Diverse Fantastic Fiction Database
Wednesday, February 11th, 2015 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jesse_the_kEvery few months I'll see a call for "SFF with these sorts of characters." Kate Diamond is making it possible to generate those lists yourself, by creating and curating: All Our Worlds: Diverse Fantastic Fiction, a highly searchable database of SFF. Today there were 819 books. The more-than-twenty search criteria available now include characters of color, disability, transgender, agender, queer and many other qualities/attributes/identities. This All Our Worlds database includes older works as well as hot new titles, anthologies, and even webcomics! It just launched in December 2014, and your contributions are welcome.
begin quote This project was partially intended as a response to the sort of discussions that had led me to assume there was very little diversity in SFF. I wanted an alternative to what felt like endless criticism of popular books and disdain of new ones, focusing on the problem rather than the solution.
While criticism has its place, I think promotion is a more dynamic method of activism. Instead of talking about the flaws in one popular book, I want to bring two better ones to the table (or six hundred!) and promote them with enthusiasm and without snide comments about the popular one. Share good books. Promote indie authors who need the attention. Dig up old gems. Encourage new authors who work in webcomics and ebooks. If people can see the momentum already in the diverse book scene, if they buy newly published books and make them popular, more authors, especially minority authors, might be inspired to write, knowing they have a support base. Big publishers will see a new market. Readers will be excited to discuss new books instead of being afraid that their childhood favorites will be cynically dissected. It's a win for everybody: the authors get the attention, diverse works become more popular, and readers have something new to celebrate. quote ends
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Date: 2015-02-12 03:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-12 04:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-12 04:01 pm (UTC)And one or two of the summaries made me wince: "Jamey Barlowe has been crippled since childhood, the result of being born on the Moon. He lives his life in a wheelchair, only truly free when he is in the water." Apollo's Outcasts by Allen Steele That's two major problems in two sentences.
(Yeah, I know I'm being picky, but 'better' doesn't mean 'perfect').
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Date: 2015-02-12 04:20 pm (UTC)Yeah, I was 50-50 on the disability issue, actually. Sometimes it doesn't matter: when an author captures some of the essential experience I feel welcomed to the conversation -- I was pleased, for example, that Scalzi got the online disability culture thing right in Lock-In.
Senses, Body, Brain? How detailed a taxonomy would you prefer?
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Date: 2015-02-13 04:28 pm (UTC)As for how detailed a taxonomy, at minimum a distinction of Mental and Physical Disability, but I normally list Physical, Mental, Intellectual (pro/con arguments for including neurodiversity here), Sensory, and Invisible/Varying Disability when I want to distinguish different areas of disability. They all have distinct experiences of disability (in particular in how people react to them), but the main reason I push them is because the last four tend to fall under people's awareness threshholds unless you specifically drag attention to them
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Date: 2015-02-14 12:35 am (UTC)I mentioned the 14 gender vs 1 disability item to Kate Diamond, and she told me she'll be updating soon.
We can see what she comes up with then post it to