Non-white readers and writers are falling in love with speculative fiction in increasing numbers – which is why we need to remove its racist figurehead
Last month I walked through the crowded corridors of Javits Center with tears in my eyes. It was New York Comic Con and around me flourished a sea of black and brown faces, many partially concealed beneath goggles, prosthetic zombie wounds or masks. For one of the first times since I started writing speculative fiction five years ago, I felt at home in my own genre.
Earlier this summer, the old guard of fantasy got very uncomfortable over a petition I started asking for the World Fantasy Award to remove the bust of HP Lovecraft as its statuette and replace it with Octavia Butler. Lovecraft was an uneven craftsman at best – his stories clunk along, overburdened with adjectives and stale characters. It’s his world-building and imagination that helped solidify his legacy, but even that is tainted by a failure of craft and humanity. He detailed his rabid, paranoid racism in many letters, and it permeates his mythos. Lovecraft peopled his fiction with hordes of swarthy, child-killing and abjectly stupid black and brown people, while women are almost non-existent.
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via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1vBoj3q
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