Chauncey de Vega is one of the smartest bloggers I’m currently following and he’s not wrong about the science fiction canon:
The Real History of Science Fiction is an example of how the idea of “canon”, i.e the required “serious” work written by “serious” people that all “serious” students should learn and model themselves after, and that the public embraces as “important” because someone who is “smart” told them so, perpetuates “unintentional” white supremacy (as well as sexism, homophobia, and other types of discrimination).
“The canon” is the result of a type of path dependent decision-making that normalizes the world as seen from the perspective of the in-group–while ignoring the foundational question(s) of how disparities of Power have naturalized what is understood by them (and some others) to be commonsense, matter of fact, taken for granted, reality.
Which raises the question of how to build up a more representative canon, when people of colour have been writing science fiction for as long if not longer as white people have yet are rarely recognised beyond Butler, Delany and possibly Hopkinson.
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