Diversity and Focus

Jul 2021
The True Queen - Zen Cho – Pan, 2019
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Diversity is a hot topic in media circles at present and that is clearly a good thing. Of course any consumer of films, TV and books should be able to find in them characters with whom they can identify, and far too many minorities are still under-represented. However, diversity does raise questions of narrative, particularly when applied to novels. How can you represent the full diversity of human experience when you have to focus on a limited cast of characters? Who do you leave out?

Sadly the answer to that has typically been: complicated women, people whose skin colour is not white, people with disabilities, those in the lower social orders, and queer people. Which is why the latest wave of diverse authors to have entered the SF/fantasy genre is exciting. Zen Cho is one of these and in her second novel she has pleasingly upped the ante on the diverse approach to fantasy and regency romance fiction that marked her first book by deliberately choosing to make all the main characters female and by expanding the milieu to include her own Malay heritage. But there has been some cost in the plotting and worldbuilding.
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