Read the full post on my own site here

There are two main reasons to care about representation in writing.

The first is that it matters to people. The wonderful late Ursula Le Guin wrote about this in the form of the feedback she got from people who felt more represented by the diversity of her characters:

I have heard, not often, but very memorably, from readers of color who told me that the Earthsea books were the only books in the genre that they felt included in���and how much this meant to them, particularly as adolescents, when they���d found nothing to read in fantasy and science fiction except the adventures of white people in white worlds. Those letters have been a tremendous reward and true joy to me.

She also addressed the second reason. It matches the real world better:

My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn���t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn���t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had ���violet eyes���). It didn���t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now���why wouldn���t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?

This was churning away in my mind when I started working on my own universe.

Read the full post on my own site here