have any difficulty finding resources when they needed them. Poverty seemed to be a background thing rather than an urgently pressing thing