Why am I the only black person in any of my Dungeon and Dragons groups? I started playing Dungeons and Dragons recently, and that’s a question I can’t get out of my head.
One of the first things you have to do when playing Dungeons and Dragons is to create a character. When I did that for the first time, the thing that immediately struck me is that most of the fantasy ‘races’ you can pick for your character are very similar to those you can find in The Lord of the Rings. Due to legal reasons, Hobbits are called Halflings, but elves, dwarves and orcs exist in Dungeons and Dragons just as they do in Middle Earth.
The Lord of the Rings books were published in the 1950s and have shaped almost all of medieval fantasy. Dungeons and Dragons isn’t the only one. Even pieces of fiction like Game of Thrones sometimes define themselves by the way they diverge from these expectations. These are powerful tropes that have had generations of staying power. And who set them? A white man in the mid-1950s. And not just one white man. Think of Robert E. Howard and C. S. Lewis. Sci-fi is the same. We have Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke.
I could go on. When we look at the titans of sci-fi and fantasy, the authors who have set the table for these genres; they are almost entirely white men. Even today things are not that different, but how could they be?
The very essence of sci-fi and fantasy, the dreams and nightmares that fuel its content are ones created traditionally by and for white men. This doesn’t mean that no one else can engage with or enjoy these genres of fiction, but it just isn’t made primarily for us, not totally, and deep down I think we know it.
When I was a teenager, I decided to write a sci-fi novel of my own. It was filled with big ideas and heavily inspired by the things I had read and watched beforehand. Its main characters were white, all of them. It wasn’t something I thought about consciously, it’s just what felt right for these genres. I’m a black man and even when creating my own story, I couldn’t see someone who looked like me at the centre of it. It felt wrong to have a black boy as the main character, and that sucks because look at the position of sci-fi and fantasy in our current culture.
Star Wars, Star Trek, all of superhero media, The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones. These aren’t niche pieces of geek culture; they are the most popular pieces of mass market storytelling.
When our society looks to escapism; sci-fi and fantasy are where we look, but these genres aren’t just a pleasant distraction. The pieces of work here are also some of our society’s biggest contributors to fictional allegory, it’s been a place for centuries where fiction is used to comment on and reflect on our culture.
Sci-fi and fantasy have a key role in our society, but they can’t truly fill that role, not in its current state. When genres like sci-fi and fantasy are predominantly written by one group of people for so long, the tropes and expectations that run through those genres don’t and can’t represent the needs of everyone else.
We have escapism, but for who and from what?
We have allegories, but what commentary do they wish to make about society and which ones do they not?
When we write about the future, whose future do we see?
We are missing something.
Imagine a version of sci-fi and fantasy that builds empathy between people by telling the stories and mythologies of a diverse group of people.
Imagine a version of sci-fi and fantasy that explores the hopes, dreams, and potential futures that all people have, not just a select few.
The saddest things though, are the things I can’t imagine. A fear I have sometimes is that our expectations and tropes about sci-fi and fantasy are so set in stone that any ideas I may have about the genres are just going to run downstream of the ideas some white men had eighty years ago.
When I was younger and I read and watched the Lord of the Rings, I knew deep down that on some level it was not for me, a black man. Pretty much all the characters in the story are white, the only dark-skinned characters were Orcs and goblins. But I fell in love with the world and the characters and the stories, so I felt like this didn’t matter. Last year, a prequel series to the Lord of the Rings was released, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
There was immediately controversy amongst a segment of the fanbase because non-white characters were added to the franchise for the first time. It was a shock to me when I heard this, but it wasn’t just the racism that hit me. It was the realisation that the whiteness of this piece of fiction, something I was overlooking because I loved it so much, was a thing some fans really liked and wanted to preserve.
And this isn’t just a Lord of the Rings thing, this same dynamic exists all across the genres of sci-fi and fantasy whenever any type of diversity is introduced into a long-running franchise.
When we tolerate a status quo where only white men can write popular sci-fi and fantasy, we attract and provide space within these genres for people who only want white men to be able to write sci fi and fantasy. If the only future we can depict in these genres is one by and for white men, then people who find that fact important will make these genres their homes.
But if that is true then surely the opposite is as well, and if that’s the case, then maybe we can make things better. Every segment of this industry has some amount of power to enact change, we just need to have the will to use it.
Publishers can look for and publish a diverse group of authors and better support the authors on their lists. Readers can be less conservative in their book buying choices and seek out and buy books by non-white authors. Established writers can seek to support and mentor other non-white writers.
This can all be done today. And maybe if it is then sometime in the future I might find another black person in one of my Dungeon and Dragons groups.
Children’s author Alex Falase-Koya has been reading and writing since he was a teenager. His debut novel ‘Marv and the Mega Robot’ was inspired after Alex struggled to find superheroes in fiction who looked like him. By creating Marv, a superhero whose strengths are kindness and imagination, Alex hopes to have created a character to whom all children can relate. He is also the co-writer of Marcus Rashford’s first fictional book, The Breakfast Club Adventures: The Beast Beyond the Fence. A previous winner of Spread the Word’s 2018 London’s Writers Awards for YA and Children’s Fiction, Alex lives in Honor Oak with his two cats.
Illustration by Clio Isadora.