Beyond Tolkien
Fantasy authors of colour and what they reveal about the publishing industry
You can tell a lot about a person by the books they read.
Whenever I visit someone’s home, the first thing I look at is the contents of their bookshelf. Seeing what they read helps me with talking-points, such as common interests and what the host might recommend. My own bookcase is a mess, but the main articles are history monographs, comic-books, and fantasy novels. Indeed, several names in the latter category hold prominent positions on my shelves: J.R.R. Tolkien, Philip Pullman, George R.R. Martin, Ursula K. LeGuin, Robert Jordan, Terry Pratchett, and Brandon Sanderson, to name a few.
However, I recently caught sight of a significant short-coming to my collection: all of my fantasy icons were white. Not once, in over twenty-five years of reading speculative fiction, had I picked up a fantasy novel written by a person of colour. Intrigued, I decided to do some digging. Within a few minutes online, over a dozen names popped up:
Tomi Adeyemi, Marlon James, Amos Tutola, Ngugi wa Thiong’ o, Karen Lord,
Tochi Onyebuchi, Ben Okri, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Evan Winters,
David Anthony Durham, Kai Ashante Wilson, Sofia Samatar, L. Penelope, and
Charles R. Saunders, to name a few.
So, there were fantasy writers of colour. But why had I not heard of them before? Many of those mentioned above were veteran writers, with several having won literary awards. N.K. Jemesin, for instance, won the Nebular Award three times in a row. Sofia Samatar won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2014 for A Stranger in Olondria. And Ben Okri won the 1991 Booker Prize for The Famished Road. They had even scored movie-deals. In 2017, 20th Century Fox announced that it would be adapting Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone into a major motion picture. That same year, HBO acquired the rights to adapt Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death into a series produced by George R.R. Martin.
Furthermore, it wasn’t as if these writers didn’t bring new and noteworthy takes on the genre. These writers broke away from the Medieval Europe archetype or presented new ways of telling a fantasy story. For example, the world of Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone is based on Yoruba language and culture. The culture and narrative-style of Samatar’s Stranger in Olondria were inspired by various African traditions, while also aiming to diverge from the Fantasy genre’s obsessions with warfare. Similarly, Marlon James has stated that each book in his Darkstar-trilogy will break with the usual linear story arc typical of fantasy trilogies. Instead, the narrative of each book will be given by a different character as the events of the first book — Black Leopard, Red Wolf — are unraveled and retold through each of their perspectives. He has explained this as an essential element in African storytelling tradition, in which the plot and meaning of a story is expected to change with each retelling.
So again, why are these writers news to me? I could chalk it down to plain ignorance; or that I didn’t move in more diverse circles. However, readership is, typically, built on word-of-mouth and advertisement. As such, one could even blame the industry from which these books emerge. Indeed, in the last few months, diversity in the publishing business has been the focus of a great deal of debate.
In 2015, Lee & Low Publishing did a survey of the publishing industry in the U.S.; the survey found that 78% of the workforce identified as white. When they conducted the survey once more in 2019, that number was 76%. A similar study was conducted in the U.K. by the British Publishing Association, which found that 85% of the workforce identified as white. Maris Kreizman, writing in the L.A. Times argues that this lack of diversity stems from various financial realities of working in the industry. Besides the notoriously low starting salaries ($35,000–40,000 a year); and given that the industry’s central hubs are in such expensive locations such as London and New York City, it becomes almost impossible for anyone without a sturdy safety-net to stay in the business long enough to make a difference.
Bringing further attention to this debate was the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe. Black children’s writer L.L. McKinney created the hashtag with the intention that authors tweet what advances they were given for their books. The official spreadsheet shows that out of the 122 authors who made more than $100,000, 78 of them identified as white, while only seven identified as Black. John Scalzi, for instance, stated that he got $65,000 in advances for his first two books in 2005 and 2006 and that by his 13th book he was paid $3.4 million. Meanwhile, N.K. Jemisin, whose Shattered Earth sci-fi trilogy made her the first writer to win the prestigious Nebula Award three times in a row, was paid $24,000 for the lot. Maris explains this issue as being symptomatic of the publishing workforce’s lack of diversity. This is combined with the fact that since publishing has no scientific method for knowing what books will sell, editors are often forced to employ educated guess-work. As such, publishers will aim for writers and topics that have done well in terms of sale. For Black writers, therefore, publishers tend to prefer narratives about Black suffering, e.g. colonialism, enslavement, police-brutality, mass incarceration and so on.
If all a group can read about themselves is suffering, that can send a message that the only worthwhile stories they have to tell are about suffering. L.L. McKinney, writing on Tor.com, stated this very issue, and is not the first. Ben Okri argued for something similar back in 2014, saying that “overwhelming subjects” spawned literature that would be “less varied, less enjoyable and ultimately less enduring.”
However, while publishers have an enormous amount of power over what gets published and what gets proper attention, the reader also has a part to play. As a consumer, the reader can help a book gain attention — the simple act of recommending a book can go a long way. Giving it a good rating online goes even further. This is as much true for Fantasy as any genre of literature. So as much as it rests with the gatekeepers to strive for a more diverse workforce and author-list, it’s also up to readers to help these new and intriguing perspectives into the mainstream, which in turn can encourage the industry to give other types of stories a chance.
I’ll certainly be trying, as new names and stories start appearing on my shelf.
