Cover Lover: #DiversityinSFF

Today’s cover lover is inspired by the hashtag #DiversityinSFF.

In Conversations with Octavia Butler, my favourite author explains to her various interviewers that, when she began writing science fiction, the genre was dominated by 30 year old white male protagonists. Initially, she attempted to follow suit, but decided her work was crap. When she embraced a more diverse world and universe, an inspirational award winning author was born.

As a person of colour myself, I don’t actively hunt down books by PoC authors or featuring PoC characters, but it certainly makes me happy when I do find them. A new favourite author, N.K. Jemisin inspired me to pick up and subsequently love love love her book, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, largely thanks to this quote:

This [fantasy] genre is rooted in the epic — and the truth is that there are plenty of epics out there which feature people like me. […] So given all these myths, all these examinations of the possible…how can I not imagine more? How can I not envision an epic set somewhere other than medieval England, about someone other than an awkward white boy? How can I not use every building-block of my history and heritage and imagination when I make shit up?

But sometimes, all it takes is a cover to immediately attract my attention. I’m a sucker for a beautiful, vibrant, stunning cover and I most recently fell for the beautiful, vibrant, stunning ladies on the covers of these books.

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone is now high on my to-read list, and you may have already seen Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel a few times here at BiblioSanctum. Ascension’s diversity goes far beyond skin deep and impressed me so much that I had to interview author Jacqueline Koyanagi to learn more.

There is a growing number of books about and being told by diverse people. These are merely the two that recently caught my eye. Science fiction and fantasy, of all genres, give us the opportunity to step so far away from our prejudices, and I’m really glad to see authors (and now publishers) finally realizing that there is more to our world and beyond than stories about 30 year old white guys.