Recommended Reading and Diversity

A minor shit storm erupted a week or so ago when two prominent male authors were asked for recommended science fiction reading and came up with lists that were not exactly diverse (for the response see E. Catherine Tobler's and Natalie Luhrs Pretty Terrible blogs).

Andy Weir of The Martian fame (to be reviewed here soon) held a Q&A on Twitter with @XploreDeepSpace, and they asked him if he would recommend SF authors to high school readers. His response was a list of six white men:

Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. For more recent authors, I recommend Ernest Cline, Peter Clines, and Hugh Howey

Ernest Cline, of Ready Player One fame, was simply asked to give a list of his 10 favorite SFF and came up with:

1. Carl Sagan, Contact
2. Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
3. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
4. Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon
5. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
6. Ken Grimwood, Replay
7. Jack Vance, Planet of Adventure
8. Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
9. George R.R. Martin, Tuf Voyaging
10. Andy Weir, The Martian

What would I have recommended? Off the top of my head? And how much of a shit storm would my list have produced?

Truthfully, I don't know. The thought of reducing a lifetime's reading to a list of only 10 favorites is daunting. Answering off-the-top-of-my-head, I imagine I would forget many great books and then look back on the resulting list with more than a little embarrassment.

Moreover, the books I would recommend would be quite different for different audiences.

So, to make things more concrete, let's say I had to recommend a list of 10 books to a group of high schoolers. This adds to the difficulty, since I now have to balance my taste as an adult against what I recall my taste in high school to have been. And looking back at my high school reading, I find that I am overcome by sentimentality.

Since I read a lot more fantasy than science fiction in high school, I will cast a wider net than Andy was asked to do; I also decided to recommend a specific work by each author.

My list, in roughly the order I read them, along with the reasons for inclusion:

1. Ursula Le Guin. A Wizard of Earthsea. My generation's Harry Potter.
2. JRR Tolkein. Lord of the Rings. Duh!
3. Anne McCaffery. Dragonriders of Pern. The first author and book that I fell truly and deeply in love with.
4. Orson Scott Card. Ender's Game. A book I have returned to many times (a problematic author we'll come back to).
5. Frank Herbert. Dune. Maybe my favorite book of all time.
6. Isaac Asimov. Foundation. Although I cannot point to a specific "aha!" moment, like Paul Krugman I figure these books must have influenced my decision to pursue a career in the mathematical social sciences.
7. Robert Heinlein. Starship Troopers. Rollicking adventure combined with some interesting thoughts about how to govern society (message fiction!)
8. Octavia Butler. Kindred. Although I did not read Butler until after leaving high school, I was blown away by her use of science fiction/fantasy/horror as a vehicle for exploring important contemporary social issues. A certified genius!
9. George R.R. Martin. A Game of Thrones. Also maybe my favorite book of all time.
10. Brandon Sanderson. Mistborn. At a time when I had mostly given up reading SFF, this book reawakened my love of the genre.

How did I do on the diversity stakes? Three women; one, a woman of color. Not bad, but not as diverse as it could be. Enough to avoid censure? I don't know. But informative and reason enough for me to seek out a more diverse list of authors to read in the future, even if I am not about to accept K. Tempest Bradford's challenge.