Reply #1: Well, as an author myself [View All]

[Mythsaje]

I have to say it's difficult, thought not completely impossible, to create a character who comes from a cultural background significantly different from my own. It's not a matter of not believing the readers could identify with the character, but that I couldn't do the character's background justice. All the research in the world cannot allow me to develop the character fully, and I would never wish to half-ass it. That, to me, would be a greater insult, to make the character two-dimensional because of my ignorance and inability to truly understand the sub-culture from which the character comes.

I can take a character with a background that parallels my own, to some extent, and create something of a hybrid, born of one culture yet raised in ours, and work with that, but, again, this does not truly do justice to the idea of multi-culturism within the piece of fiction in question. I will not "fake" it. I just can't bring myself to do so.

There are African-American sci-fi authors--Steven Barnes comes to mind. John Ridley is another. They are able to extrapolate from both their own sub-culture, and the larger surrounding culture of America, with great success, but they have the advantage of having lived in both.

The best I can do, and something I do rather well, in my opinion, is create sub-cultures that do not exist in our world, and deal with the problems of prejudice and fear through these fictional cultures. Vampires, lycanthropes, and other monsters created by a misstep of science, are as human, at their base, as any race of man known today. But they are also very different from the norm, as we understand it, and suffer for those difference in a myriad of ways.

One of the trickiest things about speculative fiction, particularly for me, whose work is often way beyond the realm of normality, is creating suspension of belief in an effective way. This precludes me delving too far into REAL cultures and sub-cultures that I myself do not grok.

I am, of course, speaking strictly for myself. I've considered this a number of times and, while I have characters from many cultures on Earth represented to some extent or another, my prime protagonists are nearly always either born of white North American culture, or born of cultures that have no direct parallel to any we now know.

One of the prime rules, is it not, is to "write what you know."