Thank you for your response! I haven’t watched the film yet but plan to after the dust settles a little more.

I think you’re on the SF Canada listserv? I’m there too! I mostly lurk and pipe up now and then with two bits. Loose change.

I wanted to thank you for your thoughtful article, which I found through Charles Tan. I loved the books and did some researching afterward. I read somewhere that Collins envisioned it as a kind of post-racial world, so I was kind of disappointed that the movie was still very white to me (check out District 12!), although overall, I thought it was well-acted, visually interesting, and conveyed the main lines of the story

I agree that the vagueness about Rue and other’s physical characteristics meant that it was unclear she was black and that the challenge for us, as writers, is to convey physical characteristics and culture without resorting to stereotypes. One of my friends said not to compare black skin to coffee or chocolate, for example, and I was stymied.

Thanks again.
P.S. For the movie, I’m with Puss in Boots. Team Cinna all the way!

As a writer, I wanted to offer some tips about how I manage gender and race descriptions in my stories. It all begins in character creation; if you fully realize the character, whatever their background is will seep naturally into the narrative.

For example, I have a character of Afghan descent in my current work-in-progress. He’s a first-generation immigrant to a colonized world in space; as a result, he and his wife occasionally reminisce about their lives back on Earth in Jalalabad. These (brief) discussions about their old lives add character traits, cultural flavor, and distinct ethnic diversity to the narrative.

The idea being, that if the character is well formed, these unique signifiers come out naturally in conversation and thought. A lot of that comes down to planning–and of course, progressive authors, editors, and publishers.

However, I wanted to add to green-knight’s thoughts a little, though since I write SF (mostly near-ish future) I don’t have to agonize over developing non-Earth-analogue races for my stories.

(I did in one so-far unpublished story, and found myself relying on skin tone, body shape, and eye color, but also, very much, on norms of clothing between the two societies, which of course was also affected by the fact one society’s women were invading the other’s country…)

But anyway, from real life experience, one thing I noticed early on as an outsider here in Korea was the kinds of subjective or imagined differences that groups tend to be attributed to different “races” sometimes are a bigger deal than any “objective” differences you might describe from a neutral, 3rd person point of view.

Easy examples include stereotypes like Westerners all having big noses or blue eyes (mine seem to shift from blue to green to grey depending on what I’m wearing, and other conditions), or the mythology (like Korean guys craning to check the white/black/other guy’s junk in the public baths, to see if the myths are true).

But the more interesting examples (to me) seem to connect to defining Koreanness versus Chineseness or Japaneseness — to differentiating one’s group from neighboring groups, with whom one’s group likely intermixed extensively in the past, though that’s sort of not up for discussion following contemporary historiography.

My partner is ethnically Korean, but her face supposedly unstereotypically round for a Korean, and having spent a good chunk of her life abroad, she doesn’t dress or walk/talk like the average Korean woman, so she gets asked whether she’s some other race (usually Chinese, occasionally Japanese) surprisingly often. Though she doesn’t dress outrageously differently, the subtle differences (and lack of makeup, surely) seem to be enough to get her odd looks even when she’s out and about without me.

These kinds of stereotypes, norms, misperceptions will be present in imagined societies too. I tend, as an outside in Northeast Asia, to be about as accurate as a local in distinguishing Japanese, Chinese, and Korean people (ie. those who grew up in those places) on sight; I managed this essentially by learning to go by fashion, hairstyle, and makeup, and pushing out of my memory all the the stuff many Koreans suggested to me about face shapes when I first got here. It’s far from foolproof (and useless on people from these ethnicities who grew up elsewhere, obviously), but over on this side of the world, it’s a *lot* more reliable than guessing based on face shape. And yet, the idea that Chinese reliably have round faces, Koreans have oval ones, and Japanese have long faces seems to persist here.

(Readers can test this for themselves using the quiz on this site: http://alllooksame.com/ … I sometimes give it to my (Korean) students when they are over-confident about this index…)

And that’s to say nothing of perceptions and misperceptions of cultural standards of behaviour… another can of worms, though, and one I don’t have time to serve at the moment.