Today’s MOC features a novelist at work in an office I aspire to own someday, watching the products of his imagination leap full-fleshed from the screen of his computer. Scroll down to see which genres our writer likes to work in.
As part of my commitment to anti-racism, I’ve been thinking a lot about myself as an artist. Writing fantasy fiction is my main artistic outlet and I hope to be published someday. Quite a lot of fantasy fiction is very Eurocentric (everything is set in Ye Olde Medieval England), and that was about all I was exposed to growing up in a small Wyoming town in the 80’s. My own writing reflects my one-sided reading; the map of the southern continent in the world of my novels is literally blank right now. And there are a lot of stereotypes and caricatures among the POC characters in speculative fiction, the product of systemic racism and ignorance.
So I’ve committed to reading the works of POC authors of speculative fiction and more fiction featuring POC characters. Here’s a great list of authors I found online:
Samuel R. Delany, Nalo Hopkinson, Tade Thompson, Karen Lord, Sofia Samatar, Marlon James, Tomi Adeyemi, Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin, and Octavia Butler.
For all the readers, writers, and gamers out there – who else would you recommend? Who are your favorite POC characters in fantasy fiction?
I picked up that floor technique from the MOCs of @ranghaal and @brickbard.
Also I just learned the terms Sword & Soul, Steamfunk, and Dieselfunk and I COULDN’T BE MORE PLEASED.
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