https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/d3ekbm/octavia-butler

In this 1980 essay, Octavia Butler talks about the lack of racial diversity in SF and the reasons for this problem. I found that what she said about authors being told to only use black characters if that was crucial to their character or the storyline really poignant. It’s striking to me that this article was written in 1980 and I think we still see this trend today. I believe that just in recent years there has been a bigger push for characters of color whose race is not crucial to their plot line to be portrayed in literature, film, and TV.

One part of the article that I really enjoyed was when Butler argued that addressing race in SF cannot be done effectively by having white humans interact with an alien race. She argues that even if the author intends for readers to see this as a commentary on racial relations within the human race, the readers will not see it this way. That is because this is SF and if you describe an alien race, people will see that race as alien with tentacles and three eyes and an extra set of arms. This made a lot of sense to me because I think quite a few authors do try to use that technique to address social issues, but we will only really see progress once we get past that way of dancing around the problem. This article reminded me of Butler’s novel Dawn, which I read about a year ago. In Dawn, Butler imagines a meeting between the last remaining humans and their alien captors. The novel does deal a lot with race, humanity, and what it would mean for humans to breed with another race. Butler does all this with a black female lead character. She doesn’t use the presence of an alien race as the only way to discuss race. Instead, she accurately represents the human race by including characters of color. On top of all this, Dawn forces us to think critically about humanity, gender, consent, and a plethora of other social topics.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/samuel-delany-and-the-past-and-future-of-science-fiction

https://www.nyrsf.com/racism-and-science-fiction-.html

I was motivated to look more into Samuel Delany by his short story “Aye, and Gomorrah” that we read for class. One of the first things that came up when I googled him was the New Yorker article in which he discusses how SF has evolved and how it is still evolving. I thought it was really interesting to read about the early days of his career when he was criticized for writing black characters, gay characters, and anything against the status quo. I have always seen SF as such a powerful tool to represent people that aren’t typically represented and to deal with social issues like racism and homophobia, so it was interesting to read about how he was one of the people on the forefront of making it that way. Obviously, SF had to become that way… it wasn’t always accepting. It still has its issues as well because our society still has those issues (as the quote at the end of the article points out). Furthermore, I was led to the “Racism and Science Fiction” piece also linked in this post by the New Yorker article. Although it was written over 20 years ago, I find that a lot of what Delany is arguing in it is still really poignant. I’m intrigued on how SF has evolved to be a genre that so often addresses issues in our society today and am eager to learn about Delany and other authors who do that work.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-sci-fi-giant-arthur-c-clarke-predicted-an-lgbt-friendly-world

I think this article really shows how science fiction can be used to comment on social and political issues of the time and imagine a better future, not just through science and technology, but through acceptance. I have not read a lot of Arthur C. Clarke’s work, so I had no idea that he was queer and that he included so much representation of homosexual relationships in his works. I was kind of astonished of how obvious some of these examples are because I think even today when authors/creators choose to include queer characters and relationships it can just be something that is not obvious or stated explicitly.

I really enjoy thinking about how science fiction can be a tool to talk about these kinds of issues. My favorite science fiction novel is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin, which raises so many questions of gender and sex. Set on a planet where every inhabitant is ambisexual the majority of the time, the novel forces us to think about what gender and sex actually are. We gain insight into the main character (who comes from a planet and race like ours and is misogynistic) contemplating how a strict gender binary influences society. Like Leguin, Arthur C. Clarke seems to have been very conscious of issues surrounding sexuality and gender in his works and I’m definitely interested to learn more about his work and the works of other authors that deal with these sorts of social issues.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/hopepunk-cyberpunk-solarpunk-science-fiction-broken.html

I found this article about how the subgenre of cyberpunk has persisted for decades (often under the guise of another “-punk” name) very interesting. The author brings up some cool points about how the plethora of subgenres that we often talk about are really just different variations of cyberpunk. I think the commentary of how this is a reflection of “the real world” was really poignant. It really forced me to think about how SF reflects the current social, political, technological, and scientific climates of the world. Contrary to the title of the article, I don’t think SF’s long obsession with cyberpunk means something is broken in SF. If anything, it means something is broken in our world.