Subversive Speculation of the Future of Scientific and Fantastic Fiction

          In a previous essay, "Tolkein and the Reality of Fantasy's Failure With Racism", I confronted the fantasy genre’s tendency towards racist caricatures of marginalized and exoticized people through fantastic cultures and races.  Reflecting upon that writing made got me thinking about the complexity of the fantasy genre itself and its ambiguous if not antagonistic relationship with science fiction.  This essay serves as a correction of that arbitrary literary distinction and I hope that my critique will not only enable the genres to be better understood but to expand beyond their current constraints to do what the genres were meant to do: create entertaining and enlightening fantasies.

          Both fantasy and science fiction are included within the speculative fiction genre, a wider genre of suspended disbelief.  The New Weird writer China Mieville, a personal favorite of mine, distinguished between the genres structurally in terms of impossibility and I think that is a useful format to follow.  So we can consider speculative fiction to deal with that which is impossible.  Within this we can make a distinction between what he defined as the not-yet-possible or the never-possible; the former belonging to science fiction and the latter to fantasy fiction.  Similarly Rod Serling defined the distinction as science fiction making the improbably possible while fantasy fiction making the impossible probable.  Science fiction is interested in narratives built upon the speculation of scientific knowledge in a consistent and continuous manner.  By contrast, fantasy fiction indulges in narratives based upon imaginative and magical mythologies, often discontinuous if not in contradiction to our scientific and historical knowledge.

          Starting from this stereotypical understanding of each genre we can construct contrasting expectations for the surface setting and narrative each will take.  Science fiction involves a confrontation with the consequences of actualized speculative science such as artificial intelligence, the colonization of other planets, extraterrestrial communication, virtual reality or time travel.  Fantasy includes a conflict between good and evil, fate and destiny, with magical powers, divine beings, and fantastic creatures.  Science fiction is futuristic and progressive while fantasy is medieval and conservative.  The former not only occurs in a scientifically and technologically-advanced future continuous with our present world but resolves its conflicts by advancing technology or knowledge even further.  The latter, fantasy fiction, typically occurs in a world historically disconnected and politically more primitive than our own and resolves its conflicts by restoring the current political and cosmological status-quo  through the recovery of some forgotten artifact or restoration of some lost royal bloodline.

          The subversion of this literary binary between science fiction and fantasy fiction begins by showing that the surface plot and setting stereotypes do not following from the structure underlying them.  I think that one could transport the surface tropes of plot and setting relatively intact from one genre into another without destabilizing its structural integrity or needing to superfluous postulation of some genre hybrid.  Science fiction explanations of the world are continuous or at least compatible with our own scientific understanding of the world and a large amount of the appeal of the genre revolves around how rigorously it extrapolates from current scientific theory to justify its speculative elements.  Fantasy is different in that it is more or less discontinuous with our scientific understanding of the world if not explicitly in contradiction to it through its re-appropriation of outdated pseudo-sciences like alchemy or invention of supernatural magic systems.  Science fiction worlds are identifiable as historically related to our world either in the near or far-future or as an alternate history that deviated from our history at some point.  Due to the typical inclusion of supernatural elements like magic and gods, fantasy is not historically related to our world even when it appears to be set in an alternate historical period.  Science fiction narratives have a history that can be traced back to a period of our own world’s history while fantasy fiction narratives have their own world history or supernatural doppelganger histories of our own non-magical world history.  Science fiction represents a possibility of our world as an actuality while fantasy fiction represents a world impossible for us but actual to itself.

          The distinction between science fiction and fantasy becomes more complicated when one considers the relatively recent emergence of sub-genres such as urban fantasy or steam-punk.  In such genres, fantasy tropes such as magic, gods or supernatural creatures such as elves, fairies and vampires are introduced into modern settings such as Victorian London or modern New York.  Insofar as these stories contain supernatural elements I think they are un-controversially fantasy stories because the supernatural as a force that contradicts our scientific understanding of the world mark a clear discontinuity with our world.  Even if it is set in a city called London, it is clearly not the London of our world insofar as we do not understand magic as an intelligible part of our world, of which London is a part.  But insofar as the steam-punk genre does not include supernatural elements and is set in a world historically connected to our own I think it is acceptable to label it as science fiction and not fantasy fiction.  What is crucial is the element of historical and scientific continuity with our world: the advancements in Victorian steam-technology must be explained compatible with current scientific understanding and plausible for the Victorian time-period.  Were anachronistic technological advancements such as robots to exist within the time period that could not be explained or produced in accordance with the scientific understanding of the Victorian era, the narrative would fit within the fantasy genre, even if it lacked supernatural explanations for the existence of said robots.

          Science fiction has a historical prejudice towards the future and fantasy fiction towards the past.  Actually in the case of fantasy this isn’t really intelligible in most cases, as most fantasy has no historical continuity with our past but is a unique world in itself or resembles our present as is the case with urban fantasy.  Regardless, these historical prejudices can be quite comfortably reversed.  A story set on foreign planets with aliens and robots meditating on time travel could be recognized as fantasy fiction while a story in a pseudo-medieval world with dragons and trolls could be considered science fiction.  George Lucas’ Star Wars is a good example of fantasy fiction appearing in a setting typically reserved for science fiction because its history is not represented as our future, it includes supernatural magic such as the Jedi and Sith Force and it doesn’t concern itself with scientific plausibility.  The speculative fiction story set in a pseudo-medieval world with dragons and trolls can be considered science fiction, albeit pulpy science fiction, if it is recognizable as our world, and the dragons and trolls are explained as evolutionarily continuous with other life (dragons are pterosaurs that managed to survive the extinction of dinosaurs and trolls are related to Neanderthals).  What matters is how the world presented in the text is understood in relation to our world and how such an explanation for the world arises within the text itself.    If the world of the text has a historical relation to our world and its explanations are continuous and compatible with our understanding of our world then it is science fiction.  Whenever the history and explanations of speculative elements deviates from our world and is explained in accordance to its own history, pseudo-science or systematic magic, it is fantasy fiction.

          There has been some considerable debate over whether or not a narrative can lack magic or the supernatural and still be considered fantasy fiction as opposed to some other ill-defined genre of speculative fiction.  I believe that a story could indeed dispense with such supernatural elements and still be considered as fantasy fiction.  What is important to the distinction between science fiction and fantasy fiction is the continuity of the former with our understanding of our world and the discontinuity of the latter with our understanding of our world.  Supernatural features such as magic, gods, and miracles represent an explicit departure from such continuity but it is not the only form such departure can take.  A story set on island nations fighting off plague-spreading sentient fungus beings would be fantasy fiction insofar as the narrative has no recognizable connection to our world or our understanding of it.  But if it was set on a future Earth flooded due to global warming struggling against the fungal plague, then it could be science fiction because such a setting is continuous with our Earth in the aftermath of global warming and presumably has a pseudo-scientific explanation for the fungal plague, perhaps a mutation of the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis like in the popular video-game The Last of Us.

          It is just as legitimate whether science fiction can do without science in the narrative and still fit within the genre, although to my knowledge such a debate has not really occurred among genre enthusiasts.  I think that a science fiction story can dispense with scientific explanations and still fit within the genre more or less, although such a fit will not be explicitly apparent.  What is important is that the narrative and setting of the story is continuous with our world and at a minimum compatible with our current understanding of the world.  But such compatibility with our current science need not itself be presented scientifically, it need only not explicitly contradict it.  In the medieval science fiction story with dinosaur-dragons it would make little sense to explicitly state that they had evolved from dinosaurs as if the theory of evolution was not common knowledge, or even privileged knowledge at the time given the state of science at the time, or lack thereof.  But one could implicitly work the connection into the narrative by saying that priests had collected bones from different layers in the earth, more or less in resemblance to the dragons they were familiar with and were beginning to question whether they had changed over time.  If science fiction can write about time periods prior to the emergence of the scientific method, and I think that it can, it makes little sense to define narrative explanations of the world in scientific terms.  But it strikes one as absurd to say that one can write science fiction unscientifically, and for this reason I will conclude this essay by suggesting a revision to the dichotomous labels of science fiction and fantasy fiction.

          There is space for ambiguity as to whether a given narrative can be defined as science fiction or fantasy fiction.  This occurs when the context of the world is neither recognizable as explicably continuous with our own nor precludes its possibility of being so.  I think any fantasy story devoid of the supernatural can conceivably fall within this categorization.  Consider a story set on an exotic world where humans live under elven overlords in a mountainous feudal kingdom threatened by swarms of dragons.  Such a story is apparently fantasy fiction as it has no continuity with our world or our understanding of it.  But later in the story it is revealed that humanity colonized this world as part of a space-faring empire originally descended from Earth and the elves and dragons are aliens which superficially resemble those of Earth fantasies.  Sounds more like science fiction now.  If science fiction is the genre of the not-yet possible and fantasy fiction of the never-possible, then such an ambiguous narrative could be labeled the not-yet-never-possible because it has not yet been closed off as violating the continuity with our understanding of the world.

          But our understanding of the world, even when mediated through the stricture of the scientific method, is subject to dramatic and destabilizing revision.  If the genre of science fiction is dependent upon continuity with such a worldview, then when this worldview is disproven, the narrative of the story lacks continuity with our world and ceases to be science fiction.  This is the fate of many, and possibly all, science fiction narratives to some extent as necessitated by the progress of scientific understanding: the science fiction of today is the fantasy fiction of tomorrow.  In ironic anticipation of this, consider speculative fiction set in an apparently science fiction world with the intrusion of inexplicable forces unintelligible to us.  Returning to our ambiguous narrative above, consider that further into the story it is revealed that the colonization was a response to the supernatural destruction of Earth by God’s angels because humanity had turned from worship of God to the idolization of science.  Later on it could be revealed that these angels were merely a more-advanced alien species utilizing technology that manipulated physics beyond our understanding so that it appears supernatural in nature.  Now we seem to be possibly back into the genre of fantasy fiction.  So on and so forth.

          This tension can be used to enhance the narrative through mystery insofar as it is never certain whether the world is continuous with our own and whether it can be exhaustively explicable according to (scientific) principles we will find intelligible.  A fantasy fiction can always be revealed to have a scientific explanation and a science fiction can always have forces which transcend explanation according to scientific principles as well as depend upon scientific principles which will eventually come to be understood as fantasy.  In line with previous thinking we can label this ambiguity of the speculative fiction genre as the never-not-yet-possible because it can never be definitively understood as a speculation which will remain or come to be explicable continuous with our scientific understanding of reality or whether it will elude such comprehension and continue to be perceived as supernatural.  A good speculative fiction narrative has to be plausible even if it is fantastic in nature and especially so if it is scientific in nature.  This plausibility arises out of the correspondence between the narrative of the text and the world of the text; when the narrative arises predictably out of the available knowledge of the world it is plausible, and when there is contradiction the story loses plausibility and the power of escapism which makes speculative fiction such an appealing genre.    If the narrative of the medieval science fiction story explains dragons as evolutionarily related to dinosaurs, you also need to explain how the theory of evolution itself arises out of a world ignorant of such a theory.  If not, the juxtaposition of a scientific narrative with a pre-scientific world will be jarring to the reader.  This is part of the challenge for writers challenging the hegemony of strict genre labels, and makes writers that effectively do so all the more impressive.

          I do not consider this a flaw of the model I am proposing but rather an advantage of it. It allows is to be comfortable with the tendency of science fiction stories to cease to be properly scientific and come to resemble fantasy as does it allow us to understand fantasy stories such as folklore and mythology as pseudo-scientific insofar as they are naively consistent with our current scientific understanding of the world.  Our narratives are subject to revision relative to how we understand our world in relation to the text and how those within the narrative of the text understand the world itself.  Science fiction and fantasy fiction as part of speculative fiction operate along a continuum between the ideals of familiarity and creativity.  Pure familiarity would replicate our world and pure creativity would be unintelligible to our world; both are impossible ideals insofar as any reproduction of this world is an idealized reduction of this world and any creativity of another world involves extrapolation from this world.  As a general rule, science fiction would tend towards what is more familiar than fantasy fiction since the former is continuous with our understanding of this world while the latter is not: it would be much harder to justify a human being turned into an insect in a science fiction narrative than it would be to do so in a fantasy fiction narrative.  This is the very appeal of subverting the narrow understanding of genre labels: the challenge of being able to think of fantastic imagery scientifically and to think of scientific scenarios as magical.  Not only do science fiction and fantasy fiction texts change genre labels throughout the history of our world, but our understanding of the text’s genre can change within the text itself depending on the form and content of its narrative, subverting our expectations again and again and forcing us to think more critically and creatively not only about the confines of the text but our world as well.

          Science fiction and fantasy fiction are not absolute and mutually exclusive genre labels but are two theoretical perspectives of the narrative relative to how we theorize the world of that narrative to be continuous and explicable with our theoretical understanding of our own world.  Although I think the genre label of any given story to be relatively stable across time, we must at least admit of the possibility that it can change and such stability is a contingency largely maintained for marketing advantages.  Genre labels are convenient ways of marketing a book in relation to other popular works to similar works to a particular demographic; it is hard to sell a book defined as fantasy-yet-possibly-science-fiction-but-eventually-fantasy.  But insofar as we are thinking theoretically in terms of genre, we can see the ambiguity and fluidity of these labels as well as their insufficiency.  What we need is a modification in our description of these genres.  Natural and supernatural fiction appears to be appealing but fantasy is not strictly defined by its inclusion of the supernatural, only by its discontinuity between the world of the text and the world of the reader, of which the supernatural is only the most explicit form.  Rational and irrational fiction is also appealing, but I think the latter is a pejorative used by science fiction genre enthusiasts against fantasy fiction unjustifiably; fantasy fiction is not irrational per se, it simply does not abide by a rationality bounded by the world of the reader and operates according to reasons internally consistent only with itself.  Fantasy fiction can be just as systematic and critical as science fiction, but it has its own system as it does its own history.

          Hypothetical fiction and fantastical fiction is a superior distinction between the two genres.  Science fiction does not necessarily have to do with science per se, but it is certainly structured by it insofar as it extrapolates from current scientific theory to form an imaginative world or makes historical changes to our world and contemplates the hypothetical consequences of such an adjustment.  Science fiction is science fiction not because of its content but its methodology just as fantasy fiction is fantastic not because it necessarily deals with the chimerical and magical but because it creates its world purely from the unconstrained imagination of the author, unbounded from the limitations of the author’s own world.  For too long in the history of speculative fiction have the hypothetical and fantastical fiction genres labored under the burden of their aesthetics, ignoring the underlying structural distinctions that make them unique genres and allow them to think more creatively from within that framework.  Hypothetical fiction doesn’t have to be constrained by the limitations of space opera battles, alien invasion, time travelers, or robotic revolutions and fantasy doesn’t need to find us again and again with magical monsters, feudal kingdoms, dark lords, and divine quests.  I think an increasing amount of speculative fiction authors are aware of this possibility, and are being imaginative enough to explore its implications by writing work that exists outside the binary of science and fantasy fiction.  The best example of this is the emerging and mutating genre of the New Weird, of which China Mieville is master.  Incorporating high and low fantasy, science fiction, horror, super-hero, dystopian, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, alternative-history, and steam-punk genres, the New Weird is continually reimagining the limitations and excess of the fantastical fiction genre and it is time for hypothetical fiction to join in that conversation.  Any of these genres can as previously considered can be contained and combined within hypothetical or fantastical fiction depending on how the narrative of the text understands its world and how the reader of understands the relationship between the world of the text and  their own world.

          I began this essay by following China Mieville’s distinction within speculative fiction between the not-yet-possible of hypothetical fiction and the never-possible of fantasy fiction.  I then expanded it to accommodate the horizons of the not-yet-never-possible and the never-not-yet-possible; the former belonging to the possibility of science fiction stories which are discredited scientifically and become pseudo-scientific fantasy fiction and the latter corresponding to speculative fiction which cannot be confined within either genre label definitively but always exists in the twilight of each, open to interpretation.  To a certain extent, I think all speculative fiction is the genre of the not-yet-never-possible because neither we do not understand ourselves and the world around us exhaustively nor can we understand the world of speculative fiction texts in that way nor can the narrator’s within the texts themselves.  All literature is escapism to some extent, and speculative fiction especially so, but all the more powerful for it.  We escape our world into the world of the text, to return to our world, to see ways in which our world could have been and could still be through hypothetical fiction and to see the mystery and fantasy we have forgotten in our world when juxtaposed with other unique worlds through fantastical fiction.  There is always the possibility of the impossible becoming probable and the probable becoming possible and each being reversed both within the world of the text and our own world.  Speculative fiction allows us to creatively and critically understand ourselves and our world by confronting the improbabilities and impossibilities of our lives through hypothetical and fantastical literary narratives.  

Tolkein and the Reality of Fantasy's Failure With Racism

          With the help of my girlfriend I have recently been rehabilitated into appreciating the fantasy genre.  Before her, my only exposure to fantasy came from Rowling and Tolkien. I had read science fiction literature too, but because I consider it a genre distinct from fantasy and because I see it less impacted by what I am to criticize in this essay, I need not mention it in any more detail.  The first book I read in my recovery of fantasy was the Silmarillion by Tolkien because I considered epic fantasy to be the essence of the genre, and I understood the Silmarillion to be the epitome of epic fantasy.

          This was a poor choice to reintroduce me to the fantasy genre because in reading it, I realized how Eurocentric and orientalist Tolkien is.  Whether this was due to my sympathy for the political revolutions of the Middle East and North Africa, or it was my interest in Islamic philosophy and theology, or my countless friendships with Muslim and Arab Americans (of which one is my girlfriend), I cannot say, though I am sure all had an influence on my reception of his epic.  In reaction I began to search out other works of great fantasy and it soon became apparent to me that much, if not most, of the literary tradition Tolkien had inspired had inherited his Eurocentric and orientalist mythology and made it essential to the fantasy genre.

          This essay is a confrontation with that legacy of fantasy which exoticizes and literally demonizes minorities and the immorality and hypocrisy involved in doing so.  I believe that this tendency can be traced back to Tolkien’s writing and will thus devote my attention to his work, though it extends past the writing of Tolkien and becomes less forgivable as it does so.  Before I explore the racism of fantasy world-building in the Tolkien tradition of epic fantasy, let me first make clear that I do not believe Tolkien was personally a racist.  He certainly wasn’t a racist in the sense appropriate to his times given that he praised the Jewish people and had great sympathy for the mistreatment of Africans in their native continent by colonialists as well as equal disdain for racism towards Germans and the racist ideology of German Nazis and their anti-Semitic sympathizers.

          That is not to say that by today’s standards Tolkien could be viewed as a benevolent racist with condescending and exoticized impressions of people of color.  But that is not the point.  I am not interesting in criticizing Tolkien himself as a racist, malevolent or benevolent, but in critiquing the racism inherent in his fantastic fiction.  Even if Tolkien himself opposed racism consciously in his person, he embodied it unconsciously in his writing, which has been continuously reproduced in those inspired by his Middle Earth mythology.  His literature transformed the fantasy genre and its continued relevance and popularity makes a critical analysis of it necessary.  The implicit racism of fantasy is not merely detrimental to people of color, but it is detrimental to the imaginative and progressive potential of the genre itself.

          In the mythology of Middle Earth, racism, like morality, is a matter of literal black and white and with racism and morality being mutually reinforcing to the fiction.  The good races of humans, elves, dwarves, hobbits and wizards are near universally represented as fair Europeans while the evil races in service to Sauron are men of the South and East, Southron and Easterlings, paralleling Arabs, Africans and Indians, or sub-human creatures of troll, goblin and orc of dark complexion and slant-eyed.  In and of itself, the tendency for fantasy to create unique ethnicities and races (i.e. species) distinct from humanity is not any more problematic than the tendency of science-fiction authors to imagine species of alien distinct from humanity.  The problem is when the fantasy author homogenizes race around morality absolutely, such that to be an elf is to be inherently predisposed to do good and to be an orc is to be inherently evil.  This is especially problematic when the ethnicity or race parallels a historical ethnicity, especially one that has suffered or continues to suffer radical discrimination and oppression.

          It was a flaw of Tolkien’s work that the majority of the evil forces came from the regions of East and South, from cultures strongly resembling African, Middle Eastern and Indian people, and that the entirety of these cultures was represented as evil.  Even more flawed is his description of orcs, in particular the sub-species of uruk-hai, as slant-eyed, repulsive Mongol-types.  The historical cultures of Africa and Asia have had to struggle with colonialism and imperialism justified through demonized or romanticized orientalist ideologies and that legacy is reflected in the literary politics of much fantasy literature.  The dark skinned people of the East and South are represented as exotic, ignorant, enigmatic, immoral or even inhuman in ways that that parallel historical racist ideologies.  Creating a fictional parallel to Asian or African cultures is not merely acceptable but beneficial for both the people and the genre but only insofar as such fictional representations are sufficiently culturally diverse and not morally homogenous so as to subvert offensive stereotypes.


          Although Tolkien’s literature has examples of good people or races turning to evil, the fall of the Numenoreans for example, there is the utter absence of evil races finding redemption.  The only way to deal with evil peoples is to kill them, and this usually involves killing the entire population of them.  This inequality is typically repeated in epic fantasy with the trope of good characters being corrupted by the evil lord and evil characters, if not whole races, needing to be slain because they are incapable of being accepting what is good.  Evil is thus not only pervasive but pathological and the solution to it is perverse; because the evil can corrupt the good and the good cannot convince the evil to abandon their immorality, the good can only maintain moral purity by eliminating all those deemed evil.  It is a moral duty to seek the extermination of orcs and goblins, trolls and ogres, because they in turn seek the extermination of the more fair and noble races.  However, their motivation for such wanton bloodlust remains inexplicable and enigmatic amounting to nothing more than the identification of their race with evil incarnate.

          One may object that we are here speaking of orcs and ogres, not mere men, and that for the former morality is essential while for the latter it is incidental.  That is to say that an orc cannot be good and still be considered an orc but a man can be good or evil and still be considered a man (one may even go so far as to say that for a man to necessarily be good or evil is not to be a man at all.  This response is uninteresting because the idea of a person, human or orc, as inherently evil is incoherent; evil is an intentional act with motive and meaning but if the being is innately evil then its actions are not motivated by evil intentions but merely by instincts that ape what we consider evil.  This lack of intentionality makes it impossible to identify with the motives of such people and it is precisely the power of evil to parody that which is good and to rationalize itself as an instrument of that good, that makes it such a threat to morality and such a tragic source of conflict in literature and history alike.  Without the contingency of evil being dependent upon corrupt motives, one cannot empathize with one’s enemies and one cannot struggle to comprehend the lessons of moral conflict and the narrative collapses into self-serving and impoverished ideology.

          Epic fantasy has a tendency to be inconsistent in its racism, and all the more racist for it.  On the one hand, fantastic races such as orcs and trolls are considered inhuman.  But on the other hand, such races are able to reproduce with humans (or other fantastic races) to produce half-breeds who are viewed as a corruptive degeneration of the more noble and pure half of their ancestry.  For example, in Tolkien the uruk-hai are born of the union between man and orc, with orcs themselves being a union of corrupt elves.  Even though elves, men and orcs are considered different races, they are able to produce offspring with one another. This inconsistency between labeling another being in-human (and in the case of races like orcs, sub-human), yet having fear and disgust over it producing children with a human is a parallel to historical racism.  There has been a tendency to vilify people of color as sub-human animals while also being anxious and hateful of unions between them and white people.  This irrational category of in-human human parallels the irrational fear and hatred of the racist themselves.  The race is a threat both because it is inhuman and incapable the moral and racial purity of humanity but also because it can infiltrate this humanity.  This returns us to the justification and celebration of genocidal warfare popularized in epic fantasies against inhuman species: because the inhuman is inherently immoral and cannot be integrated into society, but can infiltrate society and spread its corruptive influence through breeding, it must be exterminated through righteous violence.

          A modest effort to provide some diversity in the fantasy genre has been to create cultural parallels between minority races in history and literature.  However, such parallels have a tendency to be inadequate or inconsiderate.  One on hand, cultural diversity might manifest superficially as simply a mere difference in skin tone while still retaining the same Eurocentric culture; on the other hand, such multicultural representation may be fetishized into exotic and oriental stereotypes.  The Southron and Easterlings in Tolkien are of the latter sort as are the Dothraki of Martin to a less offensive extent.  An extreme example of this tendency would be the association of the appropriated historical culture with a fantastical in-human or sub-human race.  Elves may be given a semblance of Native American civilization or goblins may have a Mongol aesthetic.

          People of color who have already had their cultural identity and historical narratives marginalized and manipulated by those in power; they are appropriated into commodified parodies or incorporated into the ideological narratives of their oppressors, if not erased entirely.  In this effort to historicize fantastic literature we equally fantasize the history of already alienated peoples; in an attempt to humanize our monsters we demonize a people even further.  People of color who have already had their cultural identity and historical narratives marginalized and manipulated by those in power; they are appropriated into commodified parodies or incorporated into the ideological narratives of their oppressors, if not erased entirely.  When this imposition is superficial, the effect is quite obviously de-humanizing and doubly so. Such superficial imposition of cultural diversity is doubly offensive for not only does it reduce the historical culture to token tropes of ritual or aesthetic but it also refashions it into the culture of some in-human race. Yet the dominant white cultures of the genre continue to parallel the dominant white cultures of history, free from association with the inhuman and monstrous despite the often inhumanely monstrous consequences of their racist imperialism.

          Some further object to racist accusations of the fantasy genre by insisting that this is the way the world was back then.  Back when? When dragons flew the skies, dwarves mined the depths, and wizards amused the masses with magic? This is yet another irrational inconsistency in the racist strand of fantasy fiction.  It both parodies reality as a justification for its offensive stereotypes but escapes reality to act out the appalling logic of those fantasies: Middle Earth is British mythic fantasy and at the time the Ottoman East was an existential threat to the West, but its fine to label the Easterlings indiscriminately evil because they are not really Ottoman Turks, and after all, and it’s just fantasy anyways, so the enjoying the literary slaughter of them is morally inconsequential.  Such orientalist readings operate by oscillating between reality and fantasy where convenient when criticized but the incoherence is evident.

          One need not make a historical critique of this response by showing that the conflict between East and West was not a class of civilizations and still less a cataclysm of monumental good and evil or that history is not monumental and fixated on feudal medieval Europe but encompasses other empires and epochs too.   One need only point out the obvious reality that fantasy literature is not about historical realities but fictional fantasies.  When one writes a fantasy narrative, the world building is not, and should attempt not be, in explicit dialogue with the historical realities of the author (even though there may be allegorical parallels) but instead it should be in conversation with the history of other fantasy writings.  Tolkien’s Middle-Earth has little relation to the history of medieval England than it does the fantasies and romances popular in Medieval England and when Martin or Meiville write their contemporary grim or weird fantasy epics, they are converting and subverting the literary tropes and genre expectations popularized by Tolkien far more than they are doing so with modern history itself.

          Given this one may still be indifferent towards such fictional discrimination and insist that it is merely just fantasy so it is not truly racist; they aren’t Arab, they are Haradrim, and they aren’t African Americans, they are ogres.  Even if the parallel is superficially related to appearance and geography only, the parallel can nevertheless be offensive.  If Haradrim are universally portrayed as dark-skinned primitive tribesmen from the East who worship an evil false god in Sauron, that is enough of a parallel to cause warranted offense to people of Middle Eastern or Indian descent.  Then consider how monstrous races like orcs are also associated with supposedly primitive and oppressive cultures.  Multiply that trope again and again in authors who follow the moralistic cosmology that Tolkien originated and you have a history of people of color being discriminated against in fantasy literature.  This would not be a problem if it were not a pervasive tendency in much of fantasy literature; one could perhaps enjoy a book featuring pale protagonists fighting against dark-skinned demons from the South if this was a limited example of a diverse and imaginative genre but unfortunately it is a recurrent narrative of fantasy.  

          This is a particularly painful irony given that the escapism fantasy is criticized for has been rendered futile for the oppressed; seeking to escape the abuse of their identity in reality through the solace of literature, they see the same racist stereotypes represented in the genre with the most potential to directly confront and subvert the racist fantasies of that haunt our history.  A black boy humiliated by his white class-mates may seek to escape from his oppressive situation by contemplating on the struggles of a young boy in a fantasy world, only to find that the only black characters in the story are evil foreigners, if there are any black characters at all.  It is symptomatic of white privilege to be able to escape into fantastic literature and easily find empowering examples of people who parallel one’s own culture and it is representative of racism to find the same negative associations between dark skin, foreign customs and moral evil as one finds in the ideologies of racist politics.

          The association of racism with fantasy isn’t just offensive to the minorities it implicitly insults but undermines the fantasy genre itself.  Fantasy is already considered a sub-literary genre merely because of its intrinsic imaginative potential, and is accused of indulgent escapism.  I think the very name of the genre itself, fantasy, is revealing when one contemplates its relationship with implicit racism.  Fantasy literature is just that, a fantasy that we indulge in, and these indulgences are revealing of our mindsets.  Someone who takes oblivious pleasure from a narrative dominated by xenophobic aristocratic pseudo-Europeans struggling against evil dark-skinned and sub-human hordes in order to restore the feudal status-quo, is complicit in allowing literature to perpetuate the oppressive ideologies of history, if not unconsciously supportive of such oppression.  This is the failure of Tolkien and his ilk: even if they speak out against racism, their literature enables it because it parallels the orientalizing and dehumanizing aesthetic fantasies that oppression depends upon.  Fantasy that reproduces such systems of oppression in its world-building is at best uninteresting and at worst irresponsible.

          Fantasy can be relevant to reality, not because of its fidelity to history but in spite of it; fantasy is most progressive and transformative when it confronts the crisis of history without being confined by the identities and ideologies that cause them.  When one reads a fantasy epic about the struggle between elves and orcs, one can bypass their inherent prejudices to better contemplate moral and existential ambiguities that would be less transparent if the narrative was based around a perspective they were predisposed towards. But when one starts to notice that all the elves are white and noble and from the civilized West while the orcs are universally dark and primitive from the exotic and evil East, such potential is lost.  The appeal of the fantasy genre is the simplicity and beauty of its cosmological economy; the world can be built around moralized aesthetics to create a hyper-symbolic universe (where dark literally represents evil and light good for example); but this is also its great danger insofar as certain people fall outside of this mythic order (i.e. dark skinned people reading it find those similar to them identified as evil by skin-tone alone).   Fantasy provides an escape from the constriction of our own cultural narratives and expectations so that we may return to reality with a better appreciation for those of others as well as our own.  Fantasy has the greatest potential to confront and contradict oppression against racist oppression so it is all the more offensive when it is just another means to perpetually interpret them as Other.

          What is to be done to empower not only marginalized people of color, but the marginalized genre of fantasy itself? One should be aware that not all fantasy writers are guilty of such abuse, and I have my hopes that writers are becoming increasingly aware of the moral inadequacy of the genre’s world-building and are being proactive in correcting it, with some sub-genres being more vocal than others.  Urban fantasy, steam-punk and new weird writers such as China Meiville, Max Gladstone, NK Jemisin, Ian McDonald, Neil Gaiman, David Anthony Durham, Daniel Abraham, and Ursala K Le Guin write for, if not from, marginalized identities and their empowerment within and through literary fantasy.  Fantasy is a predominantly white genre, and whether this is the cause or the effect of its tendency towards aestheticizing racism I am not certain, but I am certain that because of its inherent white privilege it is the responsibility of white authors to be more active in addressing this perversion of their genre’s potential.  White authors are published easier and more successfully than minority authors and are better received by fans and thus they have more potential to transform the genre for a wider audience.  But this means dealing honestly with racism in their literature.  Just as ignoring racial identities perpetuates the oppression of people of color and only reinforces white privilege, so too does stripping fantasy of racial conflict ignore the reality of it within history as well as the genre.  A fantasy narrative devoid of racial tension and misunderstanding equally lacks dramatic interest and moral relevance.

          Racism should be both more explicit in fantasy worlds but equally more openly confronted and contradicted.  If elves are to hate orcs universally, then their prejudice should be more obviously an ad hoc rationalization and it should be undermined over the course of the narrative by exposure to orcs that defy the stereotype of their racist rationalizations (i.e. if elves hate orcs because they are cruel, should an example of an orc sheltering a lower class elf from the abuses of an elf aristocrat).  If orcs are fated to be evil, give them enough moral complexity to make a reader empathetic to their motives even as they expressly oppose them; the orcs have been confined to a ghetto of their former civilization by the xenophobic elves and now slaughter elves indifferently at any opportunity because they feel that all of elf-kind is complicit in the collapse of their orc civilization.

          Historical parallels to reality should be sensitive to minority cultures, and if representative of said cultures , they should not follow insulting stereotypical and intersectional binaries; the race with a Native American aesthetic should not be red-skinned sub-human tribesmen and the Arab analogy should not be confined to bearded and veiled theocratic terrorists.  Expand and exchange customs and costumes to create something identifiable but individual; have orcs be pale-skinned and sophisticated, with an East-Asian steam-punk aesthetic and have them situated from the North while the elves are a dark-skinned, sea-faring empire from the East with cultural similarities to Aztecs or Mayans.  This makes the world both familiar and free; there are identifying similarities to history but they are divorced from prejudicial associations between physical appearance, moral decency, cultural sophistication and technological innovation that would otherwise confine your narrative.  With these sorts of suggestions in mind, I think we can better appreciate the progressive elements of fantasy literature and use it to perpetuate positive and creative representations of marginalized people of color that have otherwise been largely absent from the history of the genre.