That's an oddly specific recommendation; what difference does that make?
pretty hard to find stories with well-rounded characters of multiple races, or LGBT characters or characters that are not of binary gender or realistically disabled characters
In my experience, that's because this becomes the point of the character, why he's included - either as an element within the story or simply for PC cred (“See how hip and with-it my story is?”) If it's irrelevant, there's literally no reason to bother laying it all out, and if it's relevant it tends to dominate the depiction of the character.
One notable exception - from forty-five years ago, which may be why - is Wilson Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun, where not until the final chapter is it revealed that the main viewpoint character is black. It's a zinger, and powerful in the story context, but this had simply not mattered to anyone, including him. (“Are you being disagreeable, civilian?” Surrounded by military officers, being a civilian was what mattered more.) *
Books and movies, particularly SF, tend to be set when they're made as much or more than their fictional setting. It's a matter of style, which is to say fashion, which is to say fad. If you like the fashion, the result is pleasant - the 1976 movie Logan's Run is howlingly dated, but fondly remembered for that very reason, not because anyone takes the story seriously. (In truth the production could have been done far better, if anyone had really cared.) Likewise, I'm pleased to have a massive coffee-table compendium of the 1929 Buck Rogers newspaper comics, wherein Wilma Deering, 25th Century Action Girl, is a flapper! Bobbed hair, narrow figure and all - and she's charming! (But then, so is the strip, imbued throughout with a quirky humor and sense of fun that never intrudes. When Dick Calkin died in 1940 the strip became generic, stupid, the product of lesser minds.)
If you don't like the fashion - the Fifth Columnist “nuke-freeze” propaganda of the 1980s, the feminist make-believe and toxic misandrism of the 1990s - and before, and after; not until recently did I discover that what I suspected at the time was correct, that at least one SF author wrote stories with normal, sane characters and then global-searched-and-replaced all the gender pronouns, producing the feminist-approved mockmen and eunuchs that alone were being published at that point. Correct Thought speaks with one voice…
Well, then, as you say, simply don't read it. Move on. Which, I gather, SF fandom is doing now, dwindling year by year, dispersing to other venues. (Romance novels aren't what they used to be - as long as hero and heroine find a happy ending together, it can be time travel or vampires or alternate history or, indeed, pretty much what science fiction used to be, before it became an engine of Politically Correct propaganda and “social engineering.” That's where I was going, with my alternate-history wartime spy-drama romance of an albino neo-Wiccan heroine and a PTSD combat-veteran hero. A ball-busting mockman she ain't; she IS disabled, and a complete outcast, and strangely enough, so is he…)
People don't want what the Left pushes at them - they never do - and they “vote with their feet.”
* Apropos of that, in his memoirs astronaut Michael Collins mentioned a fascinating what-if footnote: The application to join NASA did not question the applicant's race. The only reason there were no black astronauts during the Moon Race era was because none qualified. (Damn few of anyone did!) … Save one. A USAF Major, combat pilot, engineering degree, “The Right Stuff” all the way - and as it happened his ancestry was (primarily) African, not European. If he had not died in a training crash, one of the men who stood on the Moon could have been black. The social and political consequences might have been far-reaching.
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Date: 2015-05-14 01:50 pm (UTC)That's an oddly specific recommendation; what difference does that make?
pretty hard to find stories with well-rounded characters of multiple races, or LGBT characters or characters that are not of binary gender or realistically disabled characters
In my experience, that's because this becomes the point of the character, why he's included - either as an element within the story or simply for PC cred (“See how hip and with-it my story is?”) If it's irrelevant, there's literally no reason to bother laying it all out, and if it's relevant it tends to dominate the depiction of the character.
One notable exception - from forty-five years ago, which may be why - is Wilson Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun, where not until the final chapter is it revealed that the main viewpoint character is black. It's a zinger, and powerful in the story context, but this had simply not mattered to anyone, including him. (“Are you being disagreeable, civilian?” Surrounded by military officers, being a civilian was what mattered more.) *
Books and movies, particularly SF, tend to be set when they're made as much or more than their fictional setting. It's a matter of style, which is to say fashion, which is to say fad. If you like the fashion, the result is pleasant - the 1976 movie Logan's Run is howlingly dated, but fondly remembered for that very reason, not because anyone takes the story seriously. (In truth the production could have been done far better, if anyone had really cared.) Likewise, I'm pleased to have a massive coffee-table compendium of the 1929 Buck Rogers newspaper comics, wherein Wilma Deering, 25th Century Action Girl, is a flapper! Bobbed hair, narrow figure and all - and she's charming! (But then, so is the strip, imbued throughout with a quirky humor and sense of fun that never intrudes. When Dick Calkin died in 1940 the strip became generic, stupid, the product of lesser minds.)
If you don't like the fashion - the Fifth Columnist “nuke-freeze” propaganda of the 1980s, the feminist make-believe and toxic misandrism of the 1990s - and before, and after; not until recently did I discover that what I suspected at the time was correct, that at least one SF author wrote stories with normal, sane characters and then global-searched-and-replaced all the gender pronouns, producing the feminist-approved mockmen and eunuchs that alone were being published at that point. Correct Thought speaks with one voice…
Well, then, as you say, simply don't read it. Move on. Which, I gather, SF fandom is doing now, dwindling year by year, dispersing to other venues. (Romance novels aren't what they used to be - as long as hero and heroine find a happy ending together, it can be time travel or vampires or alternate history or, indeed, pretty much what science fiction used to be, before it became an engine of Politically Correct propaganda and “social engineering.” That's where I was going, with my alternate-history wartime spy-drama romance of an albino neo-Wiccan heroine and a PTSD combat-veteran hero. A ball-busting mockman she ain't; she IS disabled, and a complete outcast, and strangely enough, so is he…)
People don't want what the Left pushes at them - they never do - and they “vote with their feet.”
* Apropos of that, in his memoirs astronaut Michael Collins mentioned a fascinating what-if footnote: The application to join NASA did not question the applicant's race. The only reason there were no black astronauts during the Moon Race era was because none qualified. (Damn few of anyone did!) … Save one. A USAF Major, combat pilot, engineering degree, “The Right Stuff” all the way - and as it happened his ancestry was (primarily) African, not European. If he had not died in a training crash, one of the men who stood on the Moon could have been black. The social and political consequences might have been far-reaching.