NationStates Jolt Archive

Something divergent and interesting came out of the Starship Troopers thread.
In the US SF seems to be predominantly an ethnically WASP genre, with a fairly large amount of representation from Jewish (ethnically and religiously) writers and Latter-day Saint writers.

Comments? Do you find this true or am I way off base? What root causes are there for this?
(I have a few ideas, but will wait and see what comes of it?)

Something divergent and interesting came out of the Starship Troopers thread.
In the US SF seems to be predominantly an ethnically WASP genre, with a fairly large amount of representation from Jewish (ethnically and religiously) writers and Latter-day Saint writers.

Comments? Do you find this true or am I way off base? What root causes are there for this?
(I have a few ideas, but will wait and see what comes of it?)


white people are geeks :D

The US is mostly WASP because of the people the immigrated here. I'm not sure how to answer the other parts.

white people are geeks :D


Explain yourself.

Comments? Do you find this true or am I way off base? What root causes are there for this?

Can't really enter into this discussion fully now, but for me what remains interesting is how few black american sf writers there are - the big three seem to be Delaney, Butler and Barnes, and of those three Delaney is such an idiosyncratic writer that to try and bracket him in with others purely on the grounds of ethnicity is to miss the whole point of what he is doing.

I guess mention should at least be made on the subject of black americans and sf of the Nation of Islam and its heavily science-fictional liberation narrative (mile long spaceships and the like)...


Edit: Of course, the social conditions during the american Golden Age/Silver Age were hardly conducive to the acceptance of black writing in the US, whatever genre it was in, and thus there is much less of an apparent black sf tradition at present.

The US is mostly WASP because of the people the immigrated here. I'm not sure how to answer the other parts.

So why the marked preponderance (relative to their percentage of the American population) of Jewish writers? Certainly Judaism has a long and established tradition of narratives and the importance of scholasticism/academia, but this doesn't seem sufficient to explain the prominance of Jewish sf writers.

One can of course speculate that Jewish sf forms a kind of liberation narrative, and thus is a kind of alternative resolution to the diaspora, but this is just a far to simplistic answer.

Explain yourself.

mindless banter. but seeing as in america there is little real political struggle for the wasp to partake in i'd guess that their creative output is allowed more freedom from the social grounding that 'minority' writers might favour as a way to express their problems with current political situations.

also are wasp/jew/lds writers proportionally higher represented in this field or is it simply because there are larger numbers of these groups writing in the US?

white people are geeks :D

Can't really enter into this discussion fully now, but for me what remains interesting is how few black american sf writers there are - the big three seem to be Delaney, Butler and Barnes, and of those three Delaney is such an idiosyncratic writer that to try and bracket him in with others purely on the grounds of ethnicity is to miss the whole point of what he is doing.

I guess mention should at least be made on the subject of black americans and sf of the Nation of Islam and its heavily science-fictional liberation narrative (mile long spaceships and the like)...

So why the marked preponderance (relative to their percentage of the American population) of Jewish writers? Certainly Judaism has a long and established tradition of narratives and the importance of scholasticism/academia, but this doesn't seem sufficient to explain the prominance of Jewish sf writers.

One can of course speculate that Jewish sf forms a kind of liberation narrative, and thus is a kind of alternative resolution to the diaspora, but this is just a far to simplistic answer.

All of the above tends towards what I'm thinking... :(

mindless banter. but seeing as in america there is little real political struggle for the wasp to partake in i'd guess that their creative output is allowed more freedom from the social grounding that 'minority' writers might favour as a way to express their problems with current political situations.

also are wasp/jew/lds writers proportionally higher represented in this field or is it simply because there are larger numbers of these groups writing in the US?

http://www.adherents.com/adh_sf.html This seems to indicate there may be a disproportitonate representation of Jewish and LDS writers, but I'm having trouble finding hard data.

BWO mentions above the Black writers. Beyond the three he mentioned (discounting for the moment NOI) I'm not sure could name another black SF writer from the US.

So why the marked preponderance (relative to their percentage of the American population) of Jewish writers? Certainly Judaism has a long and established tradition of narratives and the importance of scholasticism/academia, but this doesn't seem sufficient to explain the prominance of Jewish sf writers.

One can of course speculate that Jewish sf forms a kind of liberation narrative, and thus is a kind of alternative resolution to the diaspora, but this is just a far to simplistic answer.

This can't explain everything of course but when I did Sociology at university our textbook had a whole section devoted to...hmm not sure how to explain it...like the social situations of various groups of US immigrants based on cultural factors. In particular, it focused on comparisons between Jewish and Italian immigrants during a certain span of years (I think it was a roughly comparable number from each culture.) Over the next n years, the Jewish immigrants tended to integrate faster, move to higher-paying jobs, etc. because the culture valued education very highly; many immigrants were well-educated themselves, and insisted on their children going to school as well as being taught in Hebrew schools and so forth. The Italian immigrants tended to remain more isolated, in part because the emphasis was on family loyalty and traditional values, i.e. following in your father's footsteps. There was a quote of an Italian father saying something like, "What good is a boy who can read and write if he doesn't respect his father?" or something similar.

Please note, this is NOT meant in a racist or derogatory way towards either anyone, it's just what I learned in Sociology! There was another bit about different ethnic groups and their proportions in sports or as athletes, and how poorer ethnicities tended to dominate sports for a time and then another group would eventually 'take over' - 100-odd years ago many sports in America had a high proportion of Irish people, because they were poor and uneducated, and had immigrated as farmers. Later, African-Americans began to dominate because they hadn't been allowed the opportunity for education but obviously could still train physically since that requires somewhat less resources.

But it could be that the emphasis on education as a high priority helped a lot of Jewish people gain prominence in writing, film and television and the like. Today, many people from Asian cultures have a reputation for being 'super-intelligent' and dominating professions like medicine and research science. I doubt there's anything in their genetic makeup that makes them more suited to these kinds of careers, but I can tell you that when we had a Japanese exchange student living with us it was very clear that academic success was a major priority in her life and letting her parents down by getting poor grades was not an option.

So basically, I think the priority given to education in any given cultural or religious group can have an impact on saturation in a particular field. Why it took me that long to explain that I have no idea. :P

There's also the "different religions/denominations have different attitudes towards money" thing but I won't get into that!

This can't explain everything of course but when I did Sociology at university our textbook had a whole section devoted to...hmm not sure how to explain it...like the social situations of various groups of US immigrants based on cultural factors. In particular, it focused on comparisons between Jewish and Italian immigrants during a certain span of years (I think it was a roughly comparable number from each culture.) Over the next n years, the Jewish immigrants tended to integrate faster, move to higher-paying jobs, etc. because the culture valued education very highly; many immigrants were well-educated themselves, and insisted on their children going to school as well as being taught in Hebrew schools and so forth. The Italian immigrants tended to remain more isolated, in part because the emphasis was on family loyalty and traditional values, i.e. following in your father's footsteps. There was a quote of an Italian father saying something like, "What good is a boy who can read and write if he doesn't respect his father?" or something similar.

Please note, this is NOT meant in a racist or derogatory way towards either anyone, it's just what I learned in Sociology! There was another bit about different ethnic groups and their proportions in sports or as athletes, and how poorer ethnicities tended to dominate sports for a time and then another group would eventually 'take over' - 100-odd years ago many sports in America had a high proportion of Irish people, because they were poor and uneducated, and had immigrated as farmers. Later, African-Americans began to dominate because they hadn't been allowed the opportunity for education but obviously could still train physically since that requires somewhat less resources.

But it could be that the emphasis on education as a high priority helped a lot of Jewish people gain prominence in writing, film and television and the like. Today, many people from Asian cultures have a reputation for being 'super-intelligent' and dominating professions like medicine and research science. I doubt there's anything in their genetic makeup that makes them more suited to these kinds of careers, but I can tell you that when we had a Japanese exchange student living with us it was very clear that academic success was a major priority in her life and letting her parents down by getting poor grades was not an option.

So basically, I think the priority given to education in any given cultural or religious group can have an impact on saturation in a particular field. Why it took me that long to explain that I have no idea. :P

There's also the "different religions/denominations have different attitudes towards money" thing but I won't get into that!


Dovetails in very well to what I was thinking...

I'm with Roxleys on this.

Hey Bio. ;)

WASPs and Jews generally have the best educations in the humanities and english, and as a result are more likely to be voracious readers and have voracious readers as children.

Not to say that parents who love to read are a prerequisite to loving books, but I believe that it certainly increases the liklihood.